A CONFUSED MINISTER? Confusion Brewing @ Ministry of Tourism, Arts Over Data Collection

All is certainly not well with the Ministry of Toursim, Arts & Culture and such sloppiness is beginning to manifest – www.entertainmentgh.com is taking notice and many industry players are taking notice too!

Over the weekend, a statement, written by Richard Yaw Boateng, stated categorically that, he’s been mandated by the Minister, Madam Catherine Afeku, to go to all ten regions of the country to collect and collate data for the film industry.

According to him, per the directive of the Minister, the exercise is to collate database of the entire creative arts industry for the development of the industry, form the basis for the establishment of a viable Film Council and to ascertain the peculiar state of the film industry in each of the ten regions, so as to understand the actual situation and challenges of the film industry in each of the ten regions.

Read the statement;

MINISTER OF TOURISM, ARTS AND CULTURE IS WORKING

The work of the ministry is policy making to create an enabling environment for the development of the tourism, arts and culture industry. Everybody in this country knows that the ministry has always been a tourism ministry since the first republic of Ghana. Most of the technocrats or the staff body in the ministry are professionally trained as tourism experts, nothing more, and nothing less. So there has never been anything on paper for the development of the creative arts industry, apart from the Creative Arts Bill grafted in 2015. Even though there is a cultural policy but it has not been that effective and operational; no funding has been allocated for the cultural development of the country; not even a fund for the development of the creative arts industry.

To achieve development for the arts and cultural industry, one will need a database by which the government would be able to ascertain exactly what should be done to grow the sectors. That is why the ministry from last year started embarking on the data collection exercise, to collate database of the entire creative arts industry for the development of the industry.

Mr. Richard Yaw Boateng, the National President of the Film Directors Guild of Ghana (FDGG), was assigned by the Honourable Minister, Mrs. Catherine Abelema Afeku, to go round all the ten regions of the country to analyse and collect data on the Ghana Film Industry, which would form the basis for the establishment of a viable Film Council. The ministry needs document to work on for the development of the Creative Arts Industry; those documents can only be acquired by researching on the state of the Creative Arts Industry. You don’t just get up and start doing things without bases.

As per the directive of the Minister, Mr. Boateng formed a research team called the Data Collection Team (DCT) to embark on the data collection exercise for specifically the film industry, which is one of the biggest jobs creators in the sector. He is to conduct the research, region by region, so we can ascertain the peculiar state of the film industry in each of the ten regions, so as to understand the actual situation and challenges of the film industry in each of the ten regions. Mr Boateng started the data collection exercise last year in Volta Region, which he has submitted the report, to the ministry, as a pilot for the entire research and data collection exercise. This would serve as the fundamental document that the ministry will use to plan for the continuous collection of data in the rest of the nine regions.

Research on other sectors of the Creative Arts Industry will be initiated within the first quarter of the year. So by the mid of this year, 2018, the ministry will have the entire necessary document for analysis and plan properly for the development of the Creative Arts Industry.

This is to establish the fact that the Honourable sector Minister, Catherine Afeku, and the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture are really working, behind the public’s spectacles, to lay the foundation for a proper take off for the development of the Creative Arts Industry.

SIGNED
RICHARD YAW BOATENG
NATIONAL PRESIDENT
FILM DIRECTORS GUILD OF GHANA (FDGG)

What is confusing about the situation is the fact that, in the last quarter of 2017, the Minister, also tasked Socrate Safo, Director for Creative Arts of the National Commission on Culture and the Commission to embark on a data collection drive. The data collection exercise, enshrined in the Cultural Policy of 2004, gives the NCC all the power to handle such task across the ten regions of Ghana via its regional offices.

The NCC, again, with the blessings of the Minister, organized sensitization seminars for the different groupings within the Creative Sector including film practitioners, music stakeholders, event organizers, journalists and others to discuss how the drive could be implemented successfully.

Checks by www.entertainmentgh.com show that some Executives at the NCC are jaded, trying to fathom why the Minister, after mandating a recognized institution to do a project, would turn around and offer the same task to an individual.

What is more upsetting, as this website found out, is the fact that, the Ministry has not released funds for the NCC to go to other regions on this exercise, yet, it has been able to dole out resources for an individual to do the same job.

The PR unit of the Ministry is yet to offer a response to this ambivalence!

Entertainmentgh.com