I hold a contrary view to the poverty ridden positions of the Rectors of the three specialised institutions in throwing their support behind the half-baked decision of government to merge the institutions just to attained the status of a fully-fledged university.
Aside the burial and loss of the ‘identities’ and ‘histories’ of NAFTI, GIL, and GIJ after the merger, I think the stakeholders failed to reason out of the box.
What we have done with this merger is to amplify the living and working conditions of the Teachers and Workers of these institutions without paying attention to their products.
These institutions have excelled exclusively in their respective space without a tag of university. Alumni of these institutions have and always remained proud.
No one is crying foul for graduating from an institute of Journalism, Filming, and Languages instead of a University. Nay!…
Rather than focusing on adding value to products of these Institutes, we have rather curiously turned our attention to merging and changing their identities.
What has the merger got to do with the professional standing of the trainees of these Institutes?
We just waisted a fine opportunity to add value to how journalism and filming is done in Ghana.
Yes, the opportunity to empower GIJ, NAFTI AND GIL to license and accredit people desiring to practice in the media space. We messed the chance to sanitize our film industry. We have foolishly trashed the road to make GIL the sole authority of languages in Ghana.
Like CIMA, GIJ could be a certified professional institution responsible for managing journalists with useful media certification.
And like ACCA, we could have simply put NAFTI in charge of validating film makers. While GIL could have just been made the body vetting and accrediting professionals just like IPR.
With these, we would have moved a step into enhancing the quality of journalism, languages and film making in our beloved country.
We could have simply transformed these specialized institutions into advanced media practice license bodies.
We should have a standardise ways of separating the boys from the men.
This way, licenses of offending practitioners could be suspended, and revoke when need arise.
I have no regret saying our stakeholders are dots in a circle. They are nothing short of landlocked.
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