Ghana’s investigative journalists, Anas Aremeyaw Anas has announced that the cry about corruption at the passport office has come to his attention and that very soon, he would focus his attention in the area.
The passport office would soon see me, he said, amid thunderous applause from the audience who attended a public lecture he (Anas) addressed at the Central University near Tema, over the weekend.
According to him, there was gargantuan corruption at the passport office “and Ghana needs me to be there to unravel the seeming unending corruption, within that part of our economy.”
Anas Aremeyaw Anas has, meanwhile, challenged Justice Paul Derry to face him before the Panel of Eminent Committee of Judges constituted by the Chief Justice, if he is a man.
The 2015 Ghana’s best Journalist of the year said it was needless for Justice Paul Derry, who was a former High Court judge to run to the International Human Rights’ Court, Abuja, Nigeria, to seek relief, after Ghana’s Chief Justice, Madam Georgina Theodora Wood, had constituted a panel of eminent committee in Ghana to hear his defence.
Justice Derry was among the judges that Anas’ exposé implicated as being corrupt and, therefore, influencing judgement in cases they sat on in their courts.
Consequently, he was reported to have prayed the International Human Rights Courts in Abuja to cite the ace journalist for using his profession to invade his privacy and breaching the journalism ethical standards.
Taking his turn at the Central University’s (CU) annual Public Lecture Series, with the faculty of Communications, at Miotso, Dawhenya, Anas said presently, 72 law suits stared at him, but they would not scare him from chasing and exposing the corrupt deeds of public officials.
This year’s CU Public Lecture was on the theme: ‘Putting the pieces together: the aftermath of the judiciary exposé’, and Anas said albeit he recognized that his work might be at variance with the ethics of journalism, it was necessary he defied certain odds to expose corruption.
“My definition and style for journalism is to name, shame and jail to save the country from the hands of unscrupulous persons, whose core aim is to rob the nation of what it deserves,” he stated.
The masked journalist, thus, said that much as he would welcome criticisms of his style and definition, he would not slack affirming his shift from the academic definition of journalism, otherwise, the nation wreckers would go scot-free.
Defending his definition of journalism, he said: “The repositories of ethics may have their views but the Ghanaian society differs from theirs, therefore, the need for my style of journalism.”
He said he could not watch such nation wreckers go unexposed if he did not shift from the academic definition of journalism.
Anas Aremeyaw Anas held that judges in Ghana, over the years, had not been questioned so well, even though he said they were not sacrosanct.
President of CU, Professor Kwesi Yankah, lauded Anas’ efforts of ensuring that corruption was reduced in Ghana’s socio-economic growth.
He believed that Ghana would, one day, have more of such brave and learned journalists to uncover more rots in the country.
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