The
Director General of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC), Major
Albert Don-Chebe (rtd) has called on government to restore the payment
of television license fees in order to boost the operations of the State
Broadcaster.
Speaking on ‘Tea Cup’ on Radio Gold, Major
Don-Chebe noted that should the State go back to the period where the
citizens were implored to pay a fee when they license their television
sets, GBC will be able to streamline its activities and widen their
range of operation to cover other vital sectors of the affairs of the
economy.
Stressing his point, he said the State Broadcaster wants
to cover the court case involving businessman Alfred Agbesi Woyome, who
was charged for defrauding the State by false pretense and corrupting
public officials in the payment of the controversial GHC 58 million as
judgement debt to him by the Government of Ghana.
He also added that GBC, if given the opportunity, would like to also cover proceedings in Parliament.
But
since 2006, GBC has failed to collect the fees on regular basis and so,
according to him, “with a revived TV license fee, GBC could probably
even be taken off subvention and that there will be no need for
government to fund GBC from the tax it generates from other sources and
that GBC could fund itself adequately from the TV license fee.”
Meanwhile,
the State Broadcaster has indicated that it spent 3.5 million on the
live telecast of the just-ended election petition that was filed at the
Supreme Court by the opposition New Patriotic Party leaders, the GBC
Director General has disclosed.
“All the time that we were
sitting in the Supreme Court covering, it means we had to take various
scheduled programmes off air. Programmes that would have brought us some
money because some of them were sponsored programmes, some of the
airtime could have been sold to all kinds of agencies and
organizations.”
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