“Mr President please stop politicizing the Arts” – Enock Agyepong

Its with pain that we sit helplessly and watch the government do politics with our Arts Sector and all we have to do is to wait for their term to end so we can decide if we want to continue with this bullying or change for the better or worse only God knows.

Creativity has no political colours and we serve everyone with our works, it is therefore disheartening to see the President leading his government in trying to politicize our sector and it is so painful beyond description.

When Npp took over power the first pain they inflicted on the Arts was to dissolve the Creative Arts Council consisting of all leaders from the various sectors ie music, movie, textiles etc which was almost through with the passage of the Creative Arts Bill with the excuse that they were chosen by the Ex while government and replaced the 13 member board with the President’s Daughter and two foot-soldiers of the political party.

At their inauguration they were given a specific mandate for a period of 3 months and as I type today it’s been over 15 months with no results and the President seems not to be bothered.

When we requested for the passage of the Creative Arts Bill the sector Minister told us we needed data so they have contracted one Richard Boateng aka Mr India to undertake that job. We informed the Minister that the Music sector had a comprehensive data available courtesy Musiga which was done by a reputable organisation called KPMG so if they wanted to do a research on the film sector why are they using an individual who has NO I mean NO record in data collection only for us to find out that the Order was from above so even the Minister couldn’t do anything about it.
My question is can they do this to the Health or Legal sectors? It only tells you how they don’t care about our sector and will treat it anyhow.

Mr India went to Volta region did some useless data collection and told us he will continue with the other regions later.

This same Mr India with his friends just a few days ago went to India with the intention of signing an MOU with the local Indian film industry Pollywood NOT Bollywood and then presented himselves as a high powered government delegation with executives from the Film Directors guild of Ghana. We all saw how angry Mr President was when Kwesi Nyantakyi used his name for his personal business so the question then is why is he quite over a similar issue by My Richard Boateng aka Mr India.
An advocacy group in Ghana called FOCAP after interrogating the trip realized some anomalies and released a press statement to that effect.

Facts on the ground shows that the executive members of the association he is said to represent have disassociated themselves from that trip in fact they have all left the Film Directors guild of Ghana(FDGG) to form a new group called Creative Authors and Directors Association of Ghana(CADAG) therefore making FDGG null and void.

Now Richard Boateng aka Mr India has gone to sign an MOU with a Chef in India to come and cook in Ghana in the name of promoting tourism ah what a sin thing.
My question again, is he now the tourism Minister or he is part of the political tourism ambassadors selected by the Tourism Minister?
My question again is who is behind this Indiana Jones who is using a whole sector for his personal gains?

As I indicated the Sector Minister has chosen over 30 party members as tourism ambassadors without portfolio and you dare not ask her how much they are being paid.

In all this my pain is that without the laws being passed our sector will never develop and anyone who invest there will lose simply because there is no protection and so people in the Arts will only end up broke and eventually die beggars.

We cannot continue like this and things must change and it must change now Mr President.

Enock Agyepong
#VhimMoveMent