By J.A. Sarbah
The P/NDC has never enjoyed the romance of the Ghanaian media, just as it hasn’t with the judiciary, because of their history. But they accepted the challenge and worked at it, and today, both the media and the judiciary have gone their way.
The NPP always has. The NPP has had the best friendship with the media since 1992, especially the private media, and there is a history to that.
But the last four years of Akufo-Addo’s administration presented a horrible government-media scene. The entire media landscape migrated green.
Media General is traditionally NDC but was moderate, with some 30% accommodation for the New Patriotic Party. By 2024, the NPP received zero accommodation from Media General. Multimedia, on the other hand, was essentially an independent private media enterprise. By 2024, they had less than 5% accommodation for Akufo-Addo’s government.
Panelling of major talk shows was terribly hostile to the government. Talk shows were intentionally packed with disruptive NDC elements. Rebuttals were denied to government reps. It was, and still is, difficult at those stations to identify the host from the NDC guests.
One may then ask what suddenly erased the warm media friendship Akufo-Addo had enjoyed with the generality of the media for most of his days as opposition leader.
Eugene Arhin.
Eugene Arhin was the Communications Director at the Office of the President for Akufo-Addo’s entire eight years, and by the account of key stakeholders and people who worked around that office throughout his tenure, Eugene is the reason the NPP-media friendship died.
His public record already carries the outline. A 2021 divorce filing that put his personal wealth into national conversation, a CHRAJ petition demanding an inquiry into his assets, and Manasseh Azure Awuni’s public call for him to step aside and be investigated. None of that was ever answered because all the allegations against him were materially true. What follows is what those close to the Communications Directorate have long said explains why.
There was a Ministry of Information, represented by a minister, whose remit is limited to policy reforms, providing support and an enabling environment for the media to thrive, and educating Ghanaians on government policies and achievements across the sectoral ministry ecosystem. But there was a bigger issue than any ministry’s remit could ever touch. The Ghanaian media practitioner is woefully underpaid. They always look up to politicians and governments to fund their lifestyle. This is trite knowledge on our street. Eugene Arhin, unlike the Minister of Information, enjoyed the special ear of the president, and he knew exactly what that access could have bought the party. By multiple accounts from within his own office and the Jubilee House, Eugene chose not to spend money to court the media.
There is worse. It was within Eugene Arhin’s remit to decide which journalist or group of journalists would accompany presidential trips both locally and internationally, and sources within the Communications Directorate described that discretion as one that was violently abused, triggering disaffection that has followed the NPP into opposition.
There was worse than that. I am reliably informed that in December 2023, Eugene Arhin went to the President and made a case that journalists needed to be sorted out for the Christmas season, and that President Akufo-Addo released GHS6,000,000 to him for that purpose. According to that same account, corroborated by the journalists themselves, not a cedi reached any journalist. Eugene pocketed all the money.
There is worse still, and it did not even spare his own staff. Presidential staffers who worked directly under him, roughly thirty-two by count, alleged a weekly fuel allocation of 500 cedis each, 2,000 cedis per staffer per month, that was approved but, by their own telling, Eugene never once released the money to the beneficiaries across his entire eight years in the role.
And there is worse than all of it. Multiple people who raised these concerns directly with President Akufo-Addo described being told that Eugene Arhin himself would need to be present before any complaint against him could be entertained. Yes. Whether or not that was the president’s intention, that is how it was experienced by the people who tried, and it is why, by their own account, they eventually stopped trying. Eugene became corrosive, and we lost the media to the NDC.
Contrast this with what the NDC is doing now under Felix Kwakye Ofosu as Director of Government Communication.
In the 2025 budget alone, GHS72 million has been allocated to that office for media silencing. And the media has since been quiet in spite of the many scandals plaguing the regime.
I have not seen the receipts behind the six million cedis or the fuel allocations myself, and I say so in all honesty rather than dress secondhand certainty as documented fact. But the pattern they described and the pedigree of those who corroborated the story is consistent with everything already on the public record about this man, and consistent with what an entire media landscape’s collapse from friendship to adversary in four of his eight years actually required. On this matter of Eugene Arhin and other appointees, the president’s stubbornness and personal attachments did not merely play a role. They were the undoing of his government, and the scale of the defeat that followed on December 7, 2024.
Lessons of History Series by J.A. Sarbah
