The host of Metro TV’s Good Evening Ghana, Paul Adom Otchere, has chastised Sydney Casely-Hayford for insinuating that he took ‘soli’ from the President before the latter appeared on his show last Thursday.
“How much soli did I take when I interviewed President Mahama? I think that this is a very poor comment…an intelligent and respectable man like Sydney Casely-Hayford will cast such insinuations, such aspersions, baseless, of no basis. He has no reason to cast these assertions yet, he does,” he fumed.
[contextly_sidebar id=”caUr8vhrbSg04YQ34afpp5IcunB7Bj5K”]Financial Analyst, Sydney Casely-Hayford on Citi FM’s The Big Issue said: “He [Mahama] was on the Paul Adom Otchere show and I don’t know how much ‘soli’ exchanged hands before the show happened.”
The President of IMANI Ghana, Franklin Cudjoe on his part also remarked that the interview with the President was hurriedly done saying, “It happened at such speed that it was out of normal.”
But an angry Adom Otchere called into the show and disclosed that he, together with the management of Metro TV had been hounding the President over the past eight months to grant the interview.
According to him, his outfit was “disappointed that in all the democracy we’ve had, no sitting Ghanaian President had granted an interview to a local radio or TV station and we thought that we should do that and get that done.”
“So we campaigned to President Mahama that you are a President friendly to the media so in your time, let us get this done and we’ve been working on this for a long time now,” he added.
He therefore described Casely-Hayford’s comments as “the lowest that we could assign to all these…and I call it the resurgence of free speech because I was there when free speech started.”
“Here is Sydney Casely-Hayford after 14,000 interviews and 14 years of broadcasting the programme; we have an interview with the President and he says how much soli did you take for interviewing President Mahama?” he rhetorically asked.
He continued saying, “this is disgraceful, that is just disgraceful…and my good friend Franklin Cudjoe said the interview had been hurriedly arranged…you don’t work with me, you don’t know what I do every day, you don’t know how many letters I have written.”
Mr. Adom Otchere further pointed out that it is disappointing for “people like Sydney to derogate another person’s efforts just so that they become relevant”
Apology
Casely-Hayford in response apologized for his comments.
He said: “You’ve taken a sarcastic comment and you have turned it into a serious fight for no reason…Everybody knows Paul Adom Okeyer’s focus…I have been on your programme a few times and if I didn’t like your programme or agree with what you are saying, I wouldn’t bother to show up because it’s not a paying; it’s a job that you do as a public gesture so you have my apologies if you think it was an insult. It was a sarcastic comment.”
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Click on attached audio to listen to Paul Adom Otchere
By: Efua Idan Osam/citifmonline.com/Ghana
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