The cardinal objective of mainstream mass media is to educate, inform, inspire and entertain the public. The entertainment aspect of the Ghanaian mass media has taken a different dimension through which foreign telenovelas dominate. The most popular are Kukum-Bagya, Lagaata, Veera, I do, Tinsel and Windec.
Almost all the telenovela drama series have something in common which is romance. It appears more than half of the Ghanaian population particularly children, have become addicted to these foreign telenovelas shown on local television networks.
Viewers have misconstrued watching these foreign telenovelas to mean a sub culture to their cultural heritage.
What is worrying is that, basic school children spend time watching these telenovelas to the neglect of their home studies.
Some of them have memorized names of characters in these foreign telenovelas whereas their classroom performance is poor.
A specialist in Early Child Education who teaches Information Communication Technology at Our Lady of Fatima Junior High School in Tamale, Madam Aruk Philomena shared her frustration in a Citi News interview saying, “It takes a lot of time of the students. The students watch until midnight they come to school, they are in the class and they are sleeping.”
“When they come their centre of concentration is a discussion on what happened, what they saw especially those movies on love issues. They learn a lot of things and they want to add and therefore you see that their concentration is on relationship issues and ignoring what they are supposed to learn in the classroom.”
Madam Aruk Philomena posited that the situation was affecting ICT literacy, “Even you come to ICT, you ask a child to boot a computer the child may not be able to boot a computer but as long as the computer is there the child knows where to go to pornographic websites and watch those kinds of movies.”
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Local content drama series such as “By the fire side” fizzled into thin air because of lack of sponsorship.
But, these foreign telenovelas attract local sponsorship than the nation’s flagship National Science and Maths Quiz competition.
The National Maths and Science Quiz which began in 1993 was not organized in 2010 and 2011 due to sponsorship challenges.
Adom TV’s Kukum-Bagya alone has over 20 sponsors including Vodafone.
Marketing Design Lecturer with the University for Development Studies, Faculty of Education, Dr. Issah Mohammed admonished local advertizers to make a paradigm shift.
“I will advise most of the stations to really look for sponsors that can come out with educational programmes that talk about teaching and learning and not programmes that will derail our students from the value we all place on education.
“So they must really look for donors and advertizers for the various programmes that are educational based.”
As a nation seeking to improve her human resource baseline, parents need to rethink about the impact of these foreign telenovelas on their children’s upbringing.
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By: Abdul Karim Naatogmah/citifmonline.com/Ghana