Former President John Agyekum Kufuor
Former President John Agyekum Kufuor has charged the media not to give their platforms to fraudulent people and tricksters who make vain promises.
His comments follow the recent murder of a 10-year-old boy by two of his friends at Coca-Cola near the Great Lamptey Mills School, a suburb of Kasoa in the Central Region, all in the name of making quick money.
He indicated that the two suspects, alleged minors, who are aged 16 and 17, were victims of people who have been paying attention to fraudulent TV personalities.
“How could young people do this? What do they know? Unfortunately, [the] media […] are giving so much exposure to tricksters and fraudulent people, promising everything. When you look at them you should know that these are people who are themselves just bad and ignorant. That is not the way for our society to go,” Kufuor told Joy Prime in an interview monitored by GhanaWeb on Tuesday.
Kufuor further urged media houses to cut out content and people that could “defraud the society”.
He admonished: “We need to do that, [the] media and, of course, the authorities too should come up and tackle all these people who are now virtually hijacking the airwaves with vain promises and trickery. They should be eradicated….”
According to the Police, one of the suspects confessed that a spiritualist, whom they had discovered on television agreed to help them become instant billionaires if they would provide a human being and a sum of GH¢5,000.
The two, per the police charge sheet, admitted that they killed the 10-year-old Ishmael by hitting his neck with a club.
This was after luring him into an uncompleted building under the guise of selling him a video game at Lamptey Mills, a suburb of Kasoa in the Central Region.
This development has incensed a large segment of the Ghanaian society who are calling for an end to the appearance of spiritualists and Mallams on television who promise unreasonable get-rich-quick avenues for the unsuspecting youth.