Lamisi Dabire

My trip to Rapid City South Dakota on March 30/31 was an eye opener for me. I had read about Native Americans in several novels but have never engaged them in conversation before. The closest I have come to meeting one has been my friend Ruth Yellow Hawk who is related to the Lakota’s. I was therefore excited about sitting in meeting with Lakota youth and elders.

The youth met a day earlier to reflect and respond to radio documentaries featuring Lakota elders. It was my first experience with the Talking Stone. The talking stone is Participants sat in a circle and the stone was passed from one person to the other, when the stone go to you, you were encouraged to speak to the issue at hand.

I visited Washington DC on a Washington Link Experience Program as part of the Kettering Foundation’s International Civic Society Fellowship Program and with my colleagues Jolanta Mindewicz from Poland and Ekaterina Lukyanova from Russia. I was taken in by the city, it was nothing like I expected. It has many historical sites to visit and is a true nerve centre of America’s democracy. Washington DC has many streets and sidewalks, a luxury I don’t have in Dayton. I could therefore burn calories walking around sight seeing.

I visited the Capitol building, where both the senate and congress sits. I was amazed at the easy at we secure passes to the Congress and the Senate. Our tour guide, Mary P de Butts was able to secure the passes for us from the office of the speaker of the House of Representatives, Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Montana was my first trip out of the Dayton, so it made me a little nervous. Everybody kept telling me it’s so different from Dayton and yet nobody told me what to expect. I therefore assumed I was going into a cowboy zone. I arrived in Missoula safe and sound to a different environment but not a cowboy zone as I had anticipated, that was disappointing.

Missoula has large tracks of land, sparsely populated, but with a warm feeling. Right from the airport I felt welcomed to the town. Some folks I flew with were curious as to what business I had in Missoula. I guess they don’t receive many African visitors; one woman guessed right when she said I must be visiting the university of Montana, because it’s the only thing in the town, which attracts many foreign visitors. Well, she was right. I was there at the invitation of Denise Dowling, a broadcast journalism professor, who with her students are producing and hosting the “Footbridge Forum” on KBGA 89.9, a campus based FM station. The took the opportunity to see other media houses in Montana - the KPAX TV Station, the student-run radio station KBGA, and KUFM the public broadcaster.

Citizen journalism has been in the news lately especially during the coverage of the Virginia Tech tragedy and thereafter. The role played by the students in getting the news out and in keeping everyone informed was remarkable. There are those who believe the age of citizen journalism has now fully arrived and those who believe the media is only now reaping the benefits of a citizen-led/citizen-initiated journalism effort that started less than a decade ago.

Gone are the days when big media were the people who got all the exclusive insights when a story broke. Ordinary citizens without press passes and training are now the people who are getting out the news and the professional media is running after them for the details by visiting their blogs, podcasts, inviting people to upload pictures, video and voice clips, etc. Such was the case in the coverage of the Virginia Tech tragedy. Everyone may not be aware that the first video and audio clips of the Virginia Tech incident were not captured by traditional reporters but by a student who used his cell phone. That cell phone recording of the scene was subsequently purchased by CNN. All media organizations went on the Internet to view blogs written by students as a way of updating themselves on the shooting incident.

Jeff Jarvis, veteran journalist and media critic who blogs at “buzzmachine.com” believes that this is the beginning of more changes to come in the architecture of news and media. He observes that there is a benefit to news organizations as they can get more first hand views of events from citizens than from a reporter who filters what needs to be reported. I share in Jarvis’s observation and anticipate an increase in the number of media organizations that put an effort into building a strong bond with their audiences through the Internet as well as other means. I see a kind of symbiotic relationship now emerging between many media organizations and their citizens.

Ghana is once again at the crossroads of another political decision, this time its on the implementation of the Representation of the Peoples’ Amendment Act (ROPAA), which gives voting rights to Ghanaians abroad in the next general elections in 2008.The Electoral Commission (EC) has proposed to implement the ROPAA in countries with a minimum of 500 Ghanaian resident Ghanaian. The EC is also proposing that the highest ranking government official in Ghana’s missions would be mandated to head the supervision of exercise to register Ghanaians and the counting of the ballots in the Presidential elections come December, 2008. 


All the political parties have not accepted the implementation of ROPAA in 2008; the National Democratic Congress (NDC), the Peoples National Convention (PNC) and the EGLE Party have registered their disapproval of the implementation of the law in the 2008 elections. They recently walked out on a meeting called by the EC to discuss their proposal. The Convention Peoples Party is yet to state its position on the issue.