The Centre for Social Democracy has condemned the manner in which National Security Officers arrested Citi FM/TV journalist, Caleb Kudah, and subsequently stormed the premises of the station to arrest another journalist, Mrs. Zoe Abu- Baidoo Addo.
According to the group, the move is a “threat to our democracy.”
A team of seven heavily-armed police officers on Tuesday, May 11, 2021, besieged Citi FM and Citi TV to arrest Mrs. Zoe Abu-Baidoo Addo.
Zoe was targeted in the raid after the police accused her of electronically receiving some video files from her colleague, Caleb Kudah who at the time had been arrested for allegedly filming some abandoned vehicles parked at the premises of the National Security Ministry in Accra.
In an interview with Citi News, a Fellow at the Center for Social Democracy, Williams Ampomah, questioned the procedure employed by the security officers.
Mr. Ampomah said the acts of the security agency is an attempt to put fear in Ghanaians to stop them from further criticizing the government.
“We want to ask the security operatives to point to us which offence Caleb Kudah committed and even if granted he committed an offence, was storming the media house in such a fashion the best way of dealing with the matter? We take that as a threat to our democracy and those things are the things that were done in the past during the military era, and we would least be expecting it to be happening these days under a President who has been touted as a consummate democrat.”
“This is not an isolated case because it has been happening, and it appears to be a strategy by the government to put fear in the populace so that they will not have the courage to talk about the ills of its operations and this should not be allowed to go on,” he said.
