8 Benefits of Blogging to the Blogger

The following post is work I have researched into and will be giving a lecture on at the 11th Annual Islam Propagation Week of the Ghana Muslim Students' Association(GMSA)-University of Cape Coast Branch.

Blogging offers a lot of benefits to individuals who engage in it. Some of these benefits are:

1. Writing habit improves

Blogging involves writing, then you edit, then you proofread and then you post or publish on the net.

Writing for blogs on a regular basis therefore enhances writing skills and encourages other things like critical thinking, communication and how to defend a point. These attributes coincidentally turn out to be what a university student should possess.

For this reason in some parts of the world, submitting essays on papers to lecturers are becoming out of date. Students are rather mandated to write for their own created blogs.


2. Acquisition of more knowledge

Blogging helps you acquire more knowledge since you regularly research for your blog posts. For instance, if your hobby is mathematics and you blog about it, you will be forced to look for new things in maths to publish and in doing so you are keeping the stuff yourself.

And that is one thing about blogging. When you write a post or call it article for your blog and you come later to realize some people from TUNISIA,US, INDIA, NIGERIA, CUBA or anywhere else have read it, I can assure you you will be forced to write more articles and that is where the acquisition of knowledge starts.

Also, wouldn’t you like to be referenced when say a friend of yours writes an assignment for his/her lecturer because that friend got the required information from your blog? Who here wouldn’t like to see the name of his/her blog on my assignment papers?

It means you are also adding more information to the worldwide bank of knowledge


3. You get exposure

What you blog about can easily be accessed by a lot of people all around the world. For this reason blogging is another way to get famous not only locally but internationally.

TV shows, radio programs, newspapers and even other blogs will grant you interviews when your blog starts to get readership.

Just recently, a woman blogger was granted interview on The One Show on Viasat 1. So you see blogging can give you the exposure you want. Just be good at what you blog about and you will get exposed.

Some bloggers have been given mouth watering job offers because they discuss sports, science, politics, mention them very well on their blogs. Others have become writers and written books because people from elsewhere who read their blogs are happy with their articles and are ready to publish books for them.

In particular those of you who like sports, just get a blog and start to write your side of the stories of the matches you watch. Be good at it and I wouldn’t be surprised to see you on TV stations discussing sports.


4. It’s training to become a journalist

Blogging is journalism and it is a step along the road to becoming a journalist.
Many journalists are bloggers and many bloggers are journalists. An example is Ato Kwamena Dadzie formerly with Joy Fm morning show. He has a blog and is a blogger.

For those of you who want to become journalists, I can promise you having a good blog will make getting a journalist job easier for you. Because only a few Ghanaians blog and at the interview I can assure you you will be happy to have started a blog. Just tell the interviewer you have a blog with about 50 readers and you are unique from the other people at the interview session.

A deputy editor at goal.com by name Share Evans said and I quote “blogging is a step along the road to becoming a journalist. By cutting your teeth writing on things that you are passionate about, a blogger can gain the tools to operate in a newsroom environment effectively.”

Europeans are aware of this and so some schools in Europe make it mandatory for journalism students to maintain a blog as a requirement for their journalism program.

I will make available the rest of this presentation in my next post so watch out.

The Army Worm Politics

I recently visited atokd.com (Ato Kwamena Dadzie’s blog) and read an article concerning governments handling of the army worm threat in parts of the Volta Region. As usual, the article was anti-government and this is to be expected since the author of this blog has a philosophy of attacking governments hoping that this will change the leadership style in our country.

His concern was that the government should have used civilians rather than the military to kill and prevent the further spread of the army worms. He thought the worms were just butterflies in the making and hence just the use of chemicals could get rid of them.

So I took his concerns up and researched further into the matter. Getting to know more, I realized an ex-NADMO official Ken Nuworsu, in the erstwhile Kuffuor administration had also publicly criticized the government for using the military instead of officials from NADMO, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Ministry of Health (MOH) and some trained foot soldiers.

This revelation stunned me because I couldn’t understand where the criticisms were coming from. We live in a country where our military is not engaged in any war and so they are peace keepers in other countries.

For this reason, our men are readily available for any kind of service in the country. Be it construction works, giving out relief services to disaster victims or anything the commander-in-chief tells them to do. So nothing was wrong with the Ghana Air Force flying helicopters to get the army worms infested areas sprayed.

Could the trained foot soldiers, EPA or workers at the MOH have flown helicopters in a matter of days? Or probably they should have been given months of flight lessons while the indigens of the army worm infested areas continue to suffer from these creatures.

The ex-NADMO official on the contrary cited mass transfers of NADMO officials in the Volta Region to the Ashanti Region. Clearly, this shows in an emergency like this, NADMO was under resourced in terms of personnel to carry out the spraying exercise.

You should also know that, though the army worms are just worms they have killed at least six people in the past in the same areas and also what a soldier can do five civilians cannot.

God Bless Our Homeland Ghana.

Lucky Mensah’s New Song a Message?

Lucky Mensah is the only musician to have publicly supported the then candidate John Evans Atta-Mills in his presidential bid in the 2008 general elections by composing a campaign song for the National Democratic Congress (NDC).

True to Lucky Mensah’s luck John Atta-Mills won the elections by a slim margin and eventually became the President of this great Republic.

Two years gone and it seems the Lucky singer has lost hope in the man he helped win the 2008 elections.

His new album ‘Nkratuor’ has a song titled ‘Enkoyie’ which has gotten much airplay both on TV and the radio/fm stations. This song which is rather controversial has sparked public debate as to whether Lucky Mensah is having a change in mind on whether to continue composing songs for the NDC in future elections.

The song sung in Twi has lyrics with meaning in English as ‘Tawiah, take this letter to your brother Atta and tell him things are not going well’. Though it will be wrong for one to conclude he is referring to Atta our president, aspects of the song shows he may be referring to Uncle Atta (our president).

Scenes in the video of the song show a man been portrayed as a politician with pot-bellied stomach and a bodyguard. Things seem to be going well with the politician whereas the video also shows men laboring to make ends meet.

With a video and lyrics such as this and some public outcries ‘enko yie’ as used in the song, and a 95% confidence interval (as used in statistics), the song could be nothing else than a message to our President John Fiifi Evans Atta-Mills.

However, this musician Lucky Mensah has refuted allegations that the song is intended for President Mills when he was interviewed on the Delay show on TV Africa. He further said he could not have this motive since he was a helper to President Mills’ victory.

Well, it is left for you to come to a decision who the song is intended for.

Ahead of Ghana’s Official Oil Outdooring Ceremony

Tomorrow will see Ghana’s oil officially outdoored to the merry of Ghanaians and the vigilance of the outside world.

Ghana found its oil in commercial quantities in 2007 by the help of the UK firm Tullow Oil after several attempts by the Ghana National Petroleum Commission to discover the ‘black gold’proved unsuccessful though the commission was able to collect relevant data that helped Tullow Oil in its discovery

This oil find has raised the expectations of many Ghanaians including the then President John Agyekum Kuffuor whom with joy said “with oil as a shot on the arm, we’re going to fly”.

As President Mills goes to officially outdoor the oil tomorrow, I want to say a big AYEKOO to Ghanaians and I pray that we come together as good citizens to protect this resource in order that it becomes benefitial to us.

Controversies have already stirred up with the collateralization clause in the petroleum law. The minority in parliament want the revenues from the oil to be banked for future use while the majority want part of the revenue to be used as collaterals in procuring loans in order to hasten infrastructural developments of the country.

As it stands now, the collateralization clause has been approved by parliament and all we can do as a country is to rally behind the petroleum law, safeguard it and ensure the oil revenue is used judiciously so that in the future will be able too tell our own unique positive  oil story.

Congratulations to Ghanaians and may God bless our homeland Ghana.

Newspaper Reviews: A Factor to Ghana’s Irresponsible Media

With the incessant call on responsible journalism and a positively functioning media in the country, I want to put to the fore the bane of all these media fallacies.

The too many newspaper review shows both on the televisions and the numerous radios stations across the country have put us in this state.

It is a surety that one will wake up each morning to the shout and outbursts on the various especially radio stations in the country and the unfortunate thing is that only the political news items take center stage of these discussions.

I must hereby commend such FM stations as X fm, Citi fm and Joy fm for keeping true to the course of national development in the country. I think so far they are yet to have partisan political newspaper review shows throughout the week.

It is a fact that the print media has shaped the kind and nature of discourse in the country through the help of the radio stations. It is also true that the political parties been aware of this are using their favourite newspapers to champion their political agendas.

What the political parties do is to contact these newspaper editors to put out stories that will be strategic and advantageous to their motives and most often than not these stories are very untrue. The radio stations then pick these stories up and go the extra mile contacting controversial persons who will add more flavor to the stories.

And our media is in this state because we have decided to reduce our national attention to who wins the 2012 general elections and in an attempt to outwit each other these political parties through their newspapers end up churning out falsehood. I ask myself, after 2012 do we again concentrate on who wins 2016?

While all these political stories are been debated, majority of us do not have access to pipe-borne water, the lights come and go anyhow, foreign investors are taking all the money away

It is my suggestion therefore that we restrict if not ban the partisan political discussions we have on the airwaves by taking out the representatives of the political parties from participating in these discussions for it is them who make the reviews unimportant and rather bring competent and non-aligned citizens to talk about national development.

As I write this article, I am listening to speeches of our founder Dr. Kwame Nkrumah and he is categorically confronting the challenges of his time.

God bless our Homeland Ghana.