My Blogging Year 2012

In September, my blog was hacked into and all my pics disappeared. Still today, all photos before September 8th, 2012 are missing. That is painful! But there were good times as well. Here is my Blogging Year 2012:

January

We had the first meeting of the year with BloggingGhana, I tried to launch the hashtag #GHhousing (and failed terribly) and BBC inaugurated their new debate program in Accra.

February

I found myself in the middle of a breastfeeding debate, and prepared for a presentation of my research so wrote about it and on using Google forms for research.

March

In this month, I went back to work at Ashesi University after my parental leave. Also the GhanaDecides initiative was launched together with our first campaign, iRegistered!

April

I started a series, Blogs I Read. First out was Holli’s new blog. I took my family to the Chale Wote festival organized by the AccraDotAlt crew and reported about our family addition: poultry!

May

In May, BloggingGhana held our first major event: BlogCamp. I wrote about it before it happened, then a report and then a post with pictures. And then I couldn’t help but compare it to a Swedish blog event! I also discussed the galloping inflation Ghana was experiencing.

June

A plane crash in Ghana was reported in social media before in traditional media channels – this was a tipping point for social media in Ghana! I had my first guest post and met with other people who were covering the elections online. Thanks to Google Ghana for hosting us!

July and August

I needed passport photos to travel and then I was off for vacations!

September

I came back from my vacation, revamped my blog, only to see it hacked as discussed above. I also launched a new career as a TV host!

October

With my new career, my blog readership increased big-time from around 50 on a good day to 1500! I was also chosen as the Blogger of the Week (BOW) by BloggingGhana and posted photos from my first TV interviews with Abu Sakara, Papa Kwesi Ndoum and others. This was a splendid month for my career, but luckily I also had time for some family fufu and for Sister Deborah’s hit video “Uncle Obama“.

November

The Melcom Disaster happened, killing 14, again a news that was carried by social media in Ghana. I also went to a social media and a humanist conference, both in Accra. At work, I was interviewing politicans and doing research…or rather watching the Azonto.

December

The last month of the year was dominated by the Ghanaian elections. I am proud to say that both online and on the TV-screen, I had taken part of informing the citizens of Ghana about their choices. Then the results were declared on Facebook (my post on it was read by 3000 in the first 24 hours) and soon after the opposition vowed to challenge them! On Friday, the opposition filed their complaint against the EC and the president-elect.

In conclusion, it has been a very eventful year, both for me personally and for Ghana. Specifically,  I think this is a year where social media in Ghana has really taken off and more and more people turn to the Internet for their news and communication needs. Next year, BloggingGhana will meet on how to sustain the debate we created with GhanaDecides, I will meet with TV3 to see how I can be involved in future political programming. I will of course teach, have some other projects on my mind and hope to collect data for my thesis. Recently, I met someone who presented herself as an “Academic Entrepreneur” and I humbly aspire to be just that in the next year!

Thanks for reading my blog and happy new year!

For more of this, here is My Blogging Year 2011.

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Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom of PPP on Frontline

Tonight, Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom is on Frontline. I am happily typing this from home, not at all worked up about the upcoming show as it was taped already on Tuesday morning.

I think it was a good discussion, but time just went too fast. So many more questions to ask a man who wants to lead this country. Well, a few answers were given, others were avoided however I appreciated his initiative on transparency issues, now we just have to see if the other parties will take up the challenge Dr. Nduom threw to them:

will they be declaring their assets and campaign funding before Election Day?

It is a good question to ask.

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Family Fufu

Today being a holiday, I will lay low, spend the day with my daughter and the rest of the family. For a Ghanaian day with family to be complete, there has to be fufu so on my stove a big pot of light soup is simmering away and the starchy foods for the fufu have been peeled and are now boiling.

So don’t wait up for me. I’ll be back here after the long weekend! (And after tonight’s Frontline with Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom!)

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Interview with Dr. Abu Sakara of the CPP

On Friday, I did my second Frontline 2012 interview. This time, I had Dr. Abu Sakara of the CPP in the studio and the initial nerves from the maiden broadcast were gone.

Some other things were also different this time, for instance, we had to change studios as Ghana is going through a power sharing exercise due to damages on the West Africa Gas Pipeline, but I guess that is another blogpost…

Many of you want to view the interviews online. The TV3 team is working on putting the show on YouTube or similar, in the meantime, let me share some comments from viewers on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/joshua__ADJEMAN/status/251806289297035264

https://twitter.com/Twenebowa/status/251783565765922816

Next week, Dr. Papa Kwesi Ndoum of the PPP is my guest, if you have questions for him, you can tweet or post them as comments here.

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Frontline on Swedish Radio

In connection with the first broadcast of my program, Frontline 2012, the Swedish national radio called for an interview. When they first called on the day of my TV debut, I had no time to spare, so decided to talk to the reporter from the hair salon chair where I was getting ready for my big night.

Although I was stressed and had to switch ears several times to not interfere with my hair cut, the program Verkligheten i P3 went live on Tuesday and came out really nice in my own humble opinion.

Apparently the program was running a series on “unknown celebrities” and they thought I was a perfect fit as someone interviewing presidential candidates in a country far away!

If you know Swedish or believe you are a language genius, you can listen to the program here.

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Frontline 2012 with Hassan Ayariga, PNC

On Friday, the first program in the Frontline 2012 series was broadcast.

The program is a one hour political interview aiming to clarify the issues for the Ghanaian voter in the 2012 elections. Mr Hassan Ayariga of the PNC was my first guest and, save for a technical problem during the first minutes of our transmission, it went well.

I am hoping to be a ble to share a clip with you sometime soon, but for now you have to make do with these pics from the set.

Next show, Fri 28 Sept 2012 at 8.30 PM on TV3.

What questions do you have for this election’s presidential candidates?

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