‘People were paid to petition for my removal’ – Stan Dogbe opens up on controversial tenure

A Presidential staffer under the erstwhile Mahama administration, Stan Xoese Dogbe, has said that some persons were paid to write petitions demanding his removal from office.

Mr. Dogbe, in 2015, destroyed the recorder of a journalist with the state-owned Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC) at the 37 Military hospital at a time when members of the press corps had been involved in an accident.

A journalist with the Ghanaian Times Newspaper, Samuel Nuamah had died through the accident. Some 155 journalists from over 40 media houses joined the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) to petition former President John Mahama to sanction his staffer.

But revisiting the incident in an interview monitored by theghanareport.com, Mr. Dogbe denied ever assaulting the journalist as was alleged.

“…To be honest, at the time, I couldn’t even tell that gentleman was a journalist because all the journalists were in front of the emergency ward. So Angola walked up to him and asked him why he was recording. And he said, he wasn’t recording but I said you are recording. So I took the recorder and said but that is your recording, then, he said ‘to be honest, I just took the recorder’.

“So I just dropped the recorder on the floor. I didn’t smash it, I didn’t touch the gentleman, I didn’t hold him, I didn’t know who he was… If you’re recording me without my knowledge, I have to stop you from doing that… But of course, once the story came out, the other part of the story coming out and how it was portrayed, and the role of the MFWA and the people who were paid by some people to raise petitions against Stan Dogbe and make noise about me, it all happened,” Stan Dogbe said on Joy FM.

The former media personality added “but for me, what was important was that this is somebody that you have found out was a colleague journalist. But to be fair to him, he didn’t make any upheavals about it”.

When asked if he felt he could have handled the matter in a better way, Mr Dogbe said all that was necessary was that he rendered an apology to the journalist as well as the GJA president, Roland Affail Monney.