On Happy Fm’s Showbiz Xtra this morning, Board member of the 2014 Vodafone Ghana Music Awards and Manager of Kumi Guitar-Mark Okraku Mantey was pushed to the wall to explain why his artiste who has had a release in the past has been nominated as ‘New Artiste of the Year’.

Since the question was well targeted and Mark had no escape route, he opened the bag by saying, the organizers of the Ghana Music Awards have changed some key rules of the award scheme—and this includes the description for who qualifies to be nominated in the category, New Artiste of the Year.

Without doubt, no one has any moral or legal right to stop Charter House and the GMA Board from making alterations and adjustments to the rules which determine who qualifies for nominations and who does not.

However, as equity demands; to ensure certainty of rules/laws, any change or alteration of laid down rules and principles must be made known to those concern—and this include the media and the several interest parties of the awards scheme.

Unfortunately, Mark Okraku Mantey wrongly opined that media men should have undertaken the necessary investigative steps to establish that the rules have changed—and that would have ended all the ongoing nomination list controversies.

I will like to point it out to Mark that, there is no principle of Good Faith, Equity, Substantial Justice, Information dissemination whatsoever which precludes any organisation from publicizing changed rules to ensure that those who matter are aware of the changes.

In fact, it’s Charter House’s duty and that of any organisation that alters it rules to make the new set of rules known—by taking reasonable steps to ensure wide dissemination of the new rules.

And how was anyone supposed to even know that the rules for this year’s Ghana Music Awards have changed, so that, the person will seek to find out the new rules?

If indeed rules have been changed, Charter House has not been fair to the media, itself and the people concern by their failure to effectively communicate the changes. Could they not have made this announcement at the launch?

How can there be any proper discourse when rules are not made public to fuel such discussions? Charter House/GMA has a website and it wouldn’t cost them anything substantial to have placed the notice and the new rules up there.

If people are making arguments and expressing opinions guided by the old rules as to the 2014 VGMA nominations, Charter House should be blamed for the misplaced arguments.