PHOTOS: Prez Mahama's TELEPROMPTER Reading at the State of the Nation's Address

On Thursday�s State of the Nation Address to Parliament by the fourth President of the fourth Republic of Ghana, President John Mahama, read using a teleprompter. A teleprompter is a device that displays an enlarged line-by-line text on a screen to a speaker while remaining unseen to the audience. It is normally used in television and movie making to project a speaker's script out of sight of the audience. The screen is in front of and usually below the lens of a professional video camera, and the words on the screen are reflected to the eyes of the presenter using a sheet of clear glass or a specially prepared beam splitter. Most Ghanaians were amazed as they thought it was an off the cuff presentation of the State of the Nation�s Address by President Mahama, which is a departure from the normal speech reading from a sheet of paper by past Presidents. Many also attributed the smooth reading of the speech to the technology, which is a novelty in speech reading as far as the state of the nation address is concerned and the dexterous nature it took. President John Dramani Mahama�s address took a relatively shorter time compared to that of all the past Presidents, which normally takes a longer period of time and eventually become monotonous. Though it is the second time President Mahama, who is a communications expert and technologically inclined, never has the state of the Nation address been read in such technological sophistication. In pursuance of Article 67 of the 1992 constitution, which states; �the President shall, at the beginning of the each session of parliament and before dissolution of Parliament, deliver to Parliament a message on the state of the Nation�.