I offered a silent prayer for Alhaji Mohammed Idris when he was announced as Information Minister. Everyone expected the position to go to Dr. Dele Alake but the former Lagos Commissioner for Information and Strategy dodged the bullet. Those who manage information at subnational levels are the scapegoats when things go wrong, as they always do, on the image front.
When a government’s image goes sour, it is an opportunity for politicians with direct access to the chief executive to make easy money and retain their access to power. Your Excellency, your image is taking a terrible beating out there! What are your information people doing? Why are they allowing you to have such a bad image? With such opening lines, they grab attention to launch into a prepared image laundering pitch. Most often, these pitches succeed in opening the governors’ security vote wallet because governors obsess with quick-fix personal image laundering solutions.
Alhaji Mohammed Idris may be in a tough spot right now because he is a professional communicator. Most Nigerian governors are not interested in strategically communicating their policies and programmes. They have little time to invest in harvesting citizen feedback and using them to align policies and programmes to engender citizen understanding, support, and participation in government.
Nigerian government policies are challenging to communicate, partly because governors are often architects of their personal image problems. Nigerian governors do not spare security vote expenses for quick-fix solutions to the mud they splash on themselves through their nepotistic actions, plain incompetence, and greed. These private failings get in the way of public trust in their governments.
Professional communicators like Malam Idris abhor the quick-fix solution, aka propaganda, for image management. Last month, he confirmed this at an Abuja event where he said that the President mandated him to persuade citizens to respect and listen to what the administration is doing to ease citizens’ economic burdens. His goal is therefore “to restore trust and honesty in public communication.” He vowed not to join any propaganda train to “reproduce ignorance.” There is no way that this truthful statement would not have roused the anger of the propagandist crowd to “finish him up” before the President – for daring to attack their fortune-hunting tool.
It was no surprise that, barely two weeks later, the Minister was at Arise Television to “reproduce ignorance.”
He argued that removing the petrol subsidy and merging foreign exchange windows rescued Nigeria’s economy from a freefall. The twin policies denied easy money to those who hitherto got rich through round tripping, saved the government N1.5 trillion in subsidy payments, reduced petroleum products’ consumption by half, and ultimately boosted the revenue profiles of all tiers of government. Then, like the propagandists before him, he also arrived at two illogical conclusions.
The 50 percent reduction in fuel consumption suggests that people deliberately reduced their fuel consumption habits or smugglers found it unprofitable to continue selling fuel outside Nigerian borders. In saying this, Idris ignored a simpler explanation that the policy automatically reduced citizens’ purchasing power and rendered many motorists incapable of buying fuel after a three-fold jump in pump price. The Minister is not alone in promoting this error; most senior government officials have struggled to explain this – because they are genuinely ignorant about how citizens cope with life under Tinubunomics.
Parents are the worst hit. An overwhelming majority have parked their cars at home, reduced family meals to once or twice a day, withdrew their kids from private to public schools, and are finding it challenging to buy healthcare and common prescription drugs. The propagandists should have listened to the states that reduced the work-week from five to three days when they discovered that government workers could no longer afford weekday transportation.
The Minister also toed another propaganda line by asking Nigerians to remove their exclusive focus on the President and demand what state governors do with the humongous revenue they share from the federation account. This diversionary argument is easily countered with a simple analogy. It is like a man who muddied the water at the source strolling down to ask how those washing clothes in the stream are doing with the soaps he distributed.
The minister returned to a familiar turf three days after his television show. He reportedly directed heads of agencies and departments to study the Tinubu economic plan and its programmes to ease citizens’ burdens. He listed the programmes as improved minimum wage, student loans, consumer credit, and loans to big and small businesses.
The new minimum wage is not a living wage. Parents are uncomfortable with their children getting government loans to go to school in Nigeria where there are no jobs to repay the loans after graduation. Consumer credit is not a sustainable way to live for any citizen not earning a living wage. Giving loans to small businesses in our unstable business climate is like pouring water into a bamboo basket. Strangely enough, all items on the list are designed to make parents and their children slide into debt to ease their economic burdens. Citizens did not fail to note the irony of a presidency that splashes money on luxuries asking people to borrow from the government to survive the hard times.
Tinubunomics is a hard sell for image managers because it is delivered as one-way, top-down communication. It demonstrates the government’s insufficient grasp of citizens’ peculiar difficulties, and inability to create honest and truthful solutions around those challenges. This is why it sounds like a platitude when the President said he heard the people’s cries and is doing his best to reduce their suffering.
The Nigerian president and governors do not hear people’s cries. They live in a bubble, completely isolated from the common people who elected them. Even when they return to their native homes or attend public functions, people they formerly exchanged banter with are not allowed access to them. The constant noises they hear are the glad cries of senior political appointees with access as they celebrate their awa lokan fortunes. Before long, the governor begins to determine the country’s health status from the happiness that lucky appointees radiate. When troubles arrive, as they often do, the political aides and their outside collaborators unite in search of a quick-fix image laundering solution.
Professional image managers, especially practitioners in the information ministry, find this situation challenging. Some will give up and grudgingly wear the propaganda robe to retain their jobs when the governor denies them access to funds to execute their strategic communication plans. Most governors consider such plans a waste of time or a mere “intellectual exercise.” The information manager must join the propaganda band, to avoid appearing ineffective or incompetent.
The Minister’s trouble probably began with the name change for his Ministry, from Information and Culture to Information and National Orientation. Culture is still about ideas, customs, and social behaviour, so what was the big deal? The Minister explained that the President wanted citizens to “recover their sense as a nation and begin to go in the right direction.”
Was this a problem? Our movies, music, and literary arts ambassadors do not need behavioural sermons to survive, thrive, and uplift the image of Nigeria. Neither do the wizards in the tech ecosystem and, for that matter, the Igbo trader class. All they need to thrive is an honest and trustworthy leader who creates a level playing field in every sector and an enabling environment for businesses to thrive.
Preaching to hungry citizens is not the most effective way for governments to build trust –and Alhaji Mohammed knows it.