The Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci pointed out that the main essence of political action is to determine the course of the discourse in favor of your own project. Today, Nigeria is witnessing unprecedented, profound change. It is dislocating and must be explained to the public in a multi-ethnic and multilingual state as to why this painful but necessary adjustment has to be made.
Much of government communication today appears to be directed at literate people. Unfortunately, this is not the issue. The government must direct the message at the hoi polloi – the traders, the artisans, workers’ unions, students, street hawkers, and so on. The key point in directing the territory of the discourse at those outside the elite group is to convince the grassroots, the base, to accept government policy, despite temporary dislocation and pain. The message should be about why this temporary pain will in the long-term benefit all of us and our families.
What the government needs to do today is to emulate Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who, in getting into office in 1964 and facing a devastating economic outlook, appointed one of the youngest Britain’s professor of economics to explain the economic crisis to the public. The key point here is that Professor Balogh, from Balliol College, Oxford University (not Babe College London University), was not a media person per se, but he could explain and enlighten the hoi polloi as to why the crisis arose and why the government had to respond in ways that may, at first look, seem harsh and punitive. At the time, his appeal was not to the elite but to explain the economic crisis to those who were disaffected, those with very low levels of education, and those who now saw the crisis as a punitive tax on the least protected sectors.
He did his job with aplomb.
President Tinubu’s media team will do well by studying how the United Kingdom Labour government of 1964 managed the economic crisis, and won re-election by a landslide in 1966 to learn how to explain an economic crisis in a way that will favor the government’s own position. This is important. The grave economic situation President Tinubu inherited, necessitating the current measures, has not been explained to the overwhelming majority, and the disaffection is getting pronounced. People are experiencing a massive erosion in their cost of living, in their standards of living. As one pundit has said, “We no longer have a cost of living crisis,” but rather, “a cost of existence crisis.” Therefore, we must note that the government did not cause the economic crisis, but it must explain its way out of it and show how things will gradually get better for future generations yet unborn. The key issue here is that the government itself must stop being reactive and be preemptive, by anticipating what the naysayers and the opposition might say about any government policy.
There have been a lot of particularly good government policies, such as the student loans and so forth, but they have not been explained with the clarity of how they benefit the overwhelming majority in the way that they ought to have been. Politics, as Machiavelli said, is about “the law of constant reminders.” The government must constantly remind the audience of the positive changes that are already in place. After two years in the saddle, the law of constant reminders is of extreme importance, and urgency in directing public acceptance of government policy and acceptance of the government itself.
Therefore, the two key strategies now must be “preemptive” and understanding the law of constant reminders, which is that the government’s own positive bearing in a difficult climate must be constantly explained in simple language to give the public the impression that things are getting better and will continue to get better.
The format also needs to be legitimate. As the late, much-revered Canadian communications expert Marshall McLuhan pointed out decades ago, “the medium is the message.” A new framework has to be drawn up of weekly press briefings, not press conferences, to present the economic message in simple terms with background graphics and data analysis in a humorous and enlightening way that can capture and captivate the audience at the same time, with the presumption that the audience has only a junior secondary school-type education.
This should be followed up with monthly town hall meetings across the six geopolitical zones, in which the message is presented with clarity in ways that can be understood by the overwhelming majority.
A good exponent of this kind of format was Charles de Gaulle, as President of the French Republic. He held press conferences explaining the dilemma of the Republic in ways which looked, in many instances, like pure theater. People loved watching them on television; there were live audiences, and there were a lot of things that were stage-managed to favor the perception of the government not as cruel but as caring and working towards a better future for all.
The entire format of government presentation must be rejigged. What obtains now is out of sequence with today’s 24/7 social media news cycle. It is too reactive; it must dictate and direct the terrain of thinking, thought, and action in favor of continuing momentum to gain support for the government.
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The government must be wary, because another example for the United Kingdom is that of John Major. He was a good Prime Minister, but he never really had a communications team to explain the very important gains that were being made under his government. He ended up losing by a landslide to Tony Blair. A better alternative is to look back at the past, to the intervention of President Franklin D. Roosevelt when he took over as president in the midst of a terrible economic crisis in 1932, in which Americans were eating out of the dustbin. In addition, we can borrow a leaf from the public presentation of policies by the Labour government in the United Kingdom in 1945, when the welfare state was created against opposition, but in which they carried the majority of the people with them.
The government must now be proactive, preemptive, and realize that a lot of fine-tuning has got to be made in the presentation of policies in order to rally the republic behind its own good intentions. We must now not just look at public policy as good intentions but present them in a way that people will accept that, yes, there’s temporary pain, but things are getting better in the direction of helping myself, my children, and generations yet unborn.
In the reality of today, we must not only look at geopolitical, ethnic, and religious disparities in tailoring messages to specific locations, but we must also begin to look at subgroups and social cleavages, such as age and gender. Pinpointing specific messages and formats, for example, to the informal sector and even sub-groups within the informal sector, is crucial. We need to explain why all these are a benefit to them.
The days of looking at the public as one whole are out of the question. We must now put together several specific groups and tailor messages towards encouraging them and steering them towards accepting government policy and, indeed, gradually becoming supporters and, in the end, enthusiastic supporters of the government. The work is very clear-cut.
The spokespersons of the government must see Nigerian as a fragmented population which must be rallied in a republic. to use the phrase must associated with President Charles De Gaulle . Tailor made messages must now be targeted at focus – groups and sub – divisions. This must be the way to revive and reinfigorate the communication strategy and strengthen the perception that all of these is to make tomorrow better.
Bamidele Ademola-Olateju, a former Ondo Commissioner for Information, is Director of New Media and Corporate Communications for the All Progressives Congress (APC)
