Public Relations as a Driver of Social Change and Development in Africa
The Public Relations program at the McKeil School of Business, Mohawk College, is one of the leading PR programs in Canada. In addition to a very competent faculty made up of industry practitioners and academics, what sets it apart is the diversity in the student enrollment, with current students drawn from across Canada, India, China, the United Arab Emirates, Nigeria, etc. While it focuses to a large extent on preparing professionals to be "career ready" to function in a PR role within Canada, the content and delivery of the courses is also designed to be easily relatable to professionals looking to practice in other jurisdictions.
With my background in the public service and some experience working in public relations in Africa, I have taken time to reflect on how to apply the things I have learnt in the course of the program so far, to areas of my interest, including governance and development. I have come to learn that the principles and practice of PR is fundamentally the same everywhere in the world, with adaptations to local contexts.
Indeed, communications is at the very core of all human interactions. Commerce, culture, politics, development, and even religion, all depend on communications to thrive. Media as the vehicle of communications is thus an important tool in advancing peace, progress, and social cohesion in Africa. More so, with the advent of New Media, access to contemporary vehicles for sending and receiving mass communications has been largely democratised, with anyone possessing a smart phone able to disseminate materials accessible by millions of people, far beyond previous spatiotemporal limitations. In this age that has been termed the post-truth era, such is the power of Media and Communications, that large corporations and governments are increasingly worried that fake news, propaganda, and covert de-marketing, now more than ever before determine political and commercial outcomes. Therefore, the challenge before Media and Communications practitioners in Africa today is to position the profession as a powerful force for good and contain its negative unintended outcomes.
Most successful African entrepreneurs understand the place of media and communications in growing their businesses. In the Private Sector, gone are the days when the Communications budget was the first to be cut drastically during times of economic contractions; or when Communications departments barely had representation on Management Boards, nor in crucial meetings where the strategic direction of companies were decided. African companies have paid dearly for such indiscretions in the past, and now realise the importance of Media and Communications, particularly in a recession. In tough times, people spend less overall and become far more selective about where they spend the little money they have. Spending habits change dramatically – people take inventory of their costs and the related benefits. If the value is not readily apparent, they could move on to a “safer” and “cheaper” option. Consequently, Branding/Strategic communications cannot be reserved as an exercise in times of growth. For effectiveness, there is need for constant maintenance, perhaps even more so in times of crisis. (Adenekan, 2016) [i]
Perhaps the segment of society that has recorded the most productive use of Media and Communications to advance its agendas is the Civic Sector. Non-Profit Organisations and movements abound across Africa with different thematic areas of focus. Having neither the huge communications budgets of the private sector nor the instruments of state of the public sector, these change agents are trained to sweat small budgets to scale up their reach and impact, while often coping with repressive governments who consider them enemies of the state with diametrically opposite agendas.
It can be argued that the more antagonistic a government is, or the greater the development challenges in a jurisdiction, the more virile civil society gets, and the more creative development communications becomes. In 2007-08, the horrendous Post-Election pogroms in Kenya led to the creation of Ushahidi Inc.[ii], a non-profit company that uses advanced communications tools to crowd-source crisis information for social activism and accountability. In Nigeria, endemic corruption which has undermined the growth potentials of the world's largest Black Country has birthed BudgIt[iii], who believe it is the right of every citizen to have access to and understand public budgets. Now operating in Nigeria, Ghana and Sierra Leone, BudgIt uses infographics and other communications tools to simplify complex budgetary materials, with a view to improving transparency and accountability in the management of public funds. Also, in Nigeria, www.ruralreporters.com was founded with the goal of amplifying underreported news and issues affecting rural communities. In Tanzania, the Institute for Orkonerei Pastoralists Advancement (IOPA)[iv] facilitates transformation and diversification of the economic system of the Maasai through social business, social entrepreneurship, and innovation. Using radio programmes, roundtable discussions, and festivals, the institute prepares a fertile ground for self-examination and collective action. Countless other social enterprises have become very influential operating at the nexus of Communications and Social Activism, and they all have one thing in common, the adept use of Information Technology, Media and Communications tools to be more efficient in amplifying up their impact, while getting more people to learn about and support their work.
Invariably, Africa’s Private and Civic sectors have learnt to circumvent the everyday challenges brought on by governance failure and are taking advantage of Media and Communications in meeting their objectives. That is the order of the day in Africa. In Nigeria, with 80 per cent of private homes lacking access to regular power supply in 2016, and with power generation less than 10% of the 40,000 megawatt estimated energy needs, the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria disclosed that about 100 million Nigerians owned generators in 2016, with a cumulative expenditure of about N5.5trillion on fuel within the year under review. Of this figure, the offices of the President and Vice President account for a total of N32.9 million spent fuelling their generators.[v]
It is however incontrovertible that Africa cannot reach her full potential with the Public Sector lagging. Africa’s future rests on the tripod of the Public, Private and Civic sectors, and only when these three are working optimally and in concert can we truly develop. The Public sector in Africa, like the Private and Civic sectors, must latch on to the opportunities that Media and Communications offer to own the narratives about Africa in the global media space to increase our competitiveness. Long before fake news became popular, Africa has for long suffered from negative stereotypes about the continent, and what appears to be a deliberate conspiracy by Western media to present the worst of Africa as the norm.
Africa is beautiful. We are blessed with every natural resource you can think of. Our people are hospitable and industrious and hold the promise of a brighter future. Africa is not one country. Like every other part of the world, we have our bad eggs, but we are not all fraudsters searching the internet for someone to scam. We have had our share of conflicts, but we are generally peace-loving people. African governments must take the lead in promoting positive narratives about Africa. This is not necessarily by carrying out country-level so-called rebranding campaigns, but by truly fixing Brand Africa. Governance must work in Africa, so that every touch point that internal and external publics have with the continent leaves a lasting positive impression. There is no single silver bullet to achieving this, but public relations certainly have a very significant role to play.
Governments in Africa need to give greater roles to public relations professionals. Again, this is not about the appointment of hordes of vituperative individuals to blindly defend every action or inaction of government on social media. No! African governments need to first understand that public relations is a conversation and about relationship building, and social change must be participatory. It is about deploying strategies to periodically give accounts of stewardship to the people, while creating avenues for the citizenry to provide constructive feedback, which must feed back into policy and programme planning. People whose lives are affected by a decision must be part of the process of arriving at that decision. (Naisbitt, 1984)
One of the challenges of post-authoritarian African states is the legacy of a lack of consultation in the policy development and implementation process. In the past, military governments ruled by decrees based on what they felt was best for the people. Today, civilian governments in Africa still carry on with such vestiges. They fail to realise that democracy itself is a continuous conversation by the citizenry about their values and priorities. The task of political elites is to take the pulse of the public and turn the instincts and aspirations of the electorate into political and public policy agendas. Despite the tons of well-intentioned and even altruistic policy efforts to fight poverty and other societal challenges, these initiatives fail because they are largely imposed by government on the people. They emerge from a process in which the government dictates solutions to the people rather than discussing with them. Consequently, these policies have little or no ownership or buy-in at the grassroots level and often fail. The current model of policymaking in many African countries is a heavily centralized top-bottom approach to development planning that conceives policy as the projection or imposition of developmental objectives on hapless recipients by remote well-meaning bureaucracies. Often, this approach leads to a misappropriation of energies and a misdirection of resources. (Fayemi, 2013) [vi]
Another point to be made is that African governments must build capacity within their bureaucracies to drive strategic communications. Government communications in the hands of political appointees most times leaves a lot to be desired. Some of them carry on with the combative rhetoric from electioneering days, while others simply lack the requisite competence and experience. The civil service as the bastion of institutional memory must be empowered with the skills and tools to promote the delivery of social goods, and the ease of doing business in an atmosphere of transparency, accountability, and the primacy of the Rule of Law. It must be mandatory for government entities to have channels through which the public can access information about their activities. Critical touch points with government offices, particularly by foreign publics, must always align with sovereign brand aspirations.
African governments must lead the people to believe in themselves again. Likewise the people must hold governments accountable. Maybe then, the world would listen and believe when Africans tell their own stories. Maybe then can it truly be said that Africa is rising. The PR program at Mohawk College has helped me to clarify my future career goals, which would involve working with public sector entities and non-profits in Africa, to help them communicate more effectively the message that "Africa is Rising".
Akin Rotimi is a student of the Graduate Public Relations programme at the McKeil School of Business, Mohawk College
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