Latest update April 24th, 2024 12:59 AM
Dec 10, 2016 News
Last Friday afternoon, there were two government programmes aimed simultaneously on television and cable. The first programme was a Budget programme, moderated by a PR person attached to the Ministry of Finance, and featuring the Ministers of Communities and Public Infrastructure. The second programme, aired on NCN, was a weekly feature with the President of Guyana. The programme is called The Public Interest.
That programme makes the President appear like a defence attorney rather than a politician. He is always being pushed on the back foot, even by the handpicked interviewers, to defend the actions of his government and Ministers.
The timing of those programmes was also wrong. Neither was being aired in prime time. They were being aired at a time when most people were rushing home from work. This is what happens when there is no effective coordination of PR work and when the responsibilities for PR are scattered amongst many agencies.
This simultaneous airing of programmes shows the crisis in public relations faced by the government. It is an example of the dysfunctional and disjointed nature of the government’s public relations. The airing of both programmes at the same time essentially forced viewers to make a choice as whether to watch the President give his assessment of the Budget or watch two ministers do the same thing on another programme.
The government’s public relations is a confusing arrangement. There are too many cooks. The broth is being contaminated. The messages that are being sent out are uncoordinated, the media used are limited, and the public is left in a state of mystification.
The problem is that the information portfolio is being split up into too many agencies. If there is a Minister of Information, then all public relations work should be undertaken by this Minister.
Instead what we have are a number of ministries having their own PR units or PR personnel. The Ministry of Finance has its own PR person. The Presidency has retained the outfit run by Kwame Mc Coy. Luncheon’s weekly Cabinet briefing has been continued. It means that the Ministry of the Presidency has a major stranglehold on the PR of the government, even though the Prime Minister is supposed to be responsible for information.
The Prime Minister has a Department of Information, which has done a fantastic job in terms of highlighting the Budget. But this department is being weakened by the fact that it does not have command of the entire information portfolio, which is split among a number of ministries, with some doing their own PR work. This breaking up of the information portfolio is the cause of the confusion and ineffectiveness of the government’s public relations.
The point has been made that it requires more than PR to help the government. It is said that if the government does not have anything good to sell, then no PR can sell it. In other words, the government needs good policies to look good.
This is only partly true. A good PR can sell even the worst of policies. This is why there is need for the government to streamline its information flow.
There are too many information units. The APNU+AFC coalition should have gotten rid of GINA. This unit is duplicating the work of the Department of Public Information. The government should reduce the size of NCN and instead assimilate all those PR officers into the various ministries.
It should aim at a smaller compact unit staffed by highly experienced professionals whose feet have been wet in the political trenches, and who understand the art of making a government look good, even when the government itself is rotten.
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