This is a harbinger of a threatening media event that awaits the President leading up to the 2023 election, should it be swept aside.
Based on the President and his team’s three year assessment and his poor media performance last week,by sound media people, the time has come for the President to start making some changes, especially reshuffling of his team in acknowledgement of the trending issues of the past three years.
Change, like the truth, hurts because there are aspects to it that really test you as a person when juxtaposed to your aims and objectives. For such juxtaposition, anything or one standing in the way of progress should go. Sadly, we usually don’t finish a long journey with those we started off with, despite trying our level best to keep the team together. Some will naturally fall by the wayside, while some will have to be removed, or else failure is assured.This is where President Bio finds himself.
Last week’s poor media performance by our president who struggled through simply put but hard to answer questions by people lacking the skills and training to sail through them, should necessitate that the reshuffling starts at the very ministry tasked with communicating the president and his team’s plans and actions.
By playing his own Minster of Information and Communications, it became apparent that the President needs journalists on his team, and needs a closer relationship with the media. Were a member of either the Ministry or the President’s own personal media people were to have been interviewed during last week’s media blitz by the President, chances are they would have performed better than him. Media people are versed at how to deal with and handle their colleague journalists.
By exposing the President in such a way says that it was planned for him to look incapable so as to justify him needing them, when all you really need are sound media people on your team. As the fourth estate in the governance structure of our country, it is the duty of every journalist to encourage the president in ways that will further our development aspirations. Praise where praises are needed, lambast where it is needed, all in the cause of the state and people. Any journalist worthy of his salt that wishes bad for his president, regardless of political affiliation, is unpatriotic, because when presidents perform well, the country performs well. When they fail, we all fail.
However, despite his poor performance, there are those of the President’s team and party including party-focused newspapers, etc. that are misleading him that he would win the 2023 elections based on not only his three year performance, but critically because of the way he handled himself during last week’s media engagements. Such advice should be tantamount to treason.
The president must not forget what some of our people are like; that for a pittance they will tell you all the lies you need or want to hear about yourself, without blushing. In the history of our governance, there have been men and women like that so close to power that they feel the need to mislead our leaders so as to sound unified while at the same time holding dear to their thoughts or feelings on the matter at hand.
You must not forget that only sound media practitioners will tell you where you truly stand. We helped you win the 2018 elections, and you shouldn’t forget that.
In the art of information, a sitting president will be doing him or herself a great disservice by hiring a clown for an information minister, when hard working media personalities that speak and understand the language of the media are either sidelined or sent to far off mission fields.
Should you fail to reshuffle the Ministry of Info and Communications, you will have to keep defending yourself on TV or radio instead of the people we through you are paying to do the work. As per last week, you became your own public relations representative. And with the elections drawing nearer each waking day, chances are you will end up doing your own PR and campaign work for 2023.
If you do not have a good relationship with the media beforehand, you will be in for a surprise come 2023, because all those who are telling you that you stand a chance of winning are like the tailor that told the emperor that his new clothes were one of a kind, when all along he was stark naked.
There is the general belief based on shared experiences here in our body politic that before elections, the SLPP is a champion of the underdogs, but after getting the mandate, the party turns its back on the very same underdogs. Also, there is the belief that before elections, you don’t care about educational attainments, but after you require such.
Let it not be said of you in hindsight that the very group of people that the president needed most in his time of need, the journalists, were not there to help articulate his plans and actions to garner the much needed vote to further develop the economy through human resource and capital development.