Reflection on Public Reform, Effective Governance and Strategic Communication, By Abdulwarees Solanke

In seeking to gain public acceptance or understanding on any project or policy it may want to introduce, the greatest assets, helpers or supporters of any government are informed citizens if they understand the intention or rationale of the reform initiative and they are carried along or involved at every stage of the policy and delivery process, because ultimately, the goal of any policy, programme, project or initiative is to impact the citizenry positively.

But public Policy making process is not a hypodermic injection syndrome nor is it some cold food to be forced down the throat of some imbeciles. No. Indeed, the success of any policy is rooted in stakeholders’ collaboration and public engagement, usually through public deliberation, a process or an effort to gain insight from those the policy is meant for or those the policy would affect, explain government intention, seek their buy-in, gain their trust, allay their fears and prepare them for the likely costs and impact.

Personally, I consider vision crafting, mission enunciation, manifestoes production, agenda setting and issues mainstreaming as pure sophistry or mere academic exercises, even rhetorical pre-occupation that do not pragmatically address critical existential concerns of the electorate or the citizenry until the government and public officials get o the real stage of engaging stakeholders in a reform project or the actual implementation phase when it comes face to face with the real but voiceless citizens who will be directly affected or impacted by a policy or reform initiative.

Meanwhile, all reform policies produce unintended results, outcomes and impact in what is described in policy language as externalities. It is OK if the attendant externalities are positive. But what is often most apparent as bye products of reform policies are negative externalities.

These negative externalities or unintended outcomes which affect powerful interests are often the cause of the fall of regimes that initiate such reforms. Once a policy or reform initiative is considered inimical to certain interests, it will become unpopular among the citizenry at the instigation of those behind such interests, leading to possible loss of election by the government that introduced such policy, political mayhem in the country or social upheavals that could cripple the entire fabric of the polity.

Mostly, the ordinary citizens are not aware of the intention of those interests. We are talking about a citizenry that may be ignorant or is not even concerned about its own future but just the needs of the moment, a citizenry that is incapable of appreciating the costs and sacrifices that must be made to meet those needs, a citizenry that has been wired to see only what polities of the Western world, seen as developed countries, enjoy without understanding the pains they had to bear in the past, the investments they had made and the price they paid before arriving at the Eldorado for which they are celebrated as developed.

We are talking about a citizenry that only thinks of revolutionary or overnight changes without understanding the implications of a revolution, a citizenry that suffers from the tragedy of evolutionary impatience, a citizenry that hates to begin from the beginning, that hates to swallow the bitter pills of genuine reform for the land that is dead to come back to life. We are talking about a citizenry, indeed a polity that is ignorant of the nature and realities of reform and change.

In its real essence, reform implies the dislodgment a powerful prevailing order or interest group and change from a popular culture and habitual preference to an entirely new and strange one. What this also implies is that not a few interests will be affected in true and genuine reform because there are usually many interests that benefit from unregulated or under-regulated public system.

Yet, reform is about regulation, about adoption of new sets of values. It is about change.Reform also connotes empowerment of the marginalized, the denied or the neglected of a polity. It is about reconstruction of the dilapidated or abandoned infrastructure. It is about regeneration of decaying and obsolescing values, about the rearmament of the disempowered, about displacement and retirement of exploitative and old brigade. It is also about redistribution of wealth and resources, about alignment or realignment of an unstructured or an unorganized system.

Indeed, it is also about deterrence in some cases and it is about introducing curtailing measures that will necessarily withdraw some rights and privileges from those that had once dominated critical sectors of the public life, economy or system holding the nation at the jugular or to ransom. . It is about government intervention in certain areas that all sorts of cabals superintend areas where powerful interests short-change the state and exploit the citizenry.

Such interests are not necessarily local or domestic but could be multinational corporations (MNCs) with vast resources to control strategic sectors of the national economy; they could be foreign countries and international organizations with global tentacles, reach, power, institutions and networks even beyond their interested or target countries with capacity to bring down a government or cripple a nation’s economy.

Often, they install puppet governments who will follow their bidding in the exploitation of the resources of a country and also back renegades and rebels who fight their proxy war that drain the country’s resources in tragic civil wars, at the end of which neither the rebels nor the resisting nationalist government have nothing to show but the sinister sponsors would have clandestinely profited from the sale of arsenals of war to brothers to devastate their country and finish themselves, only to begin rebuilding at a heavy price.

Again, the sponsors are the beneficiaries of the reconstruction cost in the country after they had set the stage for her devastation.It is not impossible that reform initiatives will suffer rejection, as naturally, most of the citizenry can be insensitive or impervious to change having been accultured to comfort in decay, disorder, impunity and indiscipline. Also, citizens may not trust a reform agenda when they perceive it as being driven by external influences and forces who they think have no good intention for their country or when they see that the belt-tightening or cost cutting that reform or policy change entails does not seem to affect the ruling elite.

This has been the experience in most developing countries or in transition in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Pacific that have been theatres of civil wars, military coups and violent regime changes.This is why any government that is interested in success and sustainability of its policy changes and reform initiatives must take stakeholders engagement very seriously when considering reform options and choices. The most strategic of the stakeholders in my estimation is the Fourth Estate of the Realm, whose obligation or domain in the policy process is surveillance and Agenda setting.

In this role, they mould public opinion and drive support or resistance to policies and reform initiatives depending on the interest that their sponsors promote. So, the greatest or the singular factor of collapse of any government is how the mass media have served the interests of the enemies of the state in the agent they set, the issues they frame, their depth of coverage and how they focus or slant issues in their news, feature, broadcast coverage and commentaries and opinions they publish and their choice of personalities for interviews and discussions in the press, on air, in the tube and online.

But the state or the government that will escape the plot of enemies at any time must must be smart in engaging the media, have credibility and integrity, enjoying the trust and being accountable to the citizens or the electorate whose mandate it enjoys. Such informed or educated citizenry constitutes the loyal defenders or STRONG ADVOCATES FOR A GOOD, RESPONSIVE AND ACCOUNTABLE GOVERNMENT.

This is the lesson the government of the day in Nigeria, headed by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu must learn in the pursuit of the Renewed Hope Agenda in Nigeria to win the hearts of Nigerian citizens at home and the Diaspora.

Abdulwarees, a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Public Diplomacy and Management and an associate of Nigerian Institute of Public Relations is the 2007 Commonwealth Broadcasting Association Scholar in Public Policy at the Universiti Brunei Darussalam. 

Currently a Deputy Director at Voice of Nigeria, he heads the Strategic Planning and Corporate Development Department, of the international radio service broadcaster in Wuse, Abuja FCT,korewarith@yahoo.com,08090585723