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25.02.2015 Feature Article

A Seminar For Public Alienation Practitioners

A Seminar For Public Alienation Practitioners
25.02.2015 LISTEN

This is a report I received from My Own Correspondent who smuggled himself into a Seminar in Ghana recently:

RESOURCE PERSON: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. We have brought you here to dispel the illusions that some of you have about the jobs you have accepted to carry out on behalf of the Government, your para-statal organisations or your private companies.

We have not separated you into your different sectors because your professional function is the same, irrespective of the organisation you serve.

Now, what is this function you are employed to carry out for your organisations? Some call it “public relations”; others call it “communications”; but some of the more bombastic practitioners refer to themselves as ”public awareness experts/specialists/advisers/consultants/engineers.”

Engineers? Did you hear me to say "engineers"?

Yes! If there can be financial “engineering”, why can there not be public awareness engineers?
(LOUD LAUGHTER)

Some engineers produce mechanical or electrical services, tight? Well, there is no reason why anyone who generates a product that is needed in society can not similarly call himself an engineer. If I had my way, doctors, for instance, would be called “biological engineers”. For they use tools in the same way electrical and mechanical engineers use tools.

But that is by the by. The function you are all required to perform – irrespective of what your designation is, in your organisation, is to stand between the public and your organisation.

The more subtle among you may notice that I have put the public first in defining your function. It is for a very good reason. You see, the public is the active element in the particular aspect of the relationship that is of interest to us. It is the public that reacts to services allegedly not provided; services that are allegedly over-priced; and services that are unrealistically expected to be provided.

In each instance, when the public attempts to complain in order to correct what it imagines to be wrong, it is your duty to act as if you were a military tankcovered in impenetrable armour, absorb the pellets thrown at you by the public, and return fire with such overwhelming force that the public will never dare to try to throw darts at your organisation again.

Again, the more subtle of you will notice that I am using military metaphors. Yes – the relationship between organisations and the public can be likened to war.

The public is ruthless. If you don't trample it under foot, it will cripple you by either not voting for you |(if you are a government) or driving you into bankruptcy by refusing to buy your goods (if you are a company).

So, victory at all costs must be your objective.

People who laughed when a certain practitioner of the profession was quoted as revealing that the boss in his organisation had told them to tell the public that the boss had sacrificed a “cow” for a certain purpose, when he had, in fact, only disposed of a guinea-fowl, did not realise that that practitioner was actually very good at his job. (LOUD LAUGHTER)

Adolph Hitler's communications guru, Goebbels, proved, through the Nazification of nearly all of Europe in the 1930s, that the greater the untruth, the greater the chances were of people believing it. The Nazis told Europe that people with blue eyes and blondish hair, and whose physiques were lean and tall, and who looked strong and fit, would lead the world into a Reich of Efficiency and Invincibility that would last a thousand years or three -- at least. And look what happened? Had it not been for American intervention in The Second World War, the Nazis might have won.

Okay – that was a deviation into extraneous territory. I want to bring you down to earth and return you to here, at home.

I recently came across one of the most ingenious exercises in returning fire against the public with overwhelming force, that I have ever come across.

Now, you know that Dumsor is the biggest weapon being currently deployed against the government, as well as the electricity production and distribution companies. Everyone talks about Dumsor and its consequences: how companies are being forced to lay people off because they are not provided with enough power to engage in production to their full capacity; how people who shop in bulk to void being caught in traffic jams can no longer do so because their freezers destroy their purchases of fresh produce – especially meat and fish – instead of preserving it; and how mobile phones cannot be used because there is little or no power to charge their batteries.

The guy I am talking about was clever enough to realise that the mobile phone issue was the most damaging, as far as the public was concerned. So what do you think he did? He focused on the mobile phone issue and turned the mobile phone from victim to attacker: it was, he said, the use of mobile phones that was causing a large part of the power shortages that were creating the Dumsor economy!

I am sure you don't believe your ears; you cannot accept that anyone would do what I am saying, so I shall quote the man verbatim:

QUITE: “Mobile phones consume 150 megawatts of electricity - VRA

The charging of mobile phones in the country consumes 150 megawatts of electricity, which is equivalent to the capacity of the Bui Dam, Mr Sam Kwesi Fletcher, the Head of Corporate Communications at the Volta River Authority (VRA), has said. He said charging a phone's battery consumed 10 watts of electricity and while it normally took only two hours to charge a phone's battery, many phone owners charged their phones throughout the night, bringing the energy consumption of the estimated 15 million mobile phones in the country to “150 million watts (or 150 megawatts) of electricity”.

“Mr Fletcher was speaking at a meeting called by the Ghana Tourism Federation (GHATOF) in Accra to discuss the effects of the energy crisis on the tourism industry. Some of the members of the federation, especially the hoteliers, painted a harrowing picture of the financial crunch they were going through as a direct result of high electricity tariffs and irregular supply.

“Mr Fletcher said much of the problem had to do with wastage. “While from the supply side, that is, from the VRA, Sunon Asogli and Aboadze Thermal plants, ECG and GRIDCO, wastage accounts for 22 per cent, the stark reality is that consumers waste as much as 30 per cent of electricity. By the last count, there were 27 million mobile phone lines connected; that is, two million lines more than the 25 million population. The effect of this increased domestic consumption, coupled with intensified industrialisation, is that while, in the past, one cargo of light crude, equivalent to 400,000 barrels, imported at a cost of US$60 million to produce electricity lasted 90 days, today that same quantity lasts only 20 days. So it is no exaggeration when we say that 98 per cent of VRA's revenue goes to buy crude oil to produce electricity,” he stated.

I told you the guy was clever. Do you see how he entangled his figures about the wastage caused by mobile phones, with a whole set of irrelevant figures?

Normally, people hate to do mental arithmetic, so to b8undle so many figures into one or two paragraphs is to lose them altogether. Intentionally!

He gives figures about the importation of crude oil and its cost; he quantifies the amount of wattage allegedly wasted in charging phones, and multiplies that by the population proper, plus the phone-owning population. Why was it necessary to give figures for both? It's because by the time normal newspaper reader has got his head round one set of figures, another would have been thrown in -- to make him totally forgot about mobile phone usage/wastage of electricity, which is the main subject the guy started off with!

"Ei", the reader asks himself, "so we import “light crude” to the tune of 400,000 barrels per cargo? Do all ships or tankers have the same capacity? Hmmm? And it costs $US 60 million to import 400,000 barrels? I thought the price of crude oil rise and fall on the world market? When did we buy 400,000 barrels at $60 million? Is it still costing that much, when oil prices have supposedly halved -- at the very least -- in the past year? Ei -- and while one cargo used to produce electricity to last 90 days, it only lasts for 20 daystoday? Ei, this Dumsor matter is complicated oh!

So, you see, our propaganda practitioner has returned fire with overwhelming fire. But if you think deeply about what he said, it is as full of pot-holes as some of Accra's roads. The only thing is that the conglomeration of figures makes it impossible for the reader to cut through the presentation and the reader ends up with a major consequence of a PR military assault -- a casualty called obfuscation.

Yet, if the reader had not been consigned to the realms of "collateral damage", he might have had a simple question for the guy. It is this: Sir, how do you separate the consumption of power through the charging of mobile phone batteries from other forms of power consumption in a household, when all the power the household consumes is usually accumulated and captured on a single electricity meter?
Now, that is what I call a PR victory: to make it impossible for the public to ask the simple question and expect a simple answer to it!

(MY OWN CORRESPONDENT THEN WROTE THE FOLLOWING NOTES IN THE MARGINS OF HIS REPORT):

I am sure Mr Fletcher would have had an answer to that last question, though what relationship it would bear to reality I shall never know. What is appalling about Mr Fletcher's performance is that I have no way of knowing whether he did it for political purposes or not. It doesn't matter: what his performance illustrates is that there is a culture of LYING growing by leaps and bounds in the country which, if not eradicated, will create such cynicism amongst the populace that it will cease to believe anything ANY official says, whether the official is a politician or merely a bureaucrat. Bureaucrats and politicians are in fact, morphing into one and the same thing, at an alarming rate! The idea that public servants are there to ensure the public "weal" is disappearing fast, as organisations develop a skin too think to pierce with questions asked by a populace that has no means of prying the truth out of organisational safes and vaults.

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www.cameronduodu.com

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