President should talk less and let his comms team do its job

President William Ruto [File, Standard]

When the day is done in Kenya’s noisy political landscape, no one can deny that President William Ruto has done his share of building the nation. Yet millions of Kenyans appear unimpressed. Across the country, chants of “wantam,” a call for Dr. Ruto to serve only one term, continue to echo, even as the President talks himself hoarse trying to outshout critics.

In the end, the President finds himself in the middle of a shouting match that, judged by the decibels, he is bound to lose to his louder opponents. At his best in these shouting matches, the President is beginning to sound like a talented artiste (which he is) playing the guitar to a herd of sheep!

This raises an important question: If the current government has indeed delivered measurable results in certain areas of public life, why are so many Kenyans still unconvinced? Two explanations present themselves.

Either Kenyans simply do not know very well of anything that Ruto’s government has done, in which case those paid to communicate the administration’s achievements are failing spectacularly at their job; Or Kenyans know, but no longer care, in which case the President’s public messaging has become one endless monologue.

Be that as it may, the ultimate responsibility of shaping public narratives about Ruto’s government lies with the people paid handsome salaries to manage public communications, and there are hundreds of them.

If the President himself must constantly struggle to explain and defend his government’s record in public forums, then it means that either the public communication machinery around him is not working or the President is not giving it a chance to work. It is not working. As it is now, much of the government’s public communication has been reduced to a desk-bound activity defined by endless meetings, paperwork, and bureaucratic caution; a hopelessly convoluted structure clogged with overlapping roles, internal restrictions, and layers of authority that discourage initiative.

Granted - a good number of communication officers within government are capable professionals. They write well and speak well; they can advise the President on the 5W +H of communication-What to say, Who to say it to, When to say it, Where to say it, Why, and How.

But the problem in the current public communications structure is not necessarily competence, but the bureaucratic and chaotic structure in which it operates. As it is right now, the only communication that happens seamlessly is that of internal memos, a good number of them warning public communication officers not to communicate to the public!

Meanwhile, senior political leaders, including the President, speak first and consult their communication teams later, especially only after their remarks create controversy. The result is a veritable tower of Babel that has too many political voices speaking at once, each delivering its own version of government, introduced with a subtle threat of “sisi kama serikali” (“we as the government”).

Or could it be that we simply have too many public communication officers on government payroll doing too little? Picture this-whereas we have a fully-fledged Directorate of Public Communications, every ministry and government department in Kenya seems to have its own communications office.

It gets more complicated higher up; the State House has a spokesperson, and then we have the Office of the Government Spokesperson that seems to be struggling to define its role even after shifting from the Information Ministry to the Presidency (effectively placing two government communication centres under one roof).

With so many competing voices, public communication gets locked up in bureaucratic silos bursting at the seams with a wealth of public information, while the public out there is starving for information, and ultimately, feeding on misinformation.

What, then, should be done? The answer is structural reform. If the President truly wants a public communications system that works for him, as opposed to watching him do all the work, he must crack the whip and realign the entire structure to eliminate duplication, cut bureaucracy, and centralise authority to allow information to flow faster and more smoothly from government to the public. But most importantly, the President must stop trying too hard to explain himself to the public and allow trained public communication professionals on his payroll to do their job.

Mr. Muchiri, a journalist, worked with the Office of the Government Spokesperson on secondment