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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
Akunyili And The “Re-Branding” Of Nigeria: The Limits Of Propaganda
The recent announcement by the Minister of Information and Communication, Professor Dora Akunyili, that she has initiated a campaign to “re-brand” Nigeria has, predictably, generated intense controversy. Press comments have generally been hostile even where they conceded that the professor of pharmacology seems to have proved her mettle as the Director-General of the National Food and Drug Administration and Control( NAFDAC). A few pundits, however, have vigorously defended the campaign while some newspapers, including Thisday (February 17) and Vanguard (March 2) have offered qualified support.
Akunyili herself epitomizes how spectacular the achievements of propaganda can be – and that, not to put too fine a point to it, is what her re-branding campaign is all about. Before her appointment as NAFDAC’s boss eight years ago, there was little public awareness of the regime of food and drug administration in the country. By the time she left NAFDAC last year, the acronym had become a household word.
Nothing better illustrates this phenomenal achievement by Akunyili than a little encounter I had one fine morning with one smart looking child street hawker in Abuja a couple of years ago. I was in my car driving along Michael Okpara Way in Wuse, Abuja, and waiting for the traffic light to turn green close to the T-junction with Harbert Macaulay Way, when the hawker sidled to my window with a large bunch of bananas. I thought he should be in school not on the streets at that hour of the day and wound down the glass to tell him so even though I knew it was a futile thing to say.
The kid soon proved even smarter than he looked; before I could say a word, he raised the bunch to my face and, with a broad, if somewhat mischievous grin, announced that the bananas were “NAFDAC approved”. I didn’t know when I burst out laughing and, instead of chiding the kid over something that was obviously not his fault, I bought the bunch without even haggling over his price.
This encounter alone was to me evidence enough that Akunyili had done an excellent job in creating public awareness about the proper usage of foods and, of course, drugs in the country. However, with her announcement that she would soon embark on a campaign to re-brand Nigeria, I fear that she is about to become a victim of her propaganda success.
The problem with propaganda is that it almost always leads to self-deception. Akunyili may have succeeded possibly well beyond her wildest imagination in turning NAFDAC into a well-known brand, but the reality of food and drug administration in the country is that her success has been more of image than substance.
The fact is that contrary to the image that NAFDAC under Akunyili has virtually eliminated the phenomena of fake drugs and drug abuse both have hardy experienced any significant decline. In spite of all her efforts, the open and illegal drug markets in the country including the three most notorious ones at Onitsha, Kano and Aba, have never really gone out of business. So also have those who openly hawk prescription drugs on our streets.
In a widely published article late last year by one, Olamide Akintayo, a former Chairman of the Lagos State Branch of the Pharmaceutical Society of Nigeria (PSN), in which he reviewed Akunyili’s years as NAFDAC’s boss, he showed how some of her policies negated some of the very goals for which it was established.
For example, he showed how the Lagos State PSN in 2002 warned NAFDAC against introducing NAFDAC numbers on product packs because fake drug merchants could easily print such numbers and thus make their products look genuine. NAFDAC ignored the advice. The deaths last year of scores of children that were administered My Pikin teething medicine was a direct consequence of that decision. Yet Akunyili seems to have successfully deflected blame for those avoidable deaths.
When she was first nominated for a ministerial job last year following her departure from NAFDAC, there were widespread expectations that she would get the “lucrative” health portfolio as a natural progression from her apparent success at NAFDAC. Pretty soon, however, it became obvious that it wasn’t going to be a cakewalk for her; articles and even paid adverts started appearing in newspapers about which profession in the healthcare delivery system was best suited to head the ministry.
One advert in Thisday of November 21, 2008 credited to “Elders Forum of the Nigeria Medical Association, Lagos State” insinuated, without naming names, that Akunyili not being a medical doctor was not fit to head the health ministry. Predictably, a counter advert appeared two days later in the same newspaper credited to a “Coalition of Concerned Citizens for Better Health”. This one argued that in appointing his health minister President Umaru Yarádua should ignore those who said he should pick only a medical doctor.
As things turned out the president acted contrary to popular expectations. He sent Akunyili to a most unlikely ministry – that of information and communication – for someone regarded as the best thing to have happened to the country’s health care delivery in ages.
Akunyili’s posting, however, is a paradox. At the same time that posting a pharmacist with no experience in professional media management to oversee government’s information department seems a mismatch, her success in creating a positive image of herself contrary to the reality on the ground more than qualified her for her new job.
Herein, however, lies the danger that, like most creatures of media-spin, she may end up a victim of her propaganda success. Having succeeded in creating a very positive image of herself against the reality on the ground, she has obviously come to believe that, given the right price, image can always trump substance.
Otherwise, I cannot see why she would have contemplated re-branding Nigeria – never mind according it priority – at a time like this when the future has never looked so bleak for Nigerians and their country, what with the global economic recession, the widespread insecurity in the land and the almost total breakdown of the country’s infrastructure, not to talk of stories of mind-boggling corruption that Nigerians see and hear.
As if to underscore the danger of her belief in image over substance, Akunyili’s rebranding campaign seems to have taken off on a very false and shaky start. Late last month, she was at a book launch by UNICEF on the state of the world’s children as minister of information and communication. As is usual on such occasions, UNICEF officials reeled out figures of infant and maternal mortality rates of its member-countries. Nigeria, with official maternal mortality rate of 800 per 100,000 births was, not surprisingly, at the bottom rungs.
Akunyili promptly got up to reject those figures. They did not, she said, reflect the reality on the ground. Yet those figures were produced by the National Demographic Health Survey and certified as accurate by the Federal Ministry of Health.
Chances are, far from those figures being an exaggeration of the reality, as Akunyili insisted, they were a gross understatement about how terrible the situation is; hospital based surveys by the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Nigeria (SOGON) show that in states like Lagos and Kano where maternity visits to hospitals are high, the mortality rates are in the region of 3,500 per 100,000.
If Akunyili would reject government’s own figures simply because someone else used them in a way she believed portrayed the country in poor light, it should be obvious that her re-branding campaign would end as an exercise in futility because it would certainly lack credibility.
Like human beings no country in the world is all virtue and no vice or vice-versa. Again like human beings, every country owes itself to emphasize its virtues over its vices. But in a country like ours where the reward and punishment system clearly discourages even basic honesty and hard work, it is the height of self-deception to think our mere say-so, no matter how sweet we make it sound, would convince anyone that Nigeria has become a favourite destination for visit or business.
Akunyili – and her principals – would do better than use our meagre resources in these terribly hard times in pursuit of empty, if not fraudulent, sloganeering.
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