Lai Mohammed and the death of propaganda

Mr. Lai Mohammed’s tenure as Spokesperson of opposition parties: Action Congress of Nigeria and All Progressive party(APC), witnessed a lot of propagandist communication. In fact propaganda reached its crescendo during his tenure of office as APC Spokesperson. People like Dr. Ruben Abati will not forget him in a hurry. A recent approach demonstrated by Chief Lai Mohammed in his response to Chief Olusegun Obasanjo’s letter may be a signal pointing to the death of propaganda. Or do we just assume Chief Mohammed was cautious because of the personality of the person involved?

While reading through several online comments immediately after Chief Lai Mohammed’s response, I could not but be cautious to greet his response with such enthusiasm many other communication professionals greeted it with. Chief Lai Mohammed for the first time did a highly professional job in his response to Chief Obasanjo’s communication.

Many praised Chief Lai Mohammed and called the attention of public to the fact that he is a professional Public Relations practitioner. In my mind, the question was what has happened to his professionalism until last week? Or was he just playing to the gallery beating the drum; producing the sound he was assigned before now? Truth be told Chief Lai Mohammed tenure as opposition party Spokesperson was better than what the Country witnessed when people like Mr.Femi Fani-Kayode and Doyin Okupe were government’s Spokespersons. The later were more of attack dogs than professional communicators.

Propaganda in its original form began with the Greek. Propaganda was used by Roman Catholic Church and later employed by early fathers of Public Relations in the beginning of 20th Century. Then propaganda could be seen as a legitimate practice of persuasion and influence. With time, its application in politics and governance had led to more damage and abuse than good. Usually propagandists are very clever in their use of superlative words to persuade target audience.

A known fact with many propagandists is that they communicate with a relative hidden objective. Propagandist comes with a subtle notion to either construct, alter or manipulate their audience. This in many situations is geared towards achievement of their own selfish goals. Whatever they do, party propagandist in most cases work strategically to shape public perception and direct public opinion in agreement with issues which may enhance preconceived idea of their employer.

Use of propaganda thrived before because of limited information available to the public. In the early days, only few had the correct and full information. The generality of the populace would have to really on the few information they could garner from the aristocrats or the privilege few. Times have changed, the use of propaganda might have been effective in the pre 16th century because of non responsive  and irrational public but today public is more aware, responsive and active. This changes had made the  use of propaganda to deliver less value if it still has any.

Today’s audience are skeptical and weary of incomplete or any misinformation. Today’s audience know better. Weaver once wrote  ‘since Edward Barnays, propaganda has monumentally failed to establish itself as a good Public relation tool’. In the real sense of it and no matter what we say we need to agree with L’Etang position which says, ‘public relations needs more public relations to increase its better understanding of the society’. The old and wrong thinking which sees Public relation as equal to propaganda will malign organization’s acceptability. Doing Public relations well has gone beyond lies and spin.

The age of information devolution we live in has made social engineering of consent and acceptability of an idea, policy a hard nut to crack for those who will still want to sell lies by all means. Someone has captured this well when he says ‘the more propagandists try to sell lies the more they will be losing the market’. The reason for this is not far fetched. Their actions pollute the market. As a result neither the propagandist nor the market can have a clean water to drink.

Lippman in his book also emphasised anyone who uses propaganda today and still considers it a good tool for social order will never be good crusader of participatory democracy. Propaganda to democracy is like a full blown cancer. It will take God to make a survivor of it. Propaganda dilutes substance and amplifies feelings.The result of this makes propaganda in a participatory democracy like a conspicuous bad sore in a person’s forehead. It is repulsive and hardened target audience against successful government’s policy execution and public engagement.

It is therefore our hope that this ‘born again’ Chief Lai Mohammed will begin to find better expression than his old configuration. The old software needs to give way to this new and modern configuration which will deliver more values to him and the government of the day than if he reprogramme to the default setting.

Going forward and irrespective of the status of his or government’s  critics, Chief Lai and the APC led regime will continue to gain better accolades if he leaves his default setting for the opposition party. Chief Lai will have a stronger image as a professional than his default setting where many like Senator Akpabio referred to him on the floor of national assembly as ‘Lie Mohammed’.  In any case do we really still have opposition party?