NigeriansTalk

Good Request, Great Tardiness

Imag­ine a sit­u­a­tion where a strong global brand like Coca Cola has gar­nered an unfavourable devel­op­ment where drinkers of the prod­uct have had seri­ous stom­ach upsets, then in a pub­lic rela­tions offen­sive the man­age­ment decides to rebrand the prod­uct hav­ing not essen­tially dealt with the pri­mary issues that have tar­nished the brand in the first place.

On Fri­day, Olu­mide of Loomnie.com and the new NigeriansTalk.org site invited me to review the blog reac­tions to the new brand­ing of Nige­ria – I rarely, if ever, take com­mis­sions like this because easy and inter­est­ing as it sounds, it is harder than one first realises – there is quite a lot to read before cre­at­ing a review – I am the wiser.

Good Inten­tions, Great Inactions

Recently, Pro­fes­sor Dora Akun­y­ili, the Min­is­ter of Infor­ma­tion, started a cam­paign to re-brand Nige­ria, in fact, when I first heard of it a few months ago, I was not enam­oured by the idea at all, Ken Wed­ding, like me, writ­ing on Re-branding Nige­ria states –“I would have missed this new pub­lic rela­tions cam­paign if not for the dis­cus­sions on a cou­ple of blogs writ­ten by Nige­ri­ans”, I would sup­pose we mostly picked up the thread from there.

He goes on to quote the min­is­ter who says, the cam­paign was aimed at “re-orienting Nige­ri­ans, chang­ing the neg­a­tive atti­tudes of Nige­ri­ans, mak­ing Nige­ri­ans believe in them­selves, incul­cat­ing opti­mal spirit of patri­o­tism in Nige­ri­ans and at the same time, cel­e­brat­ing our best before the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity”.

Good Aspi­ra­tions, Great Challenges

Quite laud­able, because the pur­pose of a brand is to draw atten­tion to a prod­uct or com­mod­ity and per­suade peo­ple of its qual­ity, use­ful­ness and util­ity, in the case of a coun­try, Uche Nworah, of the Long Har­mat­tan Sea­son who writes in trea­tise mode that I took a hol­i­day after read­ing his piece quotes a pre­sumed expert on nation brand­ing, Simon Anholt who says, “the chal­lenges the devel­op­ing world is fac­ing today beside poor gov­er­nance and weak infra­struc­ture is the issue of weak nation brands and iden­ti­ties”.

How­ever, going back to the Minister’s aims, it would appear that good gov­er­nance and strong infra­struc­ture might well help in per­suad­ing Nige­ri­ans of a pride in nation­hood and give them a stronger national iden­tity that could bol­ster cel­e­brat­ing our best to the world.

As he quotes another pro­po­nent of nation brand­ing, “There is no argu­ing that the image we have of another coun­try says a lot about how we view it as a tourist des­ti­na­tion, a place to invest or a source of con­sumer goods”.

Bad Reports, Low Expectations

Let us hope the Min­is­ter has noted that the biggest chal­lenge she then faces is in chang­ing what the CIA Fact­Book says about Nige­ria, one would con­cur with Uche Nworah here on Why we must rebrand Nige­ria.

The truth as I found was on LinkedIn the pro­fes­sional net­work­ing site where Aisha Lami Adeyemo who appears to have a Niger­ian name asked, “Rebrand­ing Nige­ria– I was won­der­ing what impact do you think this reform will have on Nige­ria as an Emerg­ing Mar­ket?” and the three answers she got were very negative.

Mikhail Tretyak sug­gested inter­na­tional air crew are fer­ried out of the coun­try so as not to spend their lay­over there and then asks, “How much cash does a typ­i­cal busi­ness­man need to pay the bribes in order to get from the air­port to his hotel?” and damns the whole exer­cise with “Rebrand­ing won’t work until the fun­da­men­tals change.”

Good Ideas, Great Fantasies

Reori­ent­ing Nige­ri­ans does smack of a sense of hubris, Nige­ri­ans have been reori­ented from the begin­ning of time as their lead­ers have use cliques to decon­struct the sense of nation­hood for tribal, famil­ial, reli­gious, regional or per­sonal ben­e­fit – too many peo­ple are scep­ti­cal of this drive.

How­ever, Mohammed Haruna whose write-up appears on Elendu Reports under the byline Akun­y­ili and the “re-branding” of Nige­ria: The lim­its of pro­pa­ganda, first lauds her achieve­ments as the head of NAFDAC, then won­ders if the sup­posed suc­cesses of NAFDAC can really be trans­lated to the rebrand­ing Nige­ria effort.

In fact, he con­tends that though there is a greater aware­ness of the work of NAFDAC, “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 hardly 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”.

Good Blog­gers, Great Commentary

That does not bode well at all, how­ever, Nige­ri­ans still main­tain a sense of opti­mism as Oz of Moot­box says in announc­ing Good People…Great Nation, he con­curs with the pro­fes­sor when she said, “This jour­ney will be slow and painful…but we will be a bet­ter nation tomor­row”. He wor­ried about the fact that so much had been spent “on this effort for us to tear it down on launch day” and he was “tired of the for­eign media mak­ing fun of all our efforts”.

Tosin Obubela leaves a com­ment on that blog which is some­where between gra­tu­itous ulu­la­tion and down­right sar­casm – “Con­grat­u­la­tions, you have a new name now. I know you have been through so much but never mind, a name can change a lot”.

Solomon­Sy­delle of Niger­ian Curios­ity, notes that the for­eign media mocked the ini­tia­tive and even states that Nige­ri­ans at home and abroad were invited to design a logo and slo­gan for the ven­ture, when I found the cam­paign notice, I was utterly crest-fallen, the setup was shoddy, sloppy and seden­tary – which is why many of us might not have seen it.

Bad Prepa­ra­tion, Low Responses

The cam­paign for entries was launched on the 5^th of Feb­ru­ary with a dead­line of the 23^rd and some panel selected the slo­gan and logo for the launch that hap­pened just over 2 weeks later. So, it is no won­der that Oz opined in a com­ment left for this blog, “Me thinks they were not ready and it was a rush job.”

Ouch! As Solomon­Sy­delle admon­ishes the pro­po­nents with the con­cept that more Nige­ri­ans should have been involved in this exer­cise and Oz con­sid­ers 5 things I would do dif­fer­ently, if he were run­ning this campaign.

Good Brand­ing, Great Debacle

How­ever, all this rebrand­ing talk exposes other issues, peo­ple who believe it would be another oppor­tu­nity for patron­age and graft, as Nwachukwu Egbunike on Feather’s Project opined, in his piece called The Rebrand­ing Rum­ble – “nei­ther the coun­try nor her cit­i­zens being any bet­ter for it, except the PR con­sul­tants and their cohorts who had their pock­ets lined.”

He goes on to say, “The gov­ern­ment should stop pay­ing lip ser­vice to cor­rup­tion. It is obvi­ous that 90% of our image cri­sis arises from this mon­ster, wash out cor­rup­tion and you’ll have rebranded Nige­ria, period! Nige­ri­ans are no fools; it takes a rad­i­cal com­mit­ment to effect such a rev­o­lu­tion­ary change.”

Therein is the anal­ogy I made at the begin­ning of this review and it has Grandiose Par­lour say­ing the con­cerns of the peo­ple in the main are about sur­vival, with his byline — Re-branding Nige­ria? Yes, but not on empty stomach!

Suf­fice it to say that this cam­paign which does not seem to have a web pres­ence, is not linked to any par­tic­u­lar achiev­able goals for the econ­omy, infra­struc­ture or tourism and is yet to con­vince peo­ple of its worth­while aims has been trumped by a more press­ing slo­gan “If you can sur­vive Nige­ria, you can sur­vive any­where”

Good Nige­ria, Great Nigeria

I leave the last words to another trea­tise Uche Nworah wrote, 3 years ago, about the now extinct rebrand­ing cam­paign which had Nige­ria: The Heart of Africa as its slo­gan with the title Rebrand­ing Nigeria’s Cities, and he quot­ing Tom Traynor & Ro Breehl – “every place does have some dis­tinc­tion, some rea­son to live there, work there, vaca­tion there, rather than some other place”. They also argue that find­ing that ‘true com­pelling claim of dis­tinc­tion’ can be hard work which lots of tourism boards, city coun­cils, busi­ness improve­ment dis­tricts aren’t pre­pared for, ‘pre­fer­ring instead to move directly to (inevitably drab) adver­tis­ing exe­cu­tion’.

This line of least resis­tance appears to be the one towed by Nigeria’s state and local gov­ern­ment officials.

In other words, Good Peo­ple, Great Nation, but no lessons learnt; for the opti­mists, we wish the cam­paign suc­cess; for the prag­ma­tists, keep push­ing the agenda for bet­ter cor­re­la­tion of ideas; for the pes­simists, hold your peace and the indif­fer­ent – what dif­fer­ence does it make? Nige­ria is still a coun­try of good peo­ple and a great nation, it may not be a real­ity today, but hav­ing it as a dream and aspi­ra­tion is a good start.