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In 2015, two marketing agencies located a few kilometers from each other had similar briefs, but at different scales and for different clients. The agency where I worked as Head of Content had a brief to organically boost the YouTube view figure for the client’s new TV commercial. The other agency, where some of my friends worked, had a brief to sell a retired military general from the Civil War era as an electable presidential candidate to a 21st century, internet-savvy, youthful population.
We both used the magic of storytelling to achieve our desired outcomes. I wrote a fictional one page story and placed it on a high traffic gossip blog with a link to the video at the bottom purporting to be the concluding part of the story. With this borderline mischievous strategy, the view counter jumped from 2,000 views to over 40,000 views in just three days.
The other agency employed a more complex type of storytelling, blending written and visual elements. Among other things, they got the general to take a photograph wearing a suit and bowtie while smiling at his grandson. Rather than the distant, insular Hard Guy, he was now a thinker, a doting grandfather and a believable elder statesman.
As we all know, the strategy worked well – maybe a little too well in the end. My then boss used to say that storytelling is limited because marketing communications people do not generally have seats in the boardroom. This creates a disconnect between the stories they sell and the actions of the corporate organisations in question. In the context of Nigeria’s government however, the problem is the exact opposite. Storytelling is so impactful and relatively easy to deploy that inevitably, the temptation arises to use it in place of real governance. This comes with grave economic and political consequences.
Effective storytelling instead of effective policymaking
In the private sector, the limits of storytelling are apparent. If a storyteller tries to sell a defective or dangerous product, once consumers discover its true nature, its sales will tank regardless of its marketing spend. At board level, elective appointments are made by carefully selected members whose decisions are informed by specific metrics and data. The voting board members are generally well qualified to choose the right candidates, so while their decisions might be influenced by storytelling, they are not informed by it – a crucial distinction.
In Nigerian politics and public sector affairs, the situation is completely different. Tens of millions of low-information voters make electoral decisions that are informed by carefully staged and edited photographs of politicians smiling at adorable children and wearing “Ishi Agu” cultural outfits. These individuals often hold opinions about economics, governance and policy that are based on distortions, lies and empty rhetoric spoon-fed to them by storytellers. In the absence of the required financial and intellectual capital to formulate impactful policy and action it, our government has embarked on the fool’s errand of trying to conceal its failure through storytelling.
Since 2015, Nigeria’s public discourse has been hit with an unprecedented assault of state-sponsored narrative construction and storytelling across both traditional and new media platforms. A respected mentor recently pointed out that the Presidency alone has access to an unprecedented storytelling machine with nationwide reach and coverage. Mr President alone has a Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, a Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, a Special Assistant on Digital and New Media, a personal assistant on TV Media, a personal assistant on Broadcast Media, and a personal assistant on social media.
He also has a Ministry of Information, two state-owned radio stations (Voice of Nigeria and Radio Nigeria), and a state-owned nationwide TV network (NTA), all of which function as his unofficial mouthpieces.
As if that were not enough, there is also the unprecedented spectacle of something called a “Buhari New Media Centre,” which is a fully funded, equipped and staffed internet trolling and narrative astroturfing organisation working from at least two physical locations completely outside of government – and hence not subject to any kind of civil service oversight. All of these individuals and organisations have a single repetitive message that they push out ad infinitum – President Buhari is a great president and nobody is allowed to disagree regardless of what the stack of evidence says.
Selling a bad story on purpose
Unlike say, a Russian propaganda operation, these storytellers appear to be largely amateurish and barely coordinated in their efforts. Without exception, their narratives always fall apart when subjected to even the slightest factual examination. Sometimes it is presidential media aides making fantastical claims about record tax revenue supposedly raised amid an economic recession. At other times it is social media catfish accounts posting images from other countries as “evidence” of the administration’s alleged infrastructural investment. However, to dismiss these narrative efforts as a castle made of matchsticks would be a terrible mistake.
A certain group of internet fraudsters using the “Nigerian Prince” scam template deliberately misspell words and use wrong grammar to sieve out more intelligent people and get them closer to their desired audience of less intelligent potential marks. Our government does something similar everyday when it saturates all of our media channels with a wall of apparently amateur storytelling. Those of us who read BusinessDay and understand the meaning of the term “comparative advantage” are not the audience it wants to reach with the ridiculous message that banning food imports will improve Nigeria’s food security for example.
The government is cynically going after low-information citizens and competing for their attention with more objective and data-driven information sources. The idea is to completely dissociate their “reality” from the factual reality on ground by getting to them first and appealing to their emotions instead of their intelligence like all good storytelling does. For example, there is plenty of data showing that Nigeria does not in fact import a lot of food and more importantly, that locally produced Nigerian food is among the most expensive in the world relative to average income.
Such data cannot however compete with a dishonest tweet from a government catfish account showing the photo of a rice mill in Thailand captioned “Thai rice mills lay off workers and close down because Nigeria does not import from them again!” The data presents the fact-driven, objective truth while the storyteller uses emotionally-engaging, politically-charged storytelling. Storytelling with no factual basis convincingly won over common sense in 2015. If the strategy worked to get a thoroughly unsuitable person into office and it worked again to get him reelected, why would they change it?
Fixing Nigeria’s reality instead of telling stories
Looking forward to a time when a change of government takes place bringing in people with even a passing interest in governance, there are three hugely important steps that such an administration must take. The first is to immediately reduce the size and cost profile of the executive arm of government by implementing the Orosanye Report. This report laid out a blueprint to reduce the number of statutory agencies from 263 to 161. Alongside this, the new administration should shed all excess baggage like having six media aides with fully staffed offices doing work that can just as easily be done by one or two media offices.
Wherever possible, functions should be outsourced to the private sector via a transparent and competitive bidding process, leaving government in a supervisory capacity. This cuts out a significant amount of leakage and inefficiency that currently characterizes governance in Nigeria. Alongside government rationalisation, a serious government should also immediately divest from all pseudo-public organisations like the Buhari New Media Centre, which exist at the junction of individual political interest, unclear funding arrangements and pro-regime narrative promotion with no government supervision.
The second thing it will need to do to clean up the current mess is to place its strategic focus on effective, investment-friendly economic policy rather than storytelling and narrative management. We recently observed the bizarre spectacle of a presidential media aide announcing a presidential directive that effectively banned provision of forex for food imports, only to write a mealy-mouthed rejoinder to the story when it was published by an international news platform. This is a telltale sign of a government whose only real concern is the local and international narratives it thinks it is maintaining.
Instead of majoring in jingoistic, pseudo-nationalistic storytelling, a serious government will develop and action a plan for Nigeria to develop its comparative advantage. Rather than telling emotional Green-White-Green tales about “imports destroying our local industries,” the government will put together a plan to make production in Nigeria become cheaper and more efficient. Such a government will abandon all narrative attempts to promote autarky and will instead focus on international competitiveness in line with the AfCFTA.
Instead of using catfish Twitter accounts to bemoan importation of potato chips as some sort of national moral failure, the government will fix the security and storage infrastructure problem that makes growing potato chips in the middle belt significantly more expensive and dangerous than importing them from the Netherlands. Rather than using the stick of import bans, the government will use the carrot of easing the route to market for local production, so that Nigerians will naturally migrate to locally produced goods as they become cheaper than imports.
The third and perhaps most important thing a serious subsequent government will do is to – as a matter of urgency – take Nigeria into a strategic alliance with a world power in exchange for infrastructural investment and security. The agreement could for example give such a country permission to build a naval base in Warri in exchange for developing a world class port plus say, $30 billion to invest in our transport and municipal infrastructure. In return for such strategic military influence on the West African coast, any one of China, the US and Russia would be open to such an agreement.
The only argument against this is jingoistic national pride – the same pride currently failing to do anything except create employment for storytellers at the Buhari New Media Centre. We need to understand that the ship of Nigeria achieving greatness by bootstrapping itself has sailed. What Nigeria is in 2019 is a country that cannot secure its borders, count its citizens or fund its budget. Our strategic importance to the world wanes further with each passing day, and no amount of patriotic fervor will remedy that. Our last available trump card is a key alignment that will provide the funding we desperately need to bring our infrastructure, healthcare and education to at least mid-20th century standard.
Ultimately, what this and subsequent Nigerian governments should remember is that every failed regime in recent history at some point left governance to focus purely on narrative management. The iconic image of Iraqi Information Minister Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, aka ‘Comical Ali’ smiling at cameras and saying “The Americans – their tombs will be here in Iraq” a few weeks before his arrest in 2003 is now an internet meme. General Sani Abacha’s “Youths Earnestly Ask for Abacha” is now a cautionary tale. No matter the amount of time or money invested in pushing narratives on the uninformed public, history always ends up being the final judge.
Will “Rice in Kano” end up being the Buhari administration’s ‘Comical Ali’ moment?
Only history will provide that judgment.
DAVID HUNDEYIN
