THE PROBLEM WITH THIS ‘PRESS RELEASE’.
Communication Aesthetics, a sub-field in the discipline of communication, deals with what, in layman’s term, can be referred to as the ‘beauty’ of communication.
Political communication, especially one that is written, should represent a wide thinking, even capturing a flicker of that institution’s ideology.
It is my belief that when we set out, as a party, to communicate to the country via a ‘press release’ – one of the most official tools of communication – the main import of the release should make it believable both in value (content) and signification (form).
Content is ‘what’ we have and want to say. Form is how we say it, I mean, the urgency and agency we give it.
The press release, ostensibly by Prof Nyong’o, was to achieve one thing: nip the current Jubilee propaganda that the government has failed to achieve its goals because of a ‘weak’ opposition.
It started out well: “A well orchestrated propaganda is being fed to the Kenyan public seeking to find an excuse for Jubilee’s poor performance in government. This propaganda blames the opposition for not having kept Jubilee “in check”, hence its poor performance. What utter nonsense and absolute balderdash! One would have thought that a weak opposition would give Jubilee a field day to push all its policies through Parliament without let or hindrance”.
Then someone (I can swear not Prof Nyong’o) brought in one Moses Kuria:
“The lead propagandist in all this is one Moses Kuria, the so called Jubilee Propagandist who only thrives on threatening Jubilee MPs & Senators who try to express their displeasure in the bad things the Jubilee administration does”.
Now, friends, Moses Kuria is not the government. He is neither powerful nor influential to shape Jubilee Alliance decisions. Kuria is nothing in the scheme of things. It reminds me of not long ago when we sent our Communications Director to go to studio ‘against’ one Ngunjiri Wambugu. I kept asking myself….’Etale is the bona fide ODM (“O” for Orange, “D” for Democratic, and, “M” for Movement) party chief spokesperson. ODM is the largest political party in Kenya. But Ngunjiri? Who was he? What was he?
So when I read Moses Kuria’s name in our press release, I asked myself; ‘What’ is Kuria?’. WHAT is Kuria. For our acting party leader to have mentioned Kuria is unthinkable to me. In fact, it creates a digression.
Then our ‘press release’ gets back on point:
“The truth is: using the tyranny of both numbers and political hubris, Jubilee has succeeded in perfecting the reign of propaganda and the tyranny of lies that now leads it to attempt to outsource its incompetence to the opposition. This cannot be Jubilee’s salvation”.
And then it is signed off:
Prof. Anyang Nyong’o – Sen. Acting Party
ODM
21/04/2014
*Ni hayo tu*