Two events this past week have forcefully underscored the primacy of some basics about communicating in the era of social media that government functionaries are getting wrong — that the message in your action is not necessarily what you intended and; in the ubiquity of social media, you do not get a chance to unsay what you have said.
One was the decision by the government to send 300 bouquets of flowers to health workers confronting the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK.
The intention, as captured in the accompanying message from President Uhuru Kenyatta, was to show solidarity with these valiant workers at a time that tested the “humanity in all of us”.
It was part of a campaign, supported by the private sector, dubbed “Flowers for Hope”, which has reportedly seen thousands of bouquets given to our own health workers combating the virus.
This is all. Except that this campaign became public only when the flowers were being sent to the UK, and even then the move was not nuanced at all, leaving angry and jaded Kenyans to read in it as obsequiousness towards grant- and donor-giving white folks, and hopelessly misplaced priorities.
While it could not have been kosher to accompany the flowers to the UK with a message that “we send these in solidarity with you now, but remember us when you start buying flowers again”, not rolling out the Flowers of Hope effort as a subtle campaign locally and internationally to promote our flowers was a significant omission.
The confrontational follow through on social media was an even more fatal slip.
To leave it to the president to admonish critics that have berated the action on social media is to invite personal, unbridled sarcasm and ridicule. And few will outdo Kenyans on Twitter on that front.
The second event was the (mis) handling of the frightening breakdown that Ministry of Health officials, led by Cabinet Secretary Mutahi Kagwe, gave to a parliamentary committee to explain how money intended to finance efforts to combat the Covid-19 pandemic was used.
Among the expense lines that boggled even the most cynical public finance analysts was the Sh10 million budget for tea and snacks for various teams, out of which Sh4 million had been spent.
The budget period covered 12 weeks, so the tea expense was about one million a week!
It is astonishing that a minister could be happy to present these figures to the public at any time, leave alone a time of heightened emotion as during the pandemic the country is grappling with.
Not even the urgency that usually accompanies parliamentary committee summons should have blinded the minister from the disturbing message that he was about to share with Kenyans.
Confronted with the numbers as he was before releasing them, he should have asked for more time, interrogated those numbers further and shared the message that could have won him better ratings — that he had received unsatisfactory explanations on how the cash in question had been used and he had taken disciplinary action pending further investigations.
To release the breakdown and then take to social media to berate critics was strange.
The reprisals he was threatening against anyone found to have “pinched even a penny” is what he should have announced in the first instance.
He was fighting a battle he had already lost. Messaging, in the best of times, is a multilayered activity. At a time of crisis, it is slippery terrain.
Ineptly handled, it will ensnare the communicator in a vortex of confusion. Such exposure is lethal in the social media jungle.
The writer is a former chief editor of Nation Media Group and is now managing partner at Blue Crane Global; [email protected]; @tmshindi
