Govt PROs take stock of last quarter performance

The Minister of Information, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, has tasked offi­cers of the Public Relations Unit of the Information Services Depart­ment to position themselves well in order to deal with the emerging threats of misinformation and disinformation within the media space.

According to him, the changing phase of communication required that officers mandated with the management and dissemination of government information were abreast of all the potential threats to government communication especially in the areas of misinfor­mation and disinformation.

“On the keynote for today, the role of the government public re­lations officer in fighting misinfor­mation and disinformation is one of the biggest challenges that we have currently,” he emphasised.

The Minister made the call at the fourth Government Public Relations Officers (PRO) review meeting organised by Information Services Department (ISD) of the Ministry of Information in Accra last Thursday.

The review meeting is held quar­terly every year and offers govern­ment PROs the flexibility to openly talk about their performance and assess targets set for all ISD staff

It was on the theme “Curbing misinformation and disinformation of the government PRO” and was attended by all ISD staff attached to the Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) as official government PROs.

Mr Oppong Nkrumah said it was important to emphasise that the ISD, remained the only agency under the MOI that the govern­ment worked through since the state media although agencies under the ministry, by constitution­al guarantees were totally indepen­dent of control.

He said one of the five man­dates of the MOI which the ISD fits in was to assist MDAs to devel­op and execute their communica­tion strategies for their policies and programmes as well as facilitate the gathering of feedback for central government.

The Minister noted that mis­information and disinformation had become some of the major challenges that popped up in the line of work of government PROs and designing effective strategies to deal with it was crucial.

He said so far the capacities of government PROs in terms of de­veloping communication strategies as well as organising stakeholders to enable their principals to engage with them.

“But now one of the challenges that you’re facing in the mist of all the difficulties in the public service- bureaucracy, clatter and of those things, what is your role and how do we deal with it? That is what Mr Sekyi Addo will be speaking to you about during the keynote,” he said.

The Minister congratulated the staff for achieving a lot with little or no resources at all and expressed the hope that they would continue to perform their functions in the best interest of the state

On her part, the head of Public Relations Coordinating Division of the ISD, Mrs Ethel Amissah Cudjoe, said the complexities of misinformation and disinformation made it imperative for government PROs to make adjustments where necessary.

She said it was important that each government PRO understood what was now known as infor­mation disorders and be able to identify them even in their very subtle forms.

Mr Cudjoe said over the years misinformation and disinformation had played critical roles in geno­cides and civil wars in and around the world. “The Rwandan genocide when it begun was labelled by the foreign media as one of the many instances of African natives killing each other, therefore no one lifted a finger to help. It was later that the world realised that this was a carefully planned systematic purg­ing based on years of hatred and misunderstanding fanned craftily by the media in that country,” She added.

She noted that the media in its entirety controlled what society hear, think and understand, stress­ing that “I agree with what Dr Myles Monroe of blessed memory that the media can either corrupt, clarify, pervert or protect the integrity of any message that it has to deliver.”

Mrs Cudjoe said government PROs must anticipate the evils that could be potentially unleashed by unscrupulous persons using espe­cially deep fake on social media and deal with it especially as the country entered into an election year, adding that “PROs need all the knowledge they can acquire in this area.”

 BY CLIFF EKUFUL