The story that has dominated conversations on both social and conventional media last week is about youths who have been recruited to work in Israel in agriculture farms.
The issue also found its way into Parliament where Leader of the Opposition Kondwani Nankhumwa rose to seek clarification on reports about the matter. Nankhumwa was later requested to bring evidence to Parliament last Monday, which has since been dismissed. Now it seems to be a closed matter as far as Parliament is concerned.
Meanwhile, over the weekend, Malawi News carried a story about some recruitment activities by private agents going on in Lilongwe and Liwonde where hundreds of youths were being recruited for the trip.
The paper went on to confirm that scores of youths had flown out via Kamuzu International Airport to Israel to work in the farms.
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This information was immediately dismissed by spokespersons from ministries of Foreign Affairs and Labour.
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In a sudden twist of events, the Ministry of Labour issued a press release to announce exactly what had earlier been refuted and that it had in fact “embarked on the export of labour to various countries including Israel”.
To many Malawians, this is good news as it would complement government’s drive for job creation.
However, what left people baffled was how this information was kept under wraps. In the information age, functional channels of communication are paramount.
Therefore, trying to delay or suppress the flow of information only leads to speculation and rumour mongering, thus creating undesired distortions of facts.
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The state of affairs turns out more complicated to deal with than proactively releasing any details of public interest.
Ironically, all this is happening when the Malawi Government has the Access to Information legislation.
Section 5 of the Act says: “A person shall have the right of access to information in so far as that information is required for the exercise of his rights, which is in custody of, or under the control of a public body or a relevant private body to which this Act applies, in an expeditious and inexpensive manner.”
Sections 15 and 16 have provisions for proactive disclosure of information. This means government could have disclosed this information in the same spirit as the Act demands.
However, proactive disclosure of information is always problematic in an environment where there is no public relations (PR) and communications systems.
For instance, one could see that there was no coordination among government officials, if what was reported in the media is anything to go by.
In a situation where there is a proper PR and communications setup, there are clearly defined roles.
For instance, even if the information about the youths going to Israel was available, the challenge was perhaps who was better placed to disclose it.
Was it supposed to be the Minister of Information as a designated government spokesperson? Or should it be the Ministry of Labour being a labour issue?
One would say that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs could play the PR as well because it is an inter country issue while others would say it should have been Minister of Finance since it is part of his measures outlined when the Minister responsible was presenting forex generating measure. The list would go on.
Of course, government has to be commended for establishing the ministry of information responsible for dissemination of public information.
But there is always going to be bottlenecks for the ministry to effectively discharge its mandate in absence of a proper government PR and Communications Strategy to provide a guided approach to PR and communications and to ensure that information flow is well coordinated, standardised and driven by strategic objectives.
On the other hand, trust issues are very crucial these days. One would arguably say that even if the government had proactively disclosed this information, some quarters would have probably taken this information with a pinch of salt, thinking that government simply wanted to gain political mileage.
The reason is that we are living in a world where trust in most institutions is eroded.
But when all is said and done, this conundrum could have been avoided if there was proactive disclosure of information.
