Gov’t urged to employ professional PR officers

Mr Kabral Blay-Amihere, Chairman of the National Media Commission, has urged government to employ professional public relations (PR) officers to manage its communications.

He said such professionals would be able to articulate the programmes and policies of the government better than untrained party spokespersons.

Mr Blay-Amihere said this at the Institute of Public Relations (IPR) annual lecture on the topic “A nation at the crossroads: Using effective Public Relations to achieve the agenda”.

He said in most cases, successive governments tended to employ party members, who in most cases lacked the skills, as their spokespersons and they in turn performed poorly.

Mr Blay-Amihere said because such spokespersons were not well trained, they always created the incident of non-communication, mistrust and misunderstanding.

He said scandals such as the SADA, GYEEDA issues andthe recent World Cup fiasco in Brazil resulting in the sharing of appearance fees using the co-efficient of seven formula and a host of others occurred as a result of bad PR by those institutions.

He, therefore, advised government and other institutions to employ the services of professional PRs to help articulate their issues better.

Mr Blay-Amihere also urged the IPR to respond to the emerging social media by adopting such technology in its activities.

Major Albert Don-Chebe (Retired), President of IPR said pre-communication by the state to the public before any policies or programmes were implemented would help reduce the incidence of suspicion and mistrust.