In her weekly column for the (Nairobi) Star, Andrea Bohnstedt wonders whether Rwanda might not, in fact, be doing itself a disservice with its ultra-controlled PR machinery.
“So – about this morning’s flight to Kigali …,” I said. The voice at the other end of the line was upbeat and cheerful: “Yes. It’s been cancelled due to technical reasons”. “And by technical reasons, you mean you put a plane into the airport building, right?” I inquired. Thankfully someone had alerted me during the night that my flight might not operate because of that accident, and so I had called Rwandair to check before leaving for the airport. The friendly lady from Rwandair didn’t miss a beat: “Yes! We’ll put you on Kenya Airways. Make sure that you come to the airport early!”
It had been my bad luck to have been booked on a Rwandair flight to Kigali just the day after one of their two planes went into the airport building (triggering, incidentally, the fantastic headline “Kagame Survives Death” from some Ugandan online publication, as the president had been rumoured to have been in the airport building at the time of the accident). The airline’s other plane had been grounded for security reasons, too. For today, I’ll ignore the obvious and undoubtedly fruitful sub-story about small national airlines.
In the end, getting to Kigali took me the whole day, a day that had a hot, blurry, melting-at-the-edges quality as my new flight was delayed, and then went via Bujumbura. Having worked for the better part of the night, I kept drifting in and out of consciousness. By the time I arrived in Rwanda, though: Magic! There was no sign of the accident. No debris, no holes in the wall, none of the tell-tale signs that other countries on the continent would have exhibited for weeks to come – and I write this from a city where the road crews cut sharp-edged squares into the tarmac of busy main roads, and then leave them to ruin your wheels for several weeks before returning to fill them. It was as though the accident had been photoshopped away.
This was some impressively fast action to restore the pleasant appearance of the airport, and remove any suggestion that there might have been problems of any sort. I had accompanied a team of foreign business people and journalists on a visit to Kigali, and in many ways, Rwanda’s PR towards potential investors was exactly like this incident: Very sleek, very fast, very well organized. It’s not that there are no problems, but unless you really, really know where to look, and who to talk to, you just won’t find out. Rwanda’s representatives were eloquent and smooth in their presentations. Not unlike the Rwandair lady, they acknowledged ‘challenges’ with a quick nod, and then moved on quickly to work through their list of amazing opportunities with visible enthusiasm. Then there are, of course, the neat and organised capital Kigali, and the fact that Rwanda had been one of the top reformers in the World Bank’s annual Doing Business survey. There is clearly some focused government management capacity at work.
In Kenya, the political crisis in early 2008 had intensified ongoing discussions around the country’s branding and public relations. But while Kenya is synonymous with stunning beaches and game parks as far as the tourism sector goes, its image with business people and investors is far less sunny nor dominated by attractive furry creatures. Efforts like the Brand Kenya parastatal haven’t been able to brush up Kenya’s image to any noticeable extent.
Kenya is clearly less organized about its external image, which is not surprising: Compared to Rwanda, it is a much bigger country, with far more dispersed centres of power, and more distance between business and politics, at least relatively speaking. There is, ultimately, more chaos in Kenya, and that makes message control so much more difficult. But this also creates more space for different voices: In Rwanda, there is one centre of power to talk to, which is both useful – no hectic running around – and restrictive: If that doesn’t help you, then nobody will. And don’t talk to the press either. Any negative stories about Rwanda typically trigger an instant backlash.
Coming back from Kigali, I found Kenya’s chaotic, noisy appearance almost reassuring. Most days, the papers, TV and radio stations joyfully entertain debates on pretty much anything under the sun, from the serious to the utterly pointless. The president will call you an idiot. You can say unflattering things about him in pubs. Dr Mutua has to pay for an ad to berate you for doubting the government. In all this cacophony, at least the problems are more difficult to hide – useful for investors, since PR doesn’t actually solve them. I wonder if Rwanda is not, in fact, doing itself a disservice with its ultra-controlled PR machinery?
Republished with kind permission from the (Nairobi) Star.
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