Rebranding Nigeria
Minister of Information and Communications, Professor Dora Akunyili, has explained why the Federal Government through her ministry has embarked on the re-branding Nigeria project saying they want to inspire a rebirth in the country’s belief system, repackage Nigeria and present her to the world in a more acceptable manner.The minister who spoke in Lagos at the weekend during an interaction with journalists also stated that telecoms tariffs in Nigeria rank among the most expensive on the African continent and vowed to crash the cost and enhance the quality of their services.
On the re-branding Nigeria project, she said “it is only when we believe in ourselves that we can truly make the changes needed in our society, and be in a position to project Nigeria positively to the outside world”. To achieve the lofty ambition, she said both the leadership and the people would need to imbibe a new culture of nationhood.
While stressing that re-branding Nigeria is critical project at this stage of our national development, Akunyili said: “Our vision is to work assiduously to shore up the image of Nigeria through responsible information management and dissemination, supported by efficient and effective communication systems. We are mindful of the fact that the information sector is the mirror through which the world sees Nigeria.
“My team and I know that we cannot successfully re-brand Nigeria without the support and buy-in of Nigerians. A new thinking under this initiative is the Private, Public, Peoples', Partnership, PPPP, under which the people are joint stakeholders.”
The minister said that the media, civil society groups, the political class, the professional groups, religious and traditional institutions, Nigerians in the Diaspora, and ordinary Nigerians would be involved in the initiative. “The re-branding of Nigeria needs to be home-grown. We can start now to engender a new orientation, a new attitude and a new spirit of asking what we can do for our community, our state, and our country to make it better. If this takes place, then our work to showcase Nigeria becomes easier,” she emphasised.
In re-branding Nigeria, she said they have taken cognisance of how many government programmes had failed in the past mainly due to lack of public support, and listed some of the failed programmes to include the Green Revolution, Vision 2000, Vision 2010 and more recently, the Heart of Africa Project.
Commenting on the failure of The heart of Africa project which started as the Nigerian Image Project in 2004, and later became the Heart of Africa Project in 2005, Akunyili said project suffered from a number of fundamental setbacks.
She said: “Malawi was the first to use the slogan 'Heart of Africa” and many other African countries have also laid claims to being the "The Heart of Africa". The slogan therefore, faced a contest for acceptance. Secondly, the Heart of Africa was first launched abroad, which made it foreign to Nigerians. These contentions weakened the chances of our creating a truly Nigerian brand even from the outset.
On steps she has taken to ensure the re-branding Nigeria project does not fail like others, she pointed out as follows: “I have set up a small ad-hoc committee to study the past attempts at rebranding Nigeria especially the most recent, Heart of Africa. In order not to reinvent the wheel, we will take the positive aspects of the Heart of Africa and other past initiatives and weld them into the current initiative to re-create Nigeria's collective image.
“In this project of re-branding Nigeria, we want it to be centered on the people. We want Nigerians to have ownership of this re-branding so that we can operate on the same page with them at every stage of the process. We are currently working out details and will begin a process of interface with the Nigerian people to secure their buy in.
“A major step in letting Nigerians take ownership of this project is the plan to involve them in the first major process of picking a logo and a slogan for the re-branding of the nation's image. Consequently, on Monday, at a public forum with Nigerians and other stakeholders in our country, I will announce the preliminary stage of this initiative and invite Nigerians at home and in the Diaspora to submit through email their suggested logo and slogan through a competition. This competition will be similar to that process that gave birth to the Nigerian flag which subsists till today. Submissions will close after two weeks and at the end of the third week, we will publish the winners and reward the three best entries for each category in a National forum. The best logo and the best slogan will be used for the re-branding campaign. Thereafter we will plan programmers in consultation with different stakeholders on how to take the re-branding to the next stage.”
Akunyili frowned at the high tariffs of the Nigerian telecoms market even as she decried low quality of service by most of the service providers. She said that in the immediate term, she would focus on addressing some of the more urgent concerns constantly expressed by Nigerians, some of which include: poor voice signal quality, dropped calls, high tariffs, low levels of interconnectivity, number portability, infrastructure sharing and lack of fixed lines.
“Let me say more about tariffs. They have remained high, making our telecoms market one of the most expensive in Africa. This is not justifiable given the size of our population, and the huge returns on investments to the telecom industry.”
She identified the major challenges and issues confronting the information and communications sector in Nigeria as the need to provide Nigerians with credible information which they can rely upon; and secondly, how to move the telecommunications sector that has greatly exploded in the last seven years from its present level of operation to a level that gives subscribers reasonable value for their money.
-Nosike Ogbuenyi - This Day
2009-02-11
