Communication, Strategy and The Tax Reform Bills
By Hashim M Suleiman
Same tactics, same methodology and expert analysis were deployed to support subsidy removal and now same scripts are being played out in support of the so called tax reform bills.
Indeed, mass communicators are engineers of consent. They marshal different behavioural change techniques and make humans see danger as needed ordeals. Mass communicators are blessed with the engineering wherewithal to construct and implant pictures into the brains of human beings. And, this is what this Nigerian government is doing.
This government comes with full arsenals of strategic management of communication. While the previous government of president Buhari relied on publicists and journalists to tell us about their inhumane and poverty sustaining policies, president Tinubu’s government comes with many Goebbels whom are currently giving us the sugarcoated pills treatment. Earlier, these Goebbels strategically lured us, with arranged econometric permutations, the possibility of accruals from subsidy removal to turn our lives for the better.
Now, we know better. Now, we know it is dangerous to treat economic figures through the lenses of strategic communication which comes in frames of exclusions.
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As opposition to the tax bills becomes much pronounced, the silent and communicatively innovative Goebbels are currently being tactfully unleashed on us in order to psycho engineer us into accepting more pains, more suffering and more poverty. What do we get in return? Promissory notes with no definite maturity time. They’re currently trying to make us forget that “promise is an animal in the bush, you cannot make a soup out of it.”
That’s why I love mass communication. It teaches me how people lie professionally and how to be truthful in a subtle way. Mass communication teaches me how to slap you and make you appreciate the fact that the slaps are for your own good. Mass communication in wrong hands can mobilise a whole community into self-destructive ventures.
Meanwhile, not long ago, one of the pro bono Goebbels of this government was on Facebook salivating in ignorance that people should not study mass communication. Well, in his wilful ignorance, he doesn’t want a discipline that would make Nigerians wise enough to see through the crafted lies and sugar wrapped bitter pills with no end in sight that his political benefactor and his Mussolinis are bringing upon gullible Nigerians.
Indeed, I make bold to tell Nigerians to prepare for more pains accompanied with soothing strategic communication garments. Garments of promised gold with poisonous spikes within.
As for now, I still look on in trepidation as many propaganda techniques are currently deployed to make Nigerians accept more pains from the firelord and his teams of tactical communication maneuvers. And, Nigerians are meekly accepting the Golgotha route again and again.
Allah dai ya fid da A’i a rogo.
Hashim Muhammad Suleiman, PhD is a communication scholar at Ahmadu Bello University Zaria
