Sikanku: Government must improve communication strategy to gain public trust

Etse Sikanku, a political communication expert and senior lecturer at the Ghana Institute of Journalism, is urging the government to improve its communication strategy to gain public trust.

Speaking on the Big Bulletin, the communication strategist, said there is a need for the government to admit its mistakes and be honest with the citizenry.

“One of the important things that help is to be able to engage and to successfully persuade or touch the hearts and minds of people is to be quite honest in your conversation.”
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“And I believe that a lot of governments across the world maintaining some amount of openness or maintaining some amount of transparency. One of the key ingredients or variables that are important to enable that persuasion to be persuasive and to be able to enlist public support is being open, being transparent, being honest in your discourse and sometimes admitting when things don’t go right,” he added

An economist and former rector of the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration, Professor Stephen Adei, said the government might have gone overboard with its spending although it had targeted projects for them.

Speaking in an interview with Beatrice Adu, Prof Adei attributed the current economic challenges to the drastic fall in revenue and production.

“Our expenditure exceeded our revenue collection capacity. it is not so much even from my own assessment. It’s not so much of mismanagement as over calculation of their capacity to service the loans they were taking and their abilities to raise revenues to match it …”