It is not uncommon for political administrations to appoint official spokespersons, Ministers of Information or other differently titled officials, to take responsibility for the management of its information dissemination regime, providing official information on matters of national importance. Some Ministries of Government have been known to host ministerial media briefings under their respective portfolios.
These days we boast a Department of Public Information (DPI) that releases communiques on a broad spectrum of issues although, seemingly dependent on the direct importance of an issue to a particular portfolio, the subject Minister may his of herself weigh in on the issue. The President also briefs the nation on matters of state and on other types of issues on which one expects to hear from the Head of government intermittently but has not held enough press conferences.
What this means, of course, is that there is no Information ‘Czar’ as such, so that it is not uncommon to find media houses ‘ferreting around’ for information on one issue or another, sometimes even being unsure as to which ‘door’ to ‘knock on.’ Here, Ministers and other ‘high officials,’ tend to ‘bat’ well within their creases, sometimes demonstrating an evasiveness in their engagements with journalists that points unerringly to hesitancy, a concern that they are unsure as to whether they are at liberty to answer, or whether they are putting the proper ‘spin’ on those responses.
Indeed, there are some Ministers of Govern-ment and other high officials who demonstrate marked reluctance to respond to issues that seemingly lie within their portfolios, suggesting in their ‘postures’ that the information that is being sought is not within their authority to give. In one particularly glaring instance, a Minister holding a particular portfolio palpably ‘stood down’ when answers to some questions on matters that ought to fall within his portfolio had to be sought elsewhere.
In essence, there is no single structured forum (Ministerial press conference/media briefing) to which one can go and expect to secure answers to the broadest swathe of questions on the broadest range of issues. Truth be told, some journalists have become acutely aware of that fact and spend much of their time seeking to get plausible responses wherever these can be found.
One would have to be altogether uninformed not to recognize the anomalous nature of Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo’s Thursday Media Briefings at Freedom House. Its unquestioned symbolism apart, its value reposes in the fact that it is the only media forum from which the media is likely to come away with something on everything…….which, of course, is the reason why his media briefings are the best-attended, of such encounters, and why his utterances generate more media (and public) interest than that offered by the state machinery.
The Thursday Freedom House Media Briefing has become not only the most prolific source of news emanating from ‘officialdom,’ it also allows for every question raised to secure some type of answer, a circumstance that deviates from the practice among other state officials of either declining to comment or offering responses that are sometimes teeming with hesitancy.
Not Vice President Jagdeo…he takes on ‘all comers’ and ‘all issues’ and the media functionaries who assemble at Freedom House on Thursdays, are aware that they can report on Dr. Jagdeo’s pronouncements without fear of any kind of official reprimand about ‘getting it wrong.’
Here we have a clear indication of the primus inter pares position which Dr. Jagdeo holds within the political structure of the ruling Party and the manner in which this extends into the national governance structure. In cricketing parlance, VP Jagdeo is inclined to seemingly make excursions ‘out of his crease,’ assured in the knowledge that there is no chance of him looking behind and finding that the ‘bails’ have been ‘taken off.’ His answers to the range of questions put to him at Freedom House on Thursdays are both unhesitating and unequivocal because he is altogether aware that there will be no subsequent questioning of the veracity of his utterances. No one else is afforded that immunity.
However, Mr Jagdeo is not the President and there are many things that only the President can authoritatively and properly comment on. It is time that President Ali holds more press conferences and/or ensures that his communications unit is authorised and equipped to provide answers to the media.