When I was appointed Commissioner for Information and Strategy in Lagos State, one of my quieter contributions to cabinet deliberations was to ask, at seemingly random moments, a single question: “How will this look on the front page of PUNCH tomorrow?”
At first, some of my colleagues found the question annoying. By the end of the first year, several of them were asking it before I did. It is not, as some assumed, a question about public relations. It is a question about legitimacy. Any policy that cannot survive the front-page test is a policy that has failed a test governance itself was designed to pass.
The Four Things a Journalist Brings
First, the citizen’s ear. A journalist has spent his career listening to citizens describe government as they actually experience it — not as it describes itself. That ear, transposed into a cabinet room, becomes a corrective to the natural drift of bureaucracy, which is to speak in a dialect only bureaucrats understand.
Second, an early warning system. A journalist in cabinet is not a spy. He is a smoke alarm. He recognizes, in the shape of a proposed policy, the shape of a scandal that has not yet happened. Governments that do not have such a person in the room always find out about their failures too late — from the front page they should have anticipated.
Third, translational capacity. Every policy must be explained. The Commissioner of Health can design a brilliant maternal care programme, but if it cannot be explained to a mother in Idi-Araba in language she trusts, the programme will not save her daughter. The journalist in cabinet is the natural bridge between technical excellence and public comprehension.
Fourth, institutional memory. A journalist who has covered governance for twenty years has read every failed budget, every abandoned white paper, every discredited slogan. He can, without malice, say to a colleague: We tried this in 1998. Here is why it failed. Here is what we would have to do differently. That memory is worth more than any consultant’s report.
The Risk
There is, of course, a risk. The journalist in cabinet can be co-opted. He can become a defender of the very institution he was trained to interrogate. The government captures him instead of him disciplining the government. I have watched this happen to men I respected. It is not always the result of corruption. Sometimes it is simply the result of proximity — of having been in the room too long to remember what the view from outside looks like.
The remedy is discipline. The journalist in cabinet must, in private, keep writing. Not for publication necessarily, but for himself. A journalist who stops writing during his service in government becomes, within eighteen months, a former journalist. The muscle atrophies fast.
I kept a private notebook throughout my four years as Commissioner. It contains observations I could not, at the time, publish. Someday, when the appropriate distance has been achieved, some of it may become a book. Until then, it exists to remind me that I did not stop being a journalist when I began being a Commissioner. I merely, temporarily, changed desks.
A Modest Proposal
Every cabinet in Nigeria, at every level, should have at least one appointment reserved for a journalist of at least fifteen years’ experience. Not as spokesperson. As substantive minister or commissioner. The value they bring — the ear, the alarm, the translation, the memory — is not a luxury. It is a public utility.
Governments that recognize this govern better. Governments that do not eventually discover, on a front page, why they should have.
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