Every organization is as good as its communication strategy. Now (7th March 2024), the Parliament of Uganda finds itself in a communication predicament. It’s a glaring failure of communication strategy. This predicament speaks to a lack of an effective communication strategy. Remember, strategy can fail at design, at formulation, or at the implementation and control stage. For the case of Parliament, it’s a failure at all stages.
It all started when the Agora Discourse (a digital public square) launched an online exhibition of the activities at the Uganda Parliament. During this exhibition, it was revealed that heinous sums of money had been paid out into personal accounts of various individuals at Parliament.
What followed, was public outrage online in disbelief at the extravagant spend and misuse of public funds. Parliament then reacted by hiring different social media influencers in addition to its own communication team. From the onset, it was clear there was no synergy in the communication and neither had the Parliament ever thought of a proper crisis communication plan. It’s been period of retraction, change of messages, mix of messages and instead of clearing its face, Parliament has embroiled itself in a public relations pit-hole.
What then was the problem at Parliament?
It’s clear that there’s no communication strategy at Parliament. It doesn’t seem like Parliament has ever sat down to draft its communication objectives, or worse, analyzed its constituencies when it comes to its messages. From this, one would also have expected to find Parliament’s Communications Policy online detailing all aspects in relation to media relations, internal communications, social media, external communications, public relations and for this point in time, crisis communications. When the policy is drafted, Parliament would then have an agile communication plan that activates all the different elements in the policy.
For the first time, we are witnessing a massive communications disaster, purely a failure of a proper communication strategy framework. Given the communication budget at Parliament, they could surely show up better than they have.