WHY cannot Imran Khan’s PTI communicate effectively to save its reputation from being shredded mercilessly? The answer contains many ‘I’s — in every sense of the word.

Here’s the problem: there is a yawning gap between what the PTI government is saying and what the people want to hear. As a result, whatever is being said is not having the desired impact. The PTI is falling victim to twin failures: one, it is unable to defend itself; two, it is unable to convince others. For a party and a leader whose main strength was effective communication, the stunning failure to communicate must hurt badly.

So what went wrong?

It is a long and painful slide into incompetence. Like in so many other areas, here too in the arena of communication and information, the party failed to graduate from the base level of the container. The ‘oye’ factor that served Imran Khan so well in opposition should have had an expiry date because it was bound to get lost in translation once it crossed over into official corridors.

It is a long and painful slide into incompetence.

Had Insafian leaders done this homework they would have learnt some very important lessons. Having a simple and linear narrative in opposition is not only easy, it is necessary. His was a straightforward argument: my opponents are corrupt, I will catch them and make them cough up their looted wealth through which Pakistan will become rich and prosperous. It was a ridiculously simplistic line of logic and yet it found resonance among the electorate.

But in government, there are multiple issues that need to be communicated through multiple ways to multiple audiences. This requires nuanced arguments that depend less on emotions and more on hard-nosed policy points. For instance, inflation cannot be explained away merely as a fault of the previous regimes. This simplistic explanation may have worked wonders when the leader was on the container, but it falls flat now that the leader is the prime minister. Today, the citizen demands a rational explanation for his rational problem that his atta, milk and eggs have become painfully expensive. Competent communicators would work hard to come up with a rational answer. Incompetents would resort to emotional rhetoric. Is this asking for too much from the PTI?

Incompetents would also fail to appreciate the complexity that effective communication demands. Such incompetents would — for instance — not know that the science of communication requires (a) identifying key priorities that need to be communicated; (b) sculpting the message that the government wants to relay in reference to these priorities; (c) distilling the message into a few rational arguments that blend complicated factors into a linear story; (d) making multiple variants of this story to attract various audiences; (e) selecting media platforms for dissemination of the message and formatting the message as per the platform; (f) selecting the right ‘messengers’ who have the capacity to handle reason and dole it out through rational arguments; (g) keep tweaking the message with added rationality and data-fed logic that is just simple enough to absorb and just complex enough to make convincing sense. Is this asking for too much from the PTI?

Here’s what the PTI should be doing for effective communication:

First, it should break down its communication strategy into two broad categories: (1) offensive strategy; (2) defensive strategy. Then both are further broken down into sub-categories.

Second, issues that require a defensive strategy are the two ‘I’s: Inflation and Incompetence. Both require a robust, well-reasoned defence. On inflation, the government should make a simple list of all factors that it feels have led to inflation. Caution: the list needs to make sense. A bit of honesty and self-depreciation never hurt anybody. In other words, if on a list of say five factors, one is the government’s initial mistakes, admitting it just adds a dollop of credibility to the list. Each factor on the list should then be armed with an example that an average Pakistani can relate to.

Here then is a test of the communicators’ professionalism: he/she should be able to extract relevant information and data from the economic team, simplify it into a list and lace it with examples that find traction among the citizens. This should be followed up by a similar list of solutions that the PTI has and how they will bring down the inflation within a rough time frame.

On incompetence, the government should identify three areas where it has actually done some solid work (if it can’t find these three areas it shouldn’t really be in the business of governance). These three deliverables should be micro enough to be quantifiable in a citizen’s mind and macro enough to benefit a large number of citizens. Once identified, each of these should be converted into a success story that showcases (i) prime minister’s priorities; (ii) project planning and execution; (iii) transparency and speed; (iv) final deliverables and value to the public. Once done, this triple narrative should be injected into the right formats for the right media platforms through the right messengers. Is this asking for too much from the PTI?

Third, issues that require an offensive strategy should have a direct public benefit linked to them. Here too the PTI has gone horribly wrong. In opposition, the target for offence was the government of the day and it worked well for the PTI. Now in government itself, the target of offence should change and be linked to a legacy-building policy — one big thing with a direct connection to public benefit that the PTI can be remembered for in the next election, and in the next generation. That’s the strategic offence that PTI simpletons should be launching instead of obsessing with political opponents. Is this asking for too much from the PTI?

Here’s what it should not be doing that it is insisting on consistently doing: (a) do not substitute rambling, unfocused and clichéd press conferences for effective communication; (b) do not get stuck on backward-looking narrative that obsesses with corruption only — it has already begun to pay diminishing returns; (c) do not consider combative performances on TV as a replacement for convincing performances; (d) do not underestimate the power of perception; (e) do not take your supporters for granted; (f) do not focus on ‘I’ instead of on ‘We’. Is this asking for too much from the PTI?

The writer is Dawn’s resident editor in Islamabad.

Twitter: @fahdhusain

Published in Dawn, February 8th, 2020