Talking business

Look, this isn’t rocket science.  Anyone can see you’re already wilting under pressure, but if only you would allow someone to speak honestly to you to your face, for once!  You might not like what they tell you, but trust me you’ll be better off for having heard them out!

First thing you need to know is this:  you can’t do this alone!  You need allies, real allies with real weight on them, not the fairies and storyteller type allies, but ones who can put some real muscle behind your voice.  Your go it alone strategy is doomed from the get-go.  Nobody has been able to take on the political heavyweights and their pet issues such as priority access to subsidised fiscal resources on the strength of their arguments alone.

The kind of reforms you are occasionally heard muttering about cannot be brought around through obsequious words uttered in the comfort of a walled off space.  You’ve got to be able to fight this battle out in the full light of day!  Didn’t you learn anything from the failure of the RGST initiative?  Why do you think “political consensus eluded” you throughout that affair?  Because you didn’t even try to put a loud and clear imperative behind the whole enterprise, you left the public discourse altogether, and your adversaries were only too glad to fill that void with their voice.

How many times have we seen you on the talk show circuit?  I know you find it distasteful engaging with the ignorant blowhards that rule that scene, but seriously, the prime time talk show circuit is quite possibly a more important public forum than the National Assembly.  Not for nothing many of your colleagues in the assembly will twiddle their thumbs and chit chat through an assembly session but scream vigorously before the prime time cameras.  They know something you don’t, and just to show you that this is not personal, I’ll share the insight with you here.  The game is not about how intellectually sound your ideas are.  The game is about repetition.  In our policy dialogue, or what passes for it anyway, the idea that gets repeated most often wins.  End of story.

So that’s your objective, right?  Repetition on prime time TV.  Now how do you get there?  First select the top ideas, or policy priorities you want to push, like GST on agri inputs for instance.  Offer yourself up as a guest on top rated talk shows.  Find a clever and compelling line to take with you to the show.  When you’re on, push the line, repeat it, take every question that is thrown at you and relate it back to your original line, present your line as the source of our problems.  Repeat it again and again.

When the show ends, offer yourself up for another show and do the same.  Then take calls from some reporters and columnists, exclude me if you wish, like I said this isn’t personal.  Here’s a tip about talking to reporters and columnists: address them by name.  You’ll have their everlasting love.  Refer to their last piece of writing.  You’ll earn their admiration.  Then drop a nugget or two of “inside information,” add a little “off the record” material and quickly add that the last part is purely off the record, “just for you yaar, don’t run it, ok?”

It’s called playing the game, and you have a lot to learn about how it’s done.  You keep losing all your battles because you have no clue about how the game is played.  Your most powerful ally, the media, is still waiting to hear from you!

This is not the World Bank for cryin’ out loud!  This is the real world!  You’ve got to shout to be heard, you’ve got to have the soundbite for the moment, you’ve got to put the urgency in your voice, you’ve got to speak with a clenched fist.  You’ve got to learn to deal first hand with the stakeholders in economic reality, something you’ve never done before, and don’t even think about bringing up your track record as Firesale Minister in the khaki democracy of yesteryear.  The less said about that the better, for your own sake.

The writer is Editor Business and Economic policy for Express News and Express 24/7

Published in The Express Tribune, June 20^th, 2011.