Written by Dr.
Kayode Fayemi
A few years ago, Professor Dora Akunyili, who was then the
Federal Minister of Information, launched a campaign to rebrand Nigeria. The
campaign slogan was “Nigeria: Good People, Great Nation.” Despite the best of
intentions, the campaign was not only dismissed by most Nigerians, it failed to
gain traction. In the few months that the controversy over the campaign lasted,
much of it was about deriding the campaign, rather than enhancing the image of
Nigeria. Before this, there was another attempt to brand the country. That
earlier attempt had a different, but no less rousing, slogan: “Nigeria, Heart
of Africa.”
The Economist of London summed up the (re)branding efforts
in an epigram: “Good people, impossible mission.”[1] The respected
international magazine reported that, “The previous exercise failed, and there
is little reason to expect the latest one to do much better. Many Nigerians say
their government should tackle the country’s fundamental problems – power
shortages, crime and corruption – before worrying about its image.”
Why did these attempts at branding and rebranding Nigeria
fail? Why was the rebranding mission an “impossible” one?
Most Nigerians expressed the position that the problem was
with the brand and not with branding. However, there were some who had a
problem with the idea of branding or rebranding a country. Those who hold the
latter position were not expressing any strange opinion. Throughout the world,
there are controversies about branding a country. This attitude has been
described in some contexts as “visceral antagonism”[2] to the idea of branding
a country. The major objection to this is that a nation is not a corporation
and therefore should not be reduced to something that can be branded. One of
the most articulate objectors to this idea, Michel Girard, stated that a
country “has a nature and a substance other than that of a corporation.
[Therefore] A corporation can be re-branded, not a state…. A country carries
specific dignity unlike a marketed product….”[3]
But Girard was mistaken. Indeed, nations, like corporations,
change and even reinvent themselves, especially under new regimes, new
governments, and in a new era. Even though the people who make up a state or a
nation may continue to exhibit many of their inherent characteristics, but
changes, reshaping and rebranding take place throughout the entire history of
every state, every nation, and every people. As an expert in this area, Wally
Olins, states, “The reason why nations continue to shape and reshape their
identities, or if you prefer explicitly and implicitly to rebrand themselves,
is because their reality changes and they need to project this real change
symbolically to all the audiences, internal and external, with whom they
relate.”[4]
I want to emphasise a salient point in this illuminating
position on why nations rebrand, because it is not only relevant for
understanding why Nigeria’s rebranding efforts that I mentioned earlier failed,
but why other rebranding efforts succeed. That important point concerns the
emphasis on changes in reality. By this
emphasis, Olins alerts us to the fact that changes in the reality of a
particular state or nation constitute the fundamental conditions for
rebranding. “Nigeria, Heart of Africa” and “Nigeria: Good People, Great Nation”
(re)branding efforts failed because they were not predicated upon any changes in the reality
that Nigerians experienced – which the world was invited to witness. How can
you rebrand a reality that remains unchanged? How can you change the attitude
to a spade by calling it another name, or by rebranding it?
Deconstructing a
National Brand
The architecture of a national brand connects values,
service-delivery, quality control, ideals and standard operating procedures, in
a seamless garment of national identity. The national identity is both implicit
and explicit in the rhetoric and conduct of the national elites, in the ideas
and values that drive institutional behaviour; permeate the popular culture,
and shape domestic and foreign policy.
In 2008, President Barack Obama cast his election as
America’s first African-American president as a sign of his country’s
uniqueness in the world, as a place where people can fulfill their highest
aspirations irrespective of their race. In US elections, the very idea of
American exceptionalism which is central to the American brand whether as “the
greatest country in the world” or as “the hope of the earth” is not at all
contested. What is contested is which candidate can best project the national
values and embody the national brand. A national brand is symbolically and
substantially rooted in the country’s cultural and institutional DNA and
therefore transcends partisan contestation. It is a paradigmatic consensus that
members of a society share about their land and which their society willfully
transmits to the world at large.
In the late 1990s, the Labour government of Tony Blair
launched the Cool Britannia campaign aimed at casting Britain as the
trend-setting global capital of fashion, finance and culture. This campaign
went beyond Blair’s personal advocacy and nifty sloganeering. It involved
institutional and policy measures designed to make the country, particularly
the City of London, more market-friendly, more open to foreign investments and
more hospitable. In short, it was about making Britain a place where foreigners
would feel very comfortable investing and spending their money, and therefore an
important node in the network of global capitalism.
Perhaps, the most powerful example of nation-rebranding in
Africa is that of South Africa which within the short span of a decade moved
from being known in international circles as a racist enclave ruled by white
supremacists to a multiracial democracy. In ten years, she moved from being a
pariah apartheid state to the “rainbow nation.” This profound change involved
changes not just in the country’s totems such as its national flag but also a
recalibration of South Africa’s institutional settings to more adequately
reflect her aspirations as a land of many races, colours and creeds woven
together in democratic freedom. It put
in place measures and institutions to guarantee a smooth transition and also to
ensure that the bitter memories of apartheid would not lead to a racial civil
war as many pundits widely expected.
Instead, having swiftly ended apartheid, and elected Nelson
Mandela, the world’s best known political prisoner as president; South Africa set
about righting historical wrongs with the establishment of a Truth Commission.
Within a few years, she had hosted the Rugby World Cup and the African Cup of
Nations football tournament. In 2010, she became the first ever African country
to host the FIFA world cup. Today, she is Africa’s largest economy.
Two decades ago, China was still considered a Maoist in
Tiananmen Square, more in the news for jailing dissidents and cracking down on
civil liberties. Today, China is spoken of as a rapidly expanding economic
power and she is expected to become the world’s largest economy within twenty
years. South Africa and India also boast of similar radically transformed
narratives.
The understated aspect of the rise of emerging market
countries today has been their strategic and calculated branding of their
countries to project positive impressions in the international arena. China
consistently refers to her increasing profile as a peaceful rise rather than an
aggressive expansion to avoid alarming other nations around her and arousing
unnecessary hostility. Instead, she has massively increased aid to developing
countries, while making herself the workshop of the world unobtrusively. She
projects the impression that she is a benign power rather than a malevolent empire
with hegemonic designs on the world.
India used to make the headlines in the international media
for sectarian violence and chronic political unrest. These days, she is
serenaded as an emerging market economy and as the world’s outsourcing capital.
It used to be that conflict in Kashmir, a territory historically disputed with
neighbouring Pakistan, propelled India into the spotlight. Now India is better
known for her information technology hubs like Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad
and the vibrancy of Mumbai, her booming commercial capital. India is also now a
leading destination for medical tourism.
The important thing to note is that these countries are not
perfect. Hindered, they still exhibit many of the unpopular attributes of their
past and they have not tried to project perfection. What they have done instead
is to leverage their strengths, accentuate already existing positives,
implement institutional and policy measures to reflect their strategic visions
for their nations, and then project those visions powerfully and skillfully
into the global consciousness. It is a measure of how masterfully these
branding efforts have been pursued that these countries narratives’ have
dramatically changed.
The odysseys of these countries tell us that authentic
transformation is possible. They teach us that it is entirely within our powers
to change our story. Twenty years from now, I believe the dominant narrative of
Nigeria in the international media will not be about terrorism, corruption or
conflict but about a rapidly expanding continental economic power whose strides
bear witness to the fact that Africa can produce a progressive world class
society. This will be a dramatic change in our story and it will come down to
how seriously we engage in brand engineering, not as sloganeering but as a
deliberate effort to transform both the reality and perception of our nation
and her institutions.
The Values Gap
A national brand identity consists of two primary elements.
Firstly, there must be a set of core of values and ideals that undergirds the
nation’s entire socio-political and economic life. The second element involves
how these values are projected to the world through national institutions,
systems and structures.
Our nation branding failures can be summed up as a values
deficit. It is the failure of successive administrations to articulate a
strategic national vision and calibrate institutional realities to match this
vision. In broader terms, this represents not just the failure of particular
administrations but also our failure as elites to generate a consensus about
what sort of place we want our country to be. We can not convincingly answer
the question: What is this entity called Nigeria? What does it mean to be a
Nigerian? Are we citizens or are we subjects? We have not adequately and firmly
framed the values that we want to drive our institutions. At an administrative
level, even when certain ideas have been articulated such as the service
compact or charters aimed at enhancing service delivery in the public sector,
they have failed to elicit sufficient buy-in. Proponents of such plans are
often unable to inspire confidence. In other words, the brand evangelists are
often inadequate representatives of what they are selling.
Institutional transformation of the scale that Nigeria needs
will not be achieved by just rhetoric. It requires a willingness to restore
values to the front burner of the discourse on transformation. It requires a
willingness to lead by example, to incarnate the values of the society that we
want. In the words of Gandhi, we must become the change we want to see.
Transformation cannot be imposed from above. It can only be generated by
exemplary leadership which not only elicits emulation but inspires the
conviction that the proposed path of change is the right road. Behavioral
theorists tell us that behavior is infectious. The unruliness and incivility
that we bemoan in our public spaces closely reflect the level of discourtesy
and uncouthness demonstrated by public functionaries. The long history of
intimate association between power and impunity on our shores is why many
Nigerians once placed in positions of authority begin to manifest previously
unrealized authoritarian traits. It is both a result of the institutional ethos
that we have constructed around authority and a manifestation of the power of
example.
If we are to change the character, tone and content of
leadership and thereby enhance the appeal of Brand Nigeria, we will need to
join the corps of leaders and elites exemplifying the wave of the future. We
will need to see ourselves as exemplars of a certain way of doing things.
Public Service and
Exemplary Leadership
One of the most profound paradoxes of the Nigerian condition
is how a country so reputed for corruption, ineptitude and dysfunction also
produces so many high achieving men and women of unimpeachable integrity and
sterling competence. There is a disconnect between the existence of such
Nigerians and popular impressions of Nigeria. This is indicative of a wider
dissonance between what we are capable of achieving as individuals and what we
are capable of achieving collectively in the public domain. When a first time
visitor encounters our embassies and airports, he is experiencing our public
sector and all the deficiencies of our collective enterprise as Nigerians.
What is at issue is the very idea of public service as a
dimension in which we come together to pool our talents and gifts in order to
protect and project our common interest – the national brand. This notion of
public service has been lost for decades and needs to be restored. Public
servants, regardless of how high or low their station, are the first line of
advocacy for the national brand. The tardiness of a low-level staffer can undo
months and years worth of brand construction. When corrupt officials engage
with foreigners on behalf of Nigeria, they irreparably subvert the national
brand. This is why we must no longer see the public service as an irrelevant
organization filled with slothful errand boys and errand girls. On the
contrary, it is the engine of governance and the fulcrum of policy formulation
and implementation – though more of the latter than the former. Indeed, one of
the main reasons for the gulf between excellent policy conception and abysmal
execution is the scant attention paid to the civil service which is actually
charged with executing. Typically, high-sounding policy initiatives are
announced with much fanfare only to die almost immediately because the
strategic role of the public service as the policy and brand vehicle has not
been factored in. With very low or non-existent levels of buy-in among civil
servants, it is no surprise that these initiatives are dead on arrival. Much of
the sloth and lethargy frequently attributed to civil servants mirrors how
lowly they are esteemed in the calculus of governance and policy architecture.
Revitalizing public service goes beyond issues of working
conditions and morale. These are, of course, important but they are only a tip
of the iceberg. The real key is to restore a missionary sense of purpose to the
public service; to get civil servants to see their work in sacramental terms at
the altar of a purpose far greater than themselves. In pursuing the defined
objectives and values of the state, they become envoys of the national brand.
To this end, political office holders have to see themselves
as being organically bound with civil servants in the service of the common
good. Restoring the lost idea of public service means modeling a culture of
servant leadership in which political executives see and define themselves as
servants. It also means creating an atmosphere in which rank and status cease
to be important and pale in comparison to the task of achieving excellence.
Meritocracy
A national brand is shaped to a large extent by a country’s
conception of heroes; by the character of those that it bestows iconic status
upon. For us, certain questions are relevant in this regard. What sort of
people are we celebrating in Nigeria? Is hard work a reliable pathway to reward
and recognition? What is the nature of our reward system? These are all salient
questions.
The sort of people that we celebrate as heroes in our
society says far more about our values and our image than we imagine. Our
heroes are symbols of the national brand. When we serenade fraudsters,
ex-despots, ex-convicts and other assorted persons of dubious reputations with
national honours and appointments, we are sending a terribly unedifying message
to the world. No kind of public relations blitz can undo the damage done to the
national image by the sort of people that have become our symbols. We are also
sending a dangerous signal to the young about the relationship between
competence and honesty on one hand and promotion and recognition on the other.
Nothing destroys the work ethic like the idea that hard work is futile. Nothing
subverts public ethics like the idea that honesty does not pay.
Those who we want to represent the national brand must be
chosen wisely. Even in the market driven corporate world, ethical calculations
guide the choice of celebrity endorsements for commercial brands. Celebrities
like Michael Jackson, Tiger Woods and Lance Armstrong were dropped from
multi-million dollar endorsements by their sponsors because these corporations
did not want the celebrities’ misdeeds to taint their brands. Even in the
remorselessly secular domain of capitalism, the moral injunction that a good
name is better than riches resonates with modern branding wisdom. Choosing the company you keep is essential to
good brand management.
One of the reasons public service is not esteemed in Nigeria
is because it is regarded as a realm in which factors other than merit dictate
one’s progress and promotion. A perverse notion of affirmative action and
entitlement feeds a sense of unfairness and grievance which ultimately saps
morale.
Consequently, we cannot attract our best and brightest into
the public service and so cannot but put forward the most ill-qualified or at
best average products to undertake critical national tasks. This has also
popularized the association of public service and politics with mediocrity. The
mediocre and ill-qualified personalities who rise to leadership positions
become faces of the nation and degrade the national brand even further. Many of
our top public functionaries through their substandard performances have
contributed to Nigeria’s negative reputational indices. It is said that we
perpetuate what we permit and we receive what we reward. Mediocrity thrives
because it is permitted and rewarded. Excellence will flourish and proliferate
when it is not merely permitted but celebrated, encouraged and rewarded.
The Ekiti State,
Nigeria Re-Branding Experience
In the final analysis, branding is not about crafting
propaganda or marketing illusions. It is fundamentally about our ethos, our
character as a people, how we want to organize our society and how we want to
be perceived in the world. All too often, our costly efforts to rebrand Nigeria
have fallen far short of the mark because of our prioritization of style over
substance and aesthetics over actuality. Rebranding Nigeria must of necessity
firstly mean an internal reengineering of our worldview, and a shift in the
ethical orientation of our society. A new Nigerian brand must first of all be a
new ethic.
Politics and governance are forms of brand management
because our work is to continuously strive to close the gap between our
aspirations, our realities and our reputation. Branding is as much about values
and substance as it is about visuals and symbols. In the past we have
emphasized the latter at the expense of the former and have reaped slogans
aplenty but nothing remotely approximating change. The demand of our time is to
restore values and institutional behaviour to the core of all efforts to remake
ourselves and our nation and thereby pave way for authentic transformation.
This is what we have done in Ekiti State, Nigeria; we have demystified
office-holding and restored a sense of public service as a means of bettering
the lives of our people. This is because we believe that the values that shape
the Ekiti of our dreams has to be first incarnated in our calling as public servants.
We knew that the rescue mission could not succeed, while the
roadmap to recovery would fail without promoting a new culture which involved a
return to our old values. Therefore, we rechristened the state “The land of
honour” (“Ile Iyi, Ile Eye”) and in 2011, following robust consultations across
gender, age, religion and political party divides,we launched a new brand
identity, with the full compliments of arguably the most aesthetically appealing
and functional visual icon among states in Nigeria that have adopted logos. Our
approach in creating the externalities of our brand identity signaled to the
world that we were going far beyond adopting a fancy emblem. The results of
this exercise were six unique attributes that eventually made up our logo
including: the Woven Cord; the New Dawn; the Rolling Hills; the Lush
Vegetation; the Water and the Open Book.
However, this rebranding project would have been ineffective
if it was not preceded by, and founded on, our 8-point agenda – upon which the
changes in the reality of Ekiti State today is predicated. What this means is
that, for rebranding to have meaning, reality has to change first, or reality
has to change along with rebranding. Our rebranding was therefore not in a
vacuum.
We do not merely proclaim this land as the land of honour, we live it
every day; every day, we are rebuilding this land of honour; every day, we are
spreading knowledge and providing better opportunities for our children to have
good education while ensuring human capital development; every day, we are
building new roads or repairing old ones, not only to create better
transportation system, but also to network and link every part of the state
with one another through good roads; every day, we are attending the needs to
pregnant women and women in general, and their children too, thus reducing
infant and maternal mortality rate; every day, we are improving governance, by
delivering on our promises and also effectively coordinating the interface
between all government agencies to ensure efficient and effective service
delivery to the people; every day, we are stimulating industrial development in
Ekiti State by creating technology and industrial parks for small and medium
scale enterprises, including focusing on agro-allied and solid mineral sector;
every day, we are working on modernising agriculture, for instance, through
reviving cocoa plantation to make Ekiti a world leader again in cocoa
production; every day, we are expanding the opportunities for youth employment
and empowering women.
Our rebranding is successful because we have a real change
to project symbolically to our audiences, both internal and external. We have
been able to meet all our obligations and fulfil as many of our promises as we
can fulfil in two years because the fundamental motif of governance, one upon
which the government and people relate is “honour.” Our people have recovered
their pride and they are now able to enjoy the benefits of good governance. The
changes have been real and profound. Therefore, while branding is important, we
have gone beyond branding to build lasting values for growth.
Conclusion
For many years, neo-liberal economists insisted that
self-interest and rational choice are the only paths to economic growth and
development; and we have been told that as developing countries, we need to
embrace this credo and ignore our cultural values.[5] However, the Asian Tigers
have proved them wrong. The link between economic development and cultural
values has been demonstrated by the Asian Tigers; indeed, people’s cultural
beliefs and values are crucial for economic development.[6] As some experts
have stated, “Economic growth and development need to be a substantiation of a
people’s beliefs and values.”
Therefore, in Nigeria, we must recognise that the state, the
market and the people are all agents in the process of economic growth and
development.[7] We are already demonstrating this recognition in Ekiti State.
The “Land of Honour,” a land of virtuous, hardworking, chivalrous,
accommodating, and proud people, is one in which there is good governance; one
in which we pay attention to education and human capital development; one in
which we provide good health care services; one in which we are committed to
industrial and infrastructural development; one in which we are modernising
agriculture, while promoting tourism and ensuring women empowerment.
This is where reality and branding converges. It is this
convergence that will produce, promote and sustain economic growth. In solving the country’s fundamental
problems, we will also be providing the basis for rebranding the country. It is
upon such a convergence that the rebranding of Nigeria can be built. In
contrast to what the Economist of London stated about the last rebranding
efforts, this is how to ensure that the rest of the world would see Nigerians
and Nigeria as “Good people, Possible Mission.”
Dr. Kayode Fayemi, Governor of Ekiti State Nigeria presented this paper at
the Verdant Zeal Marketing Communication’s INNOVENTION SERIES in Lagos, Nigeria on Friday, March 22, 2013
REFERENCES
[1] Economist, London, April 30, 2009.
[2] Wally Olins, “Branding the Nation – The Historical
Context”, Brand Management, Vol.9, No.4-5, April, 2002: 241.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid, p. 243. Emphasis added.
[5] Symphorien Ntibagirirwa, “Cultural Values, Economic
Growth and Development,” Journal of Business Ethics, 2009, 84:297–311.
[6] Ibid, p. 297.
[7] Ibid.
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