Why Ondo rejigs information machinery

ONDO State information Commissioner Kayode Akinmade has vowed to chart a new course for the state's information machinery 'so that the bond of connection that existed between the government and the governed in the last 32 months of the Mimiko administration would continue to be nurtured.'Akinmade, a professional journalist and former Media Adviser to erstwhile Speaker of the House of Representatives, Dimeji Bankole, told The Guardian shortly after his inauguration over the weekend that 'the most important assignment before us now is to make sure that the confidence that has been built over the last years in this state is sustained.'According to him, 'media management in a state like Ondo, which has a population of informed people who are conscious of their political, social and economic rights as well as expected roles of the government in the polity, should naturally be based on truthfulness and transparency.'Our people hate deceit and that is why any government that relies on propaganda or the art of hoodwinking the population cannot succeed here. The position of the sage, Chief Obafemi Awolowo on how education can make a people easy to govern and difficult tocheat is very apt in our situation.'He expressed delight that a cordial relationship borne out of mutual respect, commitment with understanding exists between the people of the state and the government and pledged to continue to use his office to nurture it 'because neither of the two can exist in isolation of the other.'Governance in a democracyis nothing but a mutualcontract between two parties as stated by Jean Jacques Rousseau,based on the decision of the majority of the people to chart a course for the actualisation of their collective dreams and the preparedness of those in positions of responsibility to deploy the instrumentality of the state to achieve those dreams.'We are going to use the state information machinery as a two-way traffic to inform the people about government programmes and intentions, disseminate important and correct information and at the same time get feed back from the system and gauge public acceptance ratings of government gestures.'Of course the bottom-up approach to governance had been the hallmark of this administration since inception,' he added.
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