I thought the Presidential Media Chat (PMC) was dead and buried with GEJ’s Presidency until a few days ago when I heard the announcement that it would hold as usual with President Muhammadu Buhari as a guest. I presume the PMC died a natural cause with President Olusegun Obasanjo’s kid brother out of the presidency for good. This is because I thought it created more communication problems than it solved for the two past presidents. This president can and should learn from the indiscretions of his predecessors. I also believe this presidency should be run on a completely new concept of information management with all the PMC’s publicity attractions.

Former United States President, George Washington once said with reputation you can do anything. This suggests that the reputation of our president is one of the most important qualities that ought to be guarded jealously. Communication and everything else depend on how one is perceived. Public opinion on which reputation is built can close a company or remove a government. Therefore, PMB cannot be too careful in avoiding the mistakes of the past presidents; otherwise his reputation could easily take a plunge. PMC was a creation of a medical doctor who under strange circumstances found himself managing the media in the Villa.

Apparently, OBJ found the PMC useful because it probably afforded him the opportunity to attack or rather to hit below the belt editors with whom he had an exe to grind on prime time television and present himself as a tough and rugged president. By and large, I must say that he succeeded in doing that but that was not his mission as president. His mission included keeping the country together and taking it to greater prosperity.

Throughout OBJ’s presidency, a month after the PMC held, newspapers were awash with criticisms of the president’s behaviour that spared no editor on the panel of discussants. Under normal circumstances, the guests on the panel ought be treated as presidential guests and offered the usual presidential courtesies. But that was not case. In fact, editors graduated from OBJ’s school and learnt not to expect such courtesies from the presidency. Again, that may not be the purpose of the PMC. The forum should be used to promote government’s inner thinking, the challenges it faces and how it is tackling them. Is it not what Nigerians wanted to hear? But the OBJ’s body language, seemed to enjoy every bit of the media circus associated with the PMC.

I recall that I wrote a piece during the first term of OBJ’s Presidency which was published in ThisDay. Forgive my inability to recall the exact date, but the piece centred on the unintended consequences of the PMC. Instead of being used to explain developments in the presidency, it always exposed presidential indiscretions. Along time after the PMC held, what people remembered was how the president tried to deal with his corky interviewers. The important facts revealed about the presidency during the PMC were usually obfuscated.

So should PMB be programmed to toe that line? If we now have a brand new president with an unblemished record and a capacity to take on many challenges at a time, who waited 12 years to lead the nation, his objectives and programmes should find a better platform. PMB should be put on a higher pedestal than the one on which his predecessors tried to operate. If that is case, why not try a new method of having the president interviewed by the state house correspondents to give the presidency a new lease of life?

I believe Femi Adesina and Garba Shehu have so far done pretty well managing the reputation of the president and therefore, should not have problems finding a new way for the president to communicate robustly with Nigerians at the same time avoiding the fall-out of the media circus.

Judging by the comments I overheard some of the state house correspondents making at a state house retreat held in Kaduna recently, Femi and Garba are firmly in charge of communications at the Villa and have also been very professional and accessible. They should put heads together to find ways and means of raising the reputation stakes of the new presidency. PMB is a successful, unblemished brand, stands tall with impeccable anti-corruption credentials. At least, this much was publicly acknowledged during his election campaign across the country and on the state visits to the United States and other western countries recently. Managing the reputation of PMB, therefore, should not be too difficult given the right approach.

At the same retreat, a state house correspondent raised a very important issue which had to do with bringing editors to interview the president when the correspondents were at the Villa to not only cover the presidency but to monitor developments. Besides, they were the eyes and ears of their editors. If I understood him well, what he seemed to be saying was why not have the state house correspondents interview the president whenever the need arose instead of waiting three to six months to assemble the editors. No one should feel that the correspondents are too junior to interact with the president. It is their beat and so be it.

That was the crux of my argument then. The correspondents represent the media houses and probably the editors depend on them to scoop happenings in the presidency before they appeared on the PMC. So why not have them interview and interact with the president? It should take the shape of a press conference with the president standing and the correspondents sitting down. It would be a kind of breezy interview session that should take no more than 30 minutes with a certain number of correspondents picked to ask questions at a given session. It would not be healthy to hold the president for two to three hours interview. Sometimes such long interviews have a way taking the shine out of a guest no matter how hard he tries, especially where the questions would not be submitted in advance. Instead, the frequency of the interview could be increased to, say monthly instead of quarterly. Of course, media houses that want a detailed interview can individually request for same with the president’s office individually. Each request can be treated on its merit.

That way the president can relax and learn the names of each correspondent by recognising them to speak on first name basis. This builds familiarity between the president and the correspondents that helps their work. The president can also use the forum to establish personal rapport with the correspondents that could go beyond the period of the presidency.

That is the practice most American presidents followed and used effectively. That is what president Barrack Obama currently uses with finesse. This approach should end the PMC circus and present the president as the one on whose desk the buck stops. So long presidential media chat?

• Kabir Dangogo is the Managing Director/CEO of Timex Communications, Kaduna