A cascade of static noise combusts through the neighbourhood, shattering the early morning stillness and rousing late risers out of deep sleep. Compensation for being so discourteously introduced to a new day should at least come in the form of understanding the message blaring from a loudspeaker not too far away but too often, all one hears is a muffled voice and little else.
With Botswana’s Internet penetration languishing at 10 percent, the vehicle-mounted loudspeaker system for public announcements is a practical necessity and is still widely used by government departments, political parties and NGOs. The sound truck crawling through the neighbourhood notifying residents about an upcoming public meeting has become a veritable community radio station but, unlike similar operations, is not regulated by the National Broadcasting Authority. This station’s announcers are freer than other radio journalists because there is neither a press regulatory authority nor any (executive) arm of government watching them like a hawk in the sky. But therein lies the problem and the operation of a loudspeaker in the streets has come to represent an embarrassing hole in the accomplishments of public relations.
Ideally all care should have been taken to ensure that the message reaches the audience without any hindrance but that does not always happen because not enough planning goes into this exercise and there are no established protocols of operating a loudspeaker in the street.
The observation of Ford Moiteela, a specially nominated councillor in the Francistown City Council, is that all too often this exercise is futile because the announcers are not given any training at all. He says that rather than cram vital details like nature of meeting, time and venue into a time space and deliver them in succession, some announcers choose to string them out over a long period of time and distance.
“You often hear an announcer repeat one detail over and over as the vehicle speeds through an area and by the time he mentions others, he is a good kilometre away and people behind can’t get the second part of the message. In this campaign that I am in right now, we have taught our party members who operate our sound trucks that they don’t have to waste time drive singing the party praises and chanting ‘Tsholetsa Domkrag!’ when they should be providing important details about a political rally,” says Moiteela, an ascendant political star within the Botswana Democratic Party who is presently in Orapa where he is the party’s deputy campaign manager for an upcoming ward bye-election.
He adds that FCC employees also have the same weakness because they have also not been properly trained.
A local government worker, who understands how the process works, says that an employee deemed to have good public speaking ability is usually the one asked to perform this task. At the most basic level, microphone technique, which is important for delivery of excellent audio, is not a consideration and because there are no firm rules, some announcers tend to get a little too self-indulgent. The latter share the creative impulse to consciously modulate their voices such that they sound like presenters of Radio Botswana’s Tatediso ya Dikgang programme. Political party activists are among the best executors of this tradition, especially when they get to the “phuthego ya mokatakata” part. There may be cool points to earn for being this theatrical but audio quality is severely compromised in a public announcement that aspires to the condition of music over clear-voiced enunciation.
The instructions that the announcers are given essentially relate to the message to be relayed and the area to be covered but some have a tendency to appropriate power and authority that lies at least 10 kilometres outside their mandate. Often when it is possible to actually understand what the message is, some announcers go a step farther and seek to correct the behaviour of listeners. As conceived by management, “good public speaking ability” involves ability to riff off on the central message of a public announcement but some announcers tend to go over the top and get personal. A few years ago, a Gaborone City Council announcer broadcasting a clean-up campaign message in Block 5 singled out occupants of a house with a weed-ruined backyard for a literally thunderous rebuke: “A ko o bone hela gore jarata e e leswe jang! O kare ga e nne batho.”
The announcer was exercising “megaphone power” which possesses many more people handed the same instrument. A megaphone is a symbol of power and speakers at political rallies and funerals, the radio station shock jock as well as traffic police officers in patrol cars tend to get mega-excited when they grab hold of a megaphone. In less charitable moments, there is marked inclination on the part of those with megaphones to put ‘me’ in ‘media’, to appropriate power outside their mandate, to say mean, hurtful and personal statements that deviate from what should be standard official messaging as well as to allow a discernible streak of authoritarian sociopathy to rear its unpretty head. The power that a police officer announcing a neighbourhood watch meeting feels is such that he expects listeners to drop whatever they are doing and attend right away.
Moiteela agrees that there is tendency by some announcers to veer off course and make inappropriate statements. He gives a BDP-context example of an announcer who takes the bait of someone in the street who counter-chants “Kopano!” – the Botswana National Front slogan, as the sound truck drives by.
“Some announcers would be inclined to face off with that person and say some nasty things about the party and party president, little realising that they have gone completely off-message,” he says.
There is some rudimentary psychology at play here but these announcers appear to be applying the wrong kind: while it would be desirable to use the psychology of persuasion, they instead appear to be using that of (raw) power. Rather than cajole an audience by adopting the right tone of voice, minimising distraction and framing the message in positive terms, they abuse megaphone power to a point of being disagreeable and thus fail to secure the voluntary cooperation of what is essentially a forced audience. In the final analysis, this blistering vigilante rantery comes to nought – unless of course the announcer is speaking to an audience willing to pretend that s/he has any sort of power over them.
