TED'S DIGITAL JUNGLE #32, CONGO MISSION REPORT CHAPTER 5

2.3: CHALLENGES AND LESSONS

The primary challenge of any Public Information Division is to create support for the Mission Mandate among both the population being served and the external world. The primary challenge for the Video Unit in this context should be to produce quality Video Product which helps achieve these goals. These were our goals when Mario Zamorano and Kevin Kennedy were our directors.

However, after the departure of Kevin Kennedy, our primary challenge became to produce quality video product in spite of incompetent and even sometimes destructive supervision – supervision which had no interest in hearing our professional opinions on any matter, creative or professional.

Under these conditions, protecting the integrity ot the Video Unit became my top priority.

 During this period, I used every means available to avoid personal confrontations, even under extreme provocation.  Over the years, I have learned that such confrontations seldom produce desired outcomes, and often makes things worse.

Aside from a few decades of professional production experience around the world, what enabled me to survive in MONUC was my training as a yudansha in aikido, also known the art of peace, which I have been practicing for 20 years now. In Kinshasa, I helped the Chief of Staff of the Japanese Embassy, Fujita-San, to create a dojo with Congolese students, and this free time activity helped me understand the Congolese people better than any official UN program. Furthermore, I am not aware of any UN training program which helps staff deal with some of the  complex internal politics of the organization, which can be a serious distraction. Therefore, I would encourage anyone of any age seriously interested in becoming a real peacekeeper to explore aikido. Peace begins in our own hearts and minds, and is reflected in the way we treat others. If we peacekeepers cannot work together, we can hardly expect the populations we serve to do so.

When I felt the climate in the division was becoming truly unbearable, I also turned to the Ombudsman for advice and support. For most of my tenure, the Ombudsman was Gang Li, and he taught me a great deal about the UN system while advising me on how to best defuse combustible situations. I felt I could be perfectly frank with him: it was like having the luxury of a good lawyer for guidance and counsel. My previous mission, UNTAET, had no Ombudsman, and the difference was remarkable. I feel the office of the Ombudsman is an invaluable addition to Peacekeeping Missions, with the caveat that the Ombudsman must be completely independent from the mission, and that all communication with the Ombudsman must be kept confidential.

Other major challenges involved our dependence on other divisions.

For example, on a technical level, Video Unit had a challenging relationship with CITS.  We were completely dependent upon CITS for all internet services, and, despite the efforts of every PID Director, we rarely ever received the support we needed to do our jobs properly.

The sole exception was UNIFEED, Thanks to the program File Catalyst, combined with the hard work and dedication of our Video IT experts Titus Nyukuri and Kevin Jordan, we were usually able to send short video clips to UNIFEED, the UN website on a regular basis,

FTP has been the industry standard for electronic transmission of video material for several years now, but we were never able to get it functional in MONUC or MONUSCO, in spite of many a conference and many an unkept promise. We recommended a privately paid, dedicated line for

FTP transmission from Goma to Kinshasa on several occasions, only to be told it was against

UN rules. Frankly, had we adhered to all UN rules, we never would have been able to do anything.

 As a result, we were forced to send tapes by hand from Goma to Kinshasa several times a week, putting us in violation of MOVCON rules. I authorized this practice – with the tacit understanding of the Chief of Transport, once he understood our predicament.

Likewise, the CITS ban on YouTube made it impossible for UN staff to see our weekly programs on our YouTube channel. As a result, we had to send our programs by Intranet to our colleagues, and there were always problems. Many in the sectors could not open the files, so naturally they directed their complaints to me, and I, in turn, attempted to direct them to the CITS Helpdesk. I felt it was important that our colleagues had some contact with what was going on in the rest of the mission, so this was definitely a worthwhile effort.

Our YouTube and Facebook channels remained essential to the effort to get our message out to the external world, and we turned to CITS for assistance to make it possible to upload our programs from our offices. However, we never could find a time-efficient way to upload programs on our UN computers, so we did all of the uploading at home on our private servers, at our own expense. It was worth every penny.

However, a  dedicated line for some $300. a month with a private server was a option that would have solved both the FTP problem and the uploading of material, but that was one that was never approved, due to so-called “ UN rules” that I never really saw or understood.

Indeed, this solution would have been far more cost effective than the expensive BGAN option proposed by CITS, which would have cost at least $3000 or more per week, depending upon the number of transmissions. Just for the record, BGAN is based on sat phones, and only makes sense in a remote location when no other options are available and time is of the essence.

The final challenge I will deal with here was the baffling decision by Finance in 2011 to make it impossible for to hire freelance Congolese presenters, even though we had plenty of money in our budget to pay freelance Congolese talent, and we had been doing so for three years without any problems at all. Budget failed to understand that articulate, attractive and hard working presenters do not grow on trees, and we had searched for a long time before finding our star Horeb Bulambo, who became the Congolese face and voice of the mission for many Congolese. And since he was educated, attractive and charismatic, he did an excellent job as our front man promoting the MONUSCO mandate from remote locations around the country. Anyone with any knowledge of television will understand when I was say that he had been very hard to find. Yet our friends from Budget, doubtless with some encouragement from some of our PID colleagues who were jealous of our success, turned a deaf ear to our pleas, effectively killing the program  at a critical time just before the elections.

This was particularly aggravating to me because I had just been in meetings in New York with Caroline Petit and Stephane Dujarric of DPI, who liked MONUSCO REALITES, and were trying to set up a free distribution deal for the program with Belgian RTBF, which wanted to broadcast the program for free in Europe, thereby reaching the Congolese diaspora and others .  Astonishingly enough, then PID Director George Ola-Davies gave us no support either with Budget or RTBF, and a very promising opportunity withered on the vine, along with MONUSCO REALITES. No explanations were offered. In the world of communications, such professional negligence is a serious matter, and would be grounds for dismissal in any professional organization I am familiar with.  Backdoor communications with the Administration had never been my style – nor did COS or the SRSG ,much to their credit , encourage them - so there was little I could do at the time.

A related challenge was our relationship with Radio Okapi. As far as I am concerned, Radio Okapi is the jewel in the crown of MONUC PID, and is the greatest accomplishment I know of in any DPKO Information operation. Radio Okapi is a real radio station that has become the most popular and

trusted voice on the DRC airwaves, thanks to a joint effort by MONUC and the Swiss Fondation Hirondelle. The relationship between PID and Hirondelle has been stormy, however. Hirondelle

representatives often feel that PID was in the propaganda business, while Okapi should be doing objective news. By the time I arrived in 2007, there was clearly a lot of bad blood in the air, and to this day there are many at Radio Okapi who still do not understand they work for the UN.

Thanks to Radio Okapi chief Jean Jacques Simon (who was professional enough to work with me  in spite of past differences,) I was able to obtain the services of two Okapi presenters who wanted to expand into television presenting. We began to use them for MONUC REALITES, and they  gave our program an intimacy and warmth that had been missing. When it came to paying them, however, I was told UN rules prohibited them getting any compensation. Since I needed the presenters to know their lines and be punctual, I made a private arrangement with the presenters, and my solution worked perfectly.  The  female presenters were excellent and we made them look even more beautiful.

Soon, other reporters from Okapi wanted to work with us . I was very interested, since I had been seeking an alternative to Horeb for some time. The Okapi reporters were educated professionals who could travel and work in the field, unlike anyone else available. Some collaboration seemed natural, since it would have promoted Okapi capacity building for the future, and would have eliminated our  dependence on freelancers.  What I had in mind was having some reporters for a week or two every month.

However, when I proposed the possibility of some collaboration with Okapi to then Director George Ola-Davies, his response was to try to create a conflict between myself  and Radio Okapi Chef d’Antenne, Amadou Ba. Fortunately, both Amadou and I could see what he was trying to do; and neither of us had any reason for dispute, so we dodged the bullet. However, that meant curtains for what should have been an obvious option of maximizing talent at hand for the benefit of all, especially our Congolese partners.

Episodes such as this, along with others, made me wonder what on earth was going on in PID. In the case of George Ola-Davies, it seemed that at times we were not working for the same organization. More on this in Part IV.

TED'S DIGITAL JUNGLE #31: CONGO MISSION END REPORT, CHAPTER 4

21 January, 2012- Present:  Unfortunately, for reasons that were never made clear to, the new director never arrived, and we once again found ourselves  under the rule of OIC/Spokesperson Madnodge Mounoubai. Although I was de facto his deputy, and had been recommended for a 6 month extension by COS as “irreplaceable,” I was summarily cut out of the loop on all matters, including replacement of video personnel. Told to submit my own recommendations in my Mission End Report, I retired from MONUSCO without further ado on 30 June.

II ISSUES AND RECOMMENDATIONS:

2.1. BACKGROUND

Here I would like to focus on some fundamental communications issues universal to all missions.

I have been working with film and video for the United Nations since 1976, though hardly exclusively.

During these years, I have noticed a fundamental dilemma afflicting most UN information efforts - namely, do UN Information agencies produce news or strategic communications?

This distinction is critical, since it affects the production process from  concept through to consumption.

For reasons both personal and professional. many UN information officers prefer to think they are doing news rather than strategic  communications. This is a fundamental mistake. For both political and professional reasons, the UN cannot do news. News requires freedom from political control as well as a high speed production capacity the UN lacks.

Acceptance of  this reality need not be a handicap. Quite to the contrary. To begin with, the United Nations is a political organization with political goals. To help achieve these goals, the UN must develop communications strategies that help convince large segments of the population that these political goals are in their interest, and are therefore worth supporting.

In a DPKO Mission like MONUSCO, the administration must determine with Director PID what key messages should be conveyed, and Director PID should enlist the creative skills of the entire

Division to determine how to most effectively convey these messages.

This is the way we worked when Kevin Kennedy was Director, P.I.D, and  his approach was very successful. He gave us the messages, and then challenged us to find the best ways to express it.

As a result, we all became involved in the task of promoting the mission, and our attention was focused on finding creative solutions.

We were fortunate in that Kevin was supportive as well as demanding, and that we felt we could trust both his judgement and his professionalism. If there was a disagreement, as is bound to happen in creative discussion, there could be a heated exchange, but it never became personal.

As a result, we felt we could be honest with Kevin, and take risks, knowing whatever we said would go no further. A noted, we had felt great pressure from SRSG Doss prior to Kevin’s arrival..

 And we knew that Mr. Doss took great interest in our work. However, thanks to Kevin, we never had any problems with Mr. Doss after his arrival, and I am eternally grateful to him for that. Other MONUSCO colleagues were far less fortunate when Mr. Doss was in charge.

 2.2: GOOD PRACTISES

Here I would like to single out the Video Unit team for the support they provided during my tenure.  They were all highly skilled video professionals from a variety of countries, and most of them were MONUC veterans who taught me a lot about MONUC and the DRC .I was very lucky to be able to work with them. and I am happy to say I think the feeling was mutual.

Dedicated professionals are the backbone of any UN Peacekeeping mission, and all of those responsible for the creation of this group deserve praise.  The only missing link when I arrived was organization and managerial vision, and, as an experienced film and television director and producer, I was able to provide both. It was a remarkably good fit.  I knew no one in P.I.D. prior to arrival, and went through the  standard recruitment process; special mention should be given to Hamanyoun Mubtakir, who was in charge of MONUC recruitment at that time. When I was interviewed for the job, I was very much the outside candidate. I managed to get the job anyway, through a unanimous panel decision. In this case, the system worked.

Another successful HR effort was the MDP, or the Management Development Program. I attended several training programs in the course of my 4 ½ years with the mission, and the MDP was by far the best. The trainers were external professionals, and they were true experts on managerial styles and techniques.

Among other things, they emphasized the 360 evaluation to give supervisors feedback from their staff. I was used to this approach from my work as a professor in New York, and I found it both educational and at times humbling.  Over the course of my 9 years, I was fortunate to have good rapport with most of my students.  Colleagues who received poor evaluations soon lost their jobs. In my view, 360 evaluations are an essential tool for any supervisor who wishes to improve his or her managerial skills.

Unfortunately, the United Nations system is currently behind the times in this area. At present, a supervisor need only please his or her supervisor to succeed, and treat his or her staff as they like. This does not encourage good management practices.