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MONROVIA, Liberia – Revered Liberian journalist Patrick Honnah has been critiquing President Weah’s recent interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), and the popular broadcast journalist is of the belief that handlers of the Liberian leader needed to give him much more prepping to have better prepared the retired footballer for the interview with a reputable news outlet like the BBC.
President Weah, himself, has on many occasions hinted not being an excellent public speaker, like when he gave his inaugural address on 22 January 2018, stating that his greatest contribution to Liberia during his reign as president may not lie in the eloquence of his speeches.
On Tuesday, a BBC documentary and a news interview with President Weah were both made public, with many, both Liberians and non-Liberians, expressing antipathy to how the president drearily handled himself regarding his responses to questions posed to him.
For his part, award-winning broadcast journalist Honnah, who believes the president’s interviewee skills fell below the belt, thinks there is nothing wrong with prepping any leader for an interview, needless to say on a widely monitored international news organ like the BBC.
“As an interviewer myself, I have had to share “key areas to cover” with interviewees whenever they requested before the interview,” Honnah wrote Wednesday on his official Facebook page.
He continued: “The BBC is no child’s play! Its audience is extremely huge and sophisticated, for the most part. You cannot bribe them to understand that you have inadequacies or deficiencies. They don’t have time for that! Some are professors in countries like Nigeria, or Uganda, or real political scientists, some others are too wealthy to want money from you or you cannot bribe them with jobs to bootlick and say “Chief you were not easy yesterday ooo.” They don’t have to join you to have food on their tables. You cannot threaten to take their livelihood and call them enemies of the state. They wouldn’t care at all.”
Honnah, who insists that President Weah should have been well prepared prior to sitting an interview with the BBC further wrote: “For a “RARE” interview as the BBC described it, the quality was poor, the substance misplaced and the President missed out on an opportunity to tell the world that he knew what he was saying.”
“For example: Think about this, on the same platform, the same day, the leadership of Sierra Leone was announcing strategies to shift from the extractive sector to agriculture to become self-reliant. Meanwhile, the leader of Liberia, in response to a question about the economy, said “I am not a financial expert……that’s why we brought in our own rice…” Gosh, are you kidding me???”
Honnah, a former deputy director general for media services at state broadcaster LBS, avers that President Weah’s handlers should have prepped him beforehand, so that the Liberian leader would have been up to the task for any question about reviving the fast-declining Liberian economy.
“This would have restored “hope” in the minds of Liberians and encouraged investors monitoring such an international wire,” Honnah wrote.
He penned that even the BBC Correspondent did no favors to the former World Best footballer, by putting a picture of the Clara Town statute and a picture of a stockpile of garbage immediately after President Weah said one of his foremost achievements was to “build a road to where he grew up” and then he echoed “Clara Town.”
“Pictures, they say, tell a thousand words. Sophisticated people around the world will see this as a self-centered approach to development (even though they needed it) for the fact that “you grew up there, and so you did it first,” Honnah added.
Instead, Honnah cautioned that President Weah could have highlighted other community road projects which his government is undertaking, adding that an interview with controversial talk radio host Henry Costa on the same network immediately after the president’s interview did not help the intent of the Liberian leader’s interview.
“I encourage you to read the reactions from around the world (people who are not hustling for your jobs) to the President’s interview and read yours (people who expect jobs from the President) to decipher. See what the other “eye” is seeing. We should never settle for less in this day and age my people,” Honnah concluded, in an apparent reaction to rants from the president’s supporters and blind loyalists who are hailing him for the interview in which several others believe the Liberian leader flunked.
