Addressing the Nation

I have been working at the President’s Office for sometime now, and as an intern, I found myself being called to do little stuff from other sections that had related work. Some of these include coordinating media and making the necessary technical arrangements to enable live audio and video coverage of multiple political swearing-in ceremonies that took place simultaneously across the whole country, and media monitoring and information gathering (including transcription and compilation of relevant content from television and print media) for a particular incident that I am not sure I am at liberty to discuss.

Hah! I am not intending to make this seem so cloak and dagger, and I can tell you that this is certainly not something that is on the level of national security or anything (I was just an intern after all!).

Anyways, towards end of my internship, more and more of my workload had to do with gathering, compiling and summarizing data from various government departments to prepare reports that could be used for the Presidential Address to the People’s Majlis. This is something similar to the State of the Union Address given by the President of the United States to the US Congress.

The presidential address is a news making event in and of itself, as it is both an indicator of the current status of various aspects of the country, as well as a statement on government policy and planning for the coming year. The address is formally presented to the Majlis by the President, but the event is broadcast live, and a large segment of the population tunes in to the live feed.

The attention and scrutiny given to the address means that it has to be considered carefully through a public relations perspective. To put it simply, there should not be anything in the address that projects negativity while at the same time, all pertinent issues that are in the public consciousness should be tackled truthfully.

Once again, I got to sit in the meetings convened to prepare the Presidential Address, which went on until my internship ended. These meetings were lead by the Press Secretary Mohamed Zuhair himself. Zuhair is a veteran of the media industry and someone I found to be very well versed in a multitude of subjects.

I was also included in the team assigned with the translation of the address in to English, and I managed to finish a considerable portion before my internship concluded. I am particularly happy with the work I did on this project, and I was happy for the opportunity.

This probably would be my last post, and I would like to thank everyone who made this experience possible for me, and also to those who made it an enjoyable time, because I really didn’t go in expecting that! There is a lot of work to be done in the Public Relations sphere in the Maldives, and I hope I would be able to take my part in it before long.