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.

Victory Speech

In my last post I detailed some of the events that were happening around the time I was doing my internship at the President’s Office, namely, the local council elections.

This was the first time ever that such councils were elected in the Maldives. The number of seats won by two main political parties, the Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP), and Dhivehi Rayyithunge Party (DRP) were somewhat evenly matched. MDP won the majority seats in almost all of the heavily populated constituencies while DRP had a bigger margin of victory on total seats won. This lead to both sides claiming victory, and there was no clear conclusion to be reached.

But claiming victory means that a victory speech has to follow and that was the next task on hand. The speech was to be given by President Mohammed Nasheed. This was quite a high level affair, and I was fortunate to have been allowed to sit in during the meeting. I got a first hand experience of how official speeches are prepared. The team involved in this task comprised of junior executive and technical staff, as well as senior officials from policy and media sections. It was a very cooperative and collaborative effort, and I was made comfortable with pitching in to the discussion if I had something to add.

There was a lot of bouncing around of ideas, rephrasing and reworking parts from earlier speeches given by the President to make it more relevant to the occasion, and keeping it current. The pacing, flow and even individual words were analyzed in detail. I was allowed to leave early from the meeting, as there was further work to be done that night that I might be called for, so I left before the meeting concluded.

Later that night I caught part of the speech when it was broadcast live on the state television channel, and I found myself listening in to hear how much of the speech I recognized from the meeting (President Nasheed is an eloquent orator, and its frequently the case where he would veer off from the prepared speech and just ad-lib).

I think most of the speech that we worked made it intact in to the final delivery, which felt good, cause how ever small the part I played, I knew it was part of something major.

Second Day

This is my second post about my internship. As I mentioned before, I was interning at the Office of the President of Maldives. There’s almost always a lot going on there. But the period when I initially joined, was every busier than usual. For the very first time in the history of Maldives, local council elections were being held, in each island and also for each atoll. So there was a lot of political turbulence, campaigning, media coverage and media monitoring going on.

I joined in the midst of all this, so it was a bit different from routine work. My first day of work, the election had taken place, and ballot counting was underway, with preliminary results being announced as they come. There was a need to have the information available at a glance and in an organized manner. I was assigned with one other guy and we had to keep an eye on the results being announced, assemble the information in to a summarized form, and make the whole thing fit to be filed.

During this time, I was supervised by Husham, who was acting as a coordinator of sorts, for media and communication at the President’s Office (PO) for the election period. Husham was an experienced journalist before his move to the civil sector, and he had excellent connections and a lot of know how. As you must know, this comes equally useful in Public Relations as well.

It was not challenging work, but time consuming and studious, and we had to really pay attention to detail. Most of the day and part of the night was spent working on gathering and arranging and finally filing the data. But this was still only a preparation for the actual public relation events that was soon to follow. More on that in the next blog post.

First day at the President’s Office

This is Ali Nizar, a PR student at Limkokwing University.

I had about three places that I really wanted to secure an internship position at, and the President’s Office was one. I was fortunate enough to secure and internship at the office and not long after they called me in to tell me I got it, I was called to start reporting to office.

As you might imagine, the President’s Office is one of the most prominent and high profile place of work in the country, and not just among the civil service sector. I believe there are other government departments that have a heavier workload of direct public service, but nowhere would the communication between an organization and the public be under more scrutiny or be expected to maintain immaculate levels of professionalism. It was not particularly comforting.

I was assigned to the Press Office, which is very much about PR. There are other related sections as well, one being the actual Public Relations section, albeit limited in scope, and the communications section.

That’s a bit about the place of work. I will detail a bit more about the duties and tasks the Press Office is responsible for in my next blog post. I’m a bit late with these posts, due to some problems with the blog invitations. But things are going to be going smoothly from now on. Hopefully.