Crisis communications at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic: A case study of the Ghanaian president’s fourth update on coronavirus

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic was a testbed for crisis communication, leading to recommendations on how to meet communicative goals and several individual case studies. This paper contributes to the latter by engaging in a detailed three-level analysis of an early, pivotal address to the nation by Ghana’s president Nana Akufo-Addo. In terms of infection rates and deaths, Ghana has been much less severely impacted by the pandemic than other countries, making it worthwhile to look at the role of official communications. This study investigates how the president addressed the public at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, in what ways the linguistic features of his address reflected the specific political context, and what potential impact his language use had on the behaviour of the public. Findings show that linguistic and, to a lesser extent, visual elements represent the president as powerful, authoritative, but somewhat detached from the audience. However, this is balanced by direct appeals to the same audience, whose cooperation he seeks to win rather than enforce. This balance reflects the political and socio-cultural context of the text, as further evidenced by comments on the address on Akufo-Addo’s Facebook page.