By Noela EBOB BISONG
Blasius Ngome, a household name in the communication family in Cameroon, last April 16, defended his PhD in the university of Douala. The former Director of Communication, Translation and Public Relations at the National Refining Company, SONARA, sat before a six-man jury for about seven hours to defend his thesis on the topic; ‘Communication trends in corporate social responsibility by mobile telephone companies in Cameroon and outcomes’. The veteran who finished his Doctorate programme in record three years was supervised by Prof. Thomas Atenga and co-supervised by Associate Professor, Andrew Eyoh Edjua. Amongst several things, Ngome exposed that mobile telephone companies in Cameroon including MTN, Orange, Camtel etc are not effectively communicating on Newspapers and websites but instead focus more on television and radio stations, thus limiting their exposure to the world. He prescribed usage of a mix communication strategy to effectively reach stakeholders and customers around the globe. Ngome maintained that such an initiative will enable the companies generate more money, have better image, good reputation etc. The thesis was a combination of both quantitative and qualitative methods where the candidate content-analysed 20880 newspapers in Cameroon and had indepth interviews with 28 newspaper publishers. He observed that from the analysis, while 28.6% of respondents held that MTN never communicates its corporate social responsibility activities, 19.0% held it did. In the case of Orange, 23.8% held it didn’t communicate while 9.5% was in its favour. For Camtel, 64.3% of respondents believed the body does not communicate its corporate social responsibility activities, while 5.4% agreed it does. The president of the jury, Prof. Mpoche Kizitus awarded the candidate a 17/20 score, for showcasing mastery in an area he mentioned is often neglected. Ngome, in the thesis recommended that the Cameroon Parliament should mandate mobile telephone companies operating in the country to invest more on the society through corporate social responsibility activities and for such companies to sign a partnership with newspapers for the regular publication of their activities. Dr. Ngome who has been a lecturer of Corporate Communication in the University of Buea is author of at least eight books. He holds a Masters degree in Corporate Communication, Bsc. in bilingual letters, translation and linguistics as well as a diploma in journalism, communication and linguistics.
