Original article by TJ Jordan at DeSmog
MetropolitanRepublic enlisted social media influencers to promote giant oil project as climate campaigners suffered beatings and arrests.
Last November, a beaming group of staff from MetropolitanRepublic collected their gorilla-shaped trophy at the Silverback Awards, Uganda’s top advertising and public relations gala.
The South African PR agency had won its prize for promoting the “sustainable development” of Uganda’s untapped oil reserves by French oil company TotalEnergies.
MetropolitanRepublic — which is part-owned by British communications giant WPP — described the brief for the award-winning “Action for Sustainability” campaign in its entry to the Silverback Awards: to devise an approach that “squashed all the negative PR” from protests against TotalEnergies’ plans for a 1,443-kilometre pipeline to export oil from Uganda’s Lake Albert via neighbouring Tanzania.
An accompanying video featured photographs of Ugandan anti-pipeline campaigners to illustrate this “backlash” and described them as “haters”.
“How do you launch a successful project off the back of this?” asks the narrator in the video. “Well, you develop a 360 PR campaign that retells your story the way it should be told.”
Now, DeSmog can reveal that Ugandan police or military personnel have arrested, beaten, threatened, or harassed at least eight of the 15 campaigners pictured in MetropolitanRepublic’s award submission video.
These incidents — documented via video taken at protests, interviews with the campaigners, and police records — took place both before and after the video was published on the Silverback website in March.
There is no indication that MetropolitanRepublic’s campaign or the award submission led directly to any specific incidents affecting the activists. Nevertheless, DeSmog found that the agency engaged a network of social media influencers to post hundreds of times in support of TotalEnergies’ plans to mitigate the impact of the pipeline — even as protestors were being beaten and harassed.
“These PR firms are sponsoring our oppression,” said Hillary Innocent Taylor Seguya, one of the campaigners pictured in MetropolitanRepublic’s award submission video. “The more you push misinformation to the rest of the world, the more it means that you don’t care about our rights.”
Since the pipeline project was first announced in 2017, advocacy groups have highlighted concerns over the displacement of communities in Uganda and Tanzania, damage to ecosystems and wildlife, and the climate impact of burning Uganda’s oil. The outcry has prompted some banks, insurers, and the PR company Edelman — which has represented oil companies for decades — to shun the project, known as the East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline, or EACOP.
In June this year, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged communications agencies to stop working for fossil fuel companies, saying PR campaigns run by “Mad Men fuelling the madness” were making the climate crisis harder to address.
MetropolitanRepublic, however, defended its role in promoting the pipeline — a joint venture between TotalEnergies and state oil companies from Uganda, Tanzania, and China.
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Original article by TJ Jordan continues at DeSmog