The treacherous road ahead for government to win the communications war to fight Covid-19

The success of a communications strategy may be judged in a very easy way. Do people act on it? Do they change their behaviour after seeing and consuming the communication that has been sent towards them? So far, it seems, the answer is yes. Citizens are behaving differently, gatherings have generally been cancelled (apart from a few preachers  ...), the roads can be almost empty at times, people are cutting down on the distances they move around. And, on Tuesday morning, shops seemed to be very full indeed...

This suggests that so far, government communications has been seen as credible. This is also because there are certain advantages that government has in what is, hopefully, a unique situation.

The first is that in any crisis, any statement by the President gets acres of airtime. It’s not just that the President speaks and is immediately taken live by any television or radio station. It’s that those comments are then replayed, and endlessly discussed. Because the first statement was on a Sunday night, and was an actual action (the announcement of a declaration of a State of National Disaster), this set the tone for what could be called the breakfast news cycle. It was the only conversation on Monday last week.

His second big announcement, that of the “national lockdown”, easily got the same attention. The speech itself was measured and delivered in a calm, sober way. It was clear to any observer that much thought had gone into the measures and almost all of their implications had been considered.

This helps government immeasurably. While it may seem unkind, it is not wrong to ask whether these measures would be adopted so quickly if another person had been in his position at this time...

Government has also used its other big advantage, its sheer size.

Every minister can be a newsmaker, and has the ability to control the narrative for a few hours at a time, because of the legal power that they have. Announcements about regulations affect everyone, and so they receive a huge amount of coverage.

That said, the sight of 20 ministers in last week’s Monday press conference was unprecedented. It meant that the entire day’s coverage was given to government. Experts might have appeared on certain channels, but often only to comment on the actions of government. 

Since then, there have been regular briefings and updates.

The amount of careful management that can go into this is immense. On Thursday last week, in the morning, Ramaphosa met religious leaders. That meant reporters led bulletins outside the meeting. After he came out and spoke with the leaders in public, the story moved to a briefing by Cooperative Governance Minister Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma. That briefing started slightly late, but ended in time to ensure there was no clash with the interest rate announcement by Reserve Bank Governor Lesetja Kganyago (which was delivered in a bizarrely empty room to limit the spread of the virus). While it may seem easy to ensure a press conference ends on time, it is not. Someone somewhere might have spent some serious effort ensuring that there was no time clash.

The aim of government in this time may well be to ensure that all news channels and radio stations are broadcasting the same briefing at the same time. By doing that, they ensure that there is only one message.

The other tactic, which has appeared to work fairly well, is to use other leaders in society to continue the messaging.

Because of the often obvious enmity in our politics, the sight of political leaders from different parties representing different constituencies all together in one place is rare. It is even rarer still for them all to go public and tell their constituencies to follow the President’s lead. This allows the message to be reinforced. For some, who are attitudinally disposed to simply opposing anything the government does, the message coming from their political leader may be stronger than if it were to come from the President. 

However, the potential for missteps here is vast.

A problem facing government will be the credibility of people doing the messaging.

For the President, this may not be a huge problem, at least for now. But it may be for some ministers in his Cabinet.

For instance, Fikile Mbalula is currently Minister of Transport, and thus in charge of regulations around whether certain roads could be closed, or train networks shut down. In the past he has tried to fight off controversies,  including accusations that he benefited from payments made to him as Sports Minister. On his watch as police minister, the office got embroiled in allegations of funds being siphoned off  from the SAPS Crime Intelligence budget to buy votes prior to the ANC’s 2017 elective conference. For several months he used the Twitter handle “FearFokol”. 

Some South Africans will find several of the people who are to be tasked with actually announcing various communications to be less than trustworthy.

There is another problem. Those who like to sow confusion and division are still at work. Twitter and WhatsApp groups hummed on Tuesday morning to the sight of images claiming that government’s assistance to small businesses would apply only to firms that were majority black owned or had majority black workers. Instead of focusing on the issue at hand, the pandemic and the economic situation it creates, this led people to question whether they were valued as much as others, and whether government was treating some people differently to others.

In the end, sometimes it doesn’t matter where the truth lies, the ill-feeling has been sown, even if the lie is revealed to be a lie.

Government needs to work hard against this kind of problem. The only answer is regular daily, or twice-daily briefings. It’s vital that journalists be allowed to ask questions and press for answers, as that will ensure their audiences are able to get facts on issues like this.

The longer this goes on, the more time those who want to sow division will have to cook up this kind of issue.

At the same time, the flood of news that has come from government over the last few days will have to dry up, there will simply be no more announcements to make. This will lead to a news famine, where there is nothing to report. Even the old journalistic standbys of car accidents and crime will come to halt. Government’s communicators will have to find interesting ways to fill this vacuum, lest it be filled by others with different agendas.

In the meantime, those political leaders from opposition parties who currently support Ramaphosa in public will start to find ways to snipe and criticise. This will lessen their effectiveness in terms of echoing the President’s message into their constituencies.

It should be remembered that a very strange thing is about to happen. South Africans from all walks of life, from many varied different parts of our society, come together on a daily basis to perform economic activity, together. Cleaners, Sandton CEOs, guards, factory workers, managers etc spend their days together. Offices are shared by people from different parts of the country who grew up speaking different languages and who are of different faiths. The economy creates integration.

All of this is about to be stopped for three weeks. People will only be at home, and with their families. They will also consume media in patterns differently to the way they do normally. And that may well make it more difficult for government to continue to dominate the narrative in the way that it is doing at the moment. DM