By Carl Niehaus, MP
10 June 1996
Madam Speaker
Honourable Deputy-President Mbeki
Honourable Members
Most South Africans still live in an information starved society. Worse, most people don't even know how much they don't know.
There is clearly a large role for government communications of the purely informative and educative variety. As government makes new policies and transformation takes hold, the task is to effectively create and disseminate basic information on a wide range of issues which are new to most people.
However, in order to be effectively communicated, the new policies must be understood and supported by the communicators. It is simply not sufficient to treat this as a technical process divorced from the politics driving the transformation. Communications is less about being able to write a good press release, than about BEING ABLE TO GET POLITICAL POSITIONS AND STRATEGIES UNDERSTOOD.
The existing structures were created under a system of government which neither needed nor desired to empower the vast majority of South Africans through effective communications. These structures have provided ineffective, not the least because communicators have been too distant from the political and policy making centre of ministries.
The NATIONAL COMMUNCATIONS TASK GROUP is currently hard at work preparing its report on a relevant government communications policy. In assessing that report government will have to devise an appropriate communications strategy.
While it is understandable that the South African Communications Service (SACS) - as an existing structure - cannot stop functioning while the jury is out on its future, a careful balancing act is necessary.
The new Head of SACS, Mr Solly Kotane, and his colleagues are in an unenviable position. There is clearly an urgent need for effective government communication, and at the ARNISTON MEDIA CONFERENCE there was broad consensus regarding the need for A CENTRAL INFORMATION-GATHERING, PROCESSING AND COMMUNICATION SERVICE FOR GOVERNMENT.
GOVERNMENT HAS A RESPONSIBILITY TO TALK TO THE CONSTITUENCY THAT VOTED IT INTO POWER, AND IT MUST BE EMPOWERED TO DO SO EFFECTIVELY.
However, Mr Kotane and his colleagues will have to make haste slowly, because to proceed simply within the straight-jacket of the current structure of SACS, may very well mean a perpetuation of the old ineffectiveness in a new guise.
SACS is located too far away from the engine roms of transformation to be effective - even if it is headed by new appointees.
The restructuring of a central communications service needs to start with a communications strategy. The structure must follow from that strategy. From such a communications strategy will have to follow decisions about whether all the current branches of SACS' operations are truly needed. It is only then that decisions about maintaining or shedding some these, and possibly contracting some of government's technical communication needs out to the private sector, can be made.
The real political co-ordination and drive for government's communications efforts should come from the politicians who are in charge through their own communications officials.
THE CENTRAL COMMUNICATIONS SERVICE MUST BE RESTRUCTURED IN AN ENVIRONMENT OF STRONG POLITICALLY EMPOWERED AND COMBINED MINISTERIAL-DEPARTMENTAL COMMUNICATION STRUCTURES.
It is tragic tha communication structures ad attitudes currently in place in minitries and departments still differ seldomly from those of the apartheid era. Sadly, Ministers are not equipped to communicate effectively. Press spokespersons are lone individuals on the staff of ministers, while in the various departments there are SEPARATE communicatins directorates. In many departments the myth persists of "tehnical communication", divorcd from the politics of the Ministers.
This situation is contrary to what is necessary for effective government communications. Democratic government needs unified structures which allow ministries/departments to communicate with one voice, and the head of communications should be sufficiently senior and politically close to the Minister to be able to participate in strateic policy formulation.
Having the right politics and the right experience is often more important in communicating polcy than having formal comunications qualifications - politically inded people will learn the communications skills. In many countries, including the United States of America, the United Kingdom and Germany, the communications chief is a political appointee paid at the rank of deputy or even director general.
While details vary, the staff are generally a combination of career civil servants and political appointees. However, in all cases these are high powered groups combining advisory and administrative skills of the highest order to insure the PRIMACY OF THE POLITICAL LEVEL.
Madam Speaker, when I recently made this point to a few journalist friends some of them accused me of wanting to tighten political control over government information to the point of propagandistic manipulation. I continue to be astonished that there can still be in this day and age people in the media world who try to hold onto the possibility of a neutral communicator/spokesperson. I suspect that their need for such a mythical figure is borne more out of their own lack of skill to discern between communication that is based in and informed by the political decision making process - and on the other hand crude propaganda.
Good journalists will concede that they can gain much more from a government spokesperson who understands the politics and processes that have gone into decision making, than from someone who is simply a bureaucratic mouthpiece. Why is it that the central communications service in the Federal Republic of Germany, which falls directly under the Office of the Chancellor, and is headed by a political appointee, is not considered to be simply a crude propaganda instrument? But curiously enough when one says in South Africa that the government's communication strategy must be steered by the politicians who are in charge, then there are suddenly howls of "government propaganda"?
Madam Speaker, it is true that Government is not receiving a fair press. As a consequence the relations between the ANC components of government and the media are at a low point. There can be no doubt that the media is still too white and conservative, particularly in senior editorial and management positions, and that ownership structures present similar problems to those across large sectors of a strongly monopolistic economy.
Yet, none of this absolves the government from its responsibility to communicate as effectively and efficiently as it can via the established media. In fact the opposite is true: the weaker the media, the more important it is to have strong, effective and credible government communications. The better government communications are, the more it will have the right to criticise what the media is doing.
We should anyhow disabuse ourselves of the notion that there will always be peace and harmony between the media and the government. There is usually a somewhat antagonistic relationship between government and the media in a democracy. Support for, and guaranteeing an independent media is worth infinitely more than slavish support of lapdogs who are not taken seriously by the public.
Thank you.