Lindiwe Sisulu and co playing broken telephone in a war of words that aren’t their own

There is a delicious irony to the current storm around the opinion piece by tourism minister Lindiwe Sisulu and the slew of counter-columns it generated, culminating in her dressing down via a governmental communique from the president.

The irony is this: It is a controversy about what she wrote, and few of the players in this governmental soap opera actually wrote any of the articles attributed to them.

We live in a time when ideas, discourse, content, and general verbiage are everywhere.

People are saying things to each other constantly, none more so than the powerful people who run our society – leaders of government, business, NGOs and civil society.

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These people are influential, experienced and wise, their thoughts have value, import and influence. This is why they are so sought-after to write “think pieces” for our various media platforms. 

However, these influential, important people are also extremely busy, and do not really have the couple of hours it takes to organise their thoughts and type up a few hundred words on a topic close to their hearts. 

And so the job of doing the actual writing, falls to the ghostwriters, speechwriters, spin doctors, PR staff, liaison officers and comms teams of this world. 

Before they start writing the opinion piece, they might be lucky enough to have a short briefing with the person in whose name it will be published.

Sometimes they might not.

After a few months or years, they might develop a type of telepathy, where the writer begins to understand what the principle thinks on many issues, without having to explicitly discuss it.

Sometimes, though, this understanding can go awry.

Maybe there’s not enough time to really clarify what the opinion is.

Maybe the writer gets a bit carried away, or maybe the briefing process is so poor, or so minimal that the writer is left to their own devices in putting something together that will still bear the name of the Big Boss. 

Perhaps something like this is what happened with Ms Sisulu’s article.

Cue mass national consternation about an article that condemns the current economic dispensation, the judiciary, and the very constitution on which South Africa’s democracy is founded. 

This was then followed by a slew of response pieces by other influential South Africans.

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Many of these were probably also ghostwritten, by writers who “pretty much” understand what their bosses think. 

At this point, there is a war of words, but it’s being fought by proxy, not by the people involved.

It’s being fought by commissioned writers, paid to paraphrase these political players and season their comms with buzzwords or populist phraseology. 

Most recently, an article reported on a meeting that apparently happened between the president and the minister, where it was reported that the minister apologised for the initial article. 

The presidency appeared to apologise on behalf of Sisulu, who almost immediately withdrew the proxy apology, saying “I didn’t say what you said I said about what I said”!

We have now reached such a base level of separation between ideas, events, actual truth and how it is expressed, that is almost impossible to form any sincere opinions. 

There is ostensibly a “battle of ideas” going on, but these ideas are being expressed, clumsily, by people trying to interpret what other people may or may not think, or have said, about something else, that was also ghostwritten by someone else who is not an expert, but just a writer who can string words together grammatically. 

These articles are also being read by a nation of people who read and comprehend through a cloudy lens of personal bias and imperfect comprehension. 

It’s a cock-up. 

Because of the broken-down telephone of layers through which ideas are being expressed, the cynicism of the leaders and their trend-surfing opportunism, we have almost no way of knowing what any of our leaders really believe in. 

Reading the missives of our leaders will not help us, because it’s not them writing them, and it’s all just strategic comms, managed by teams with varying degrees of effectiveness, and being interpreted by armies of biased analysts who all have ulterior motives. 

What we are left with is words that have no objective meaning, attributed to people prepared to say almost anything, in order to achieve or cling to power. 

It would be easy to lose hope, but in such a cynical communications landscape, authentic, principled ideas shine like a beacon, they resonate, grab people’s minds and make them believe. 

Finding those ideas, these days, is like panning for nuggets of gold in a recycling bin.

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