Ramaphosa’s trust tango: Can better communication save the dance?

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s government needs to learn something very quickly: he is operating from a position of very low trust.

South African citizens trust very little that is done by government right now and it means even those things the government does with the best of intentions will be viewed with suspicion.

That is what happens when trust is repeatedly abused in a two-way relationship.

In fact, it has got so bad that it is now best for government to pre-empt negative reactions and explain matters beforehand.

Take the matter of the visit of the president of the United Arab Emirates and his substantial entourage to the Eastern Cape, for example.

Given the known history associated with a large plane carrying guests landing at a remote airport (as opposed to the bigger commercial ones), it should have been anticipated citizens and the media would ask the question:

“Is this another Gupta-Waterkloof situation?”

Instead of being put on the defensive, the government should have come out and explained before the planes landed in Bisho, that diplomatic goodwill extended to visiting heads of state is flexible depending on who they are and what they mean to the country.

For the government to explain itself beforehand all the time would take a lot of energy and time, but that is way better than having three press conferences after the fact, explaining why President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al Nahyan and his guests received “special treatment”.

In fact, explaining before it happened would mean also letting the country know, this being a private visit by the president of the UAE, he owes the country no explanation whatsoever on his country’s refusal to extradite the Gupta brothers.

Proper communication channels being kept open during a situation of such low trust does a lot to help mitigate the situation.

When the International Criminal Court issued the warrant of arrest for Russian president Vladimir Putin, knowing fully well he is due to travel to South Africa later in the year, it was not time for the government to speak with a forked tongue or for kneejerk reactions.

The government has been here before and even though the outcomes with former Sudan President Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir were not what the world expected of South Africa, lessons were learnt.

There is no way that South Africa would even begin to contemplate arresting a leader of a superpower, let alone Putin of Russia.

It is not going to happen and was never going to happen.

People like the premier of the Western Cape, Alan Winde, were always going to play politics but if the government was more organised, maybe it wouldn’t be embarrassed by one of its own.

Winde is in government, after all, and surely him communicating something in contradiction with national government would land him in official trouble.

But the government itself is not communicating truthfully and openly on about its true intentions. So opportunists like Winde choose to fill the confused void.

If Ramaphosa really hopes to come back for a second term, he will have to do much better than he doing now in terms of getting ahead of issues.

Issues are guaranteed to be there because the government has consistently let down the people of South Africa. What is left now is to consistently save face by communicating ahead of issues.

Winning back people’s trust will take something short of a miracle but, in the meantime, in order to govern effectively, Ramaphosa and his people must keep ahead of problems.