Cabinet ministers need to win back the trust of the nation

Warfare involves secrecy, disinformation and propaganda. Bamboozling your enemy is often a way to beat him, perhaps best exemplified in the way the Allies painstakingly misled the Germans about the location of the D-Day landings in 1944. The principle also applies to the world’s war on Covid-19, the disease caused by a new virus that has run rings around scientific, social and political efforts to contain it. Virologists and epidemiologists have been working around the clock for months to outwit this invisible enemy. They have won the odd battle, but the war will rage for the foreseeable future — and the virus no doubt has some tricks and mutations up its sleeve as it evolves in its fight for supremacy.

In the four months since Covid-19 changed all of our lives forever, it has become horrifyingly clear that this is a world war that deserves the appellation. It will be won only if nations unite, and if the citizens of individual countries stand as one behind leaders who are wise, sensible, clear and trustworthy. There can be no place for muddle, furtiveness, ulterior motives or incompetence, and despite the widely praised performance by President Cyril Ramaphosa, those regrettable but common traits of leadership have begun to assert themselves in recent days.

The basic education department’s bungled effort this week to inform 11.5-million schoolchildren and their families when classes might resume is a case in point. After five weeks of lockdown, parents and caregivers are stressed to breaking point. They deserve a clear message about what happens next. But even when minister Angie Motshekga tried to mop up the mess left by her deputy and director-general, she failed. Will schools begin to go back on June 1, as finally proposed?

No-one knows. As for stop-go-stop tobacco sales, the mystery is even deeper.

The coronavirus has rendered people powerless to direct the course of their lives. Information is the one thing that can help them recover a sense of control, and it is here that the government at all levels has left a worrying vacuum.

Residents of townships — the communities where basic mitigation measures such as handwashing and physical distancing are often difficult — spoke to the

Sunday Times this week. They said they understood little about the coronavirus or the lockdown. Matter-of-factly, two young men in Cape Town said they were resigned to dying.

The message explaining that people need to protect themselves and their neighbours is not reaching them in their own languages, or with clarity. Nor will it get through to them by police sjambokkings or by disciplining from soldiers. Information about how the virus spreads in their neighbourhoods is also sparse. Even in Gauteng and the Western Cape, the only provinces publishing daily infection statistics for health subdistricts, there is not enough data for it to be useful. In Cape Town, for example, the western subdistrict has the highest per capita infection rate but it stretches from Camps Bay to Atlantis, suburbs so fundamentally different they might as well be on different planets.

With the exception of Ramaphosa, who ought to address the nation more frequently, cabinet ministers have failed the communication test, partly because of awful media skills but also because of their reluctance to take South Africans into their confidence. Far too much time and energy have been spent arguing about cigarette and alcohol bans, for instance; far too little explaining why these are needed. The result? Seeds of rebellion take root and undermine more important battlefields.

Trust works only if it exists on both sides. If we are to trust the government, at all levels, to take decisions in our best interests as the pandemic continues, those in government need to suppress their overdeveloped affection for secrecy and spin, and to trust us. It will help everyone to see more clearly into an uncertain future.

Ministers have failed … partly because of awful media skills