HILARY JOFFE: SA shoots itself in the foot with bungled messaging on Omicron discovery

Back in February, when SA was coming out of its second wave of the coronavirus, the Financial Times’ Joseph Cotterill wrote about the leading edge SA scientists and laboratories that had been developed for HIV and TB but repurposed for the pandemic, enabling the country to identify the Beta variant rapidly.

Beta was the one that started life as the “SA variant” and many will remember how swiftly the UK red-listed us as soon as our scientists went public on their discovery — a listing they took a whole month to impose on India after the Indian or Delta variant emerged.

The point is that Cotterill’s story of SA’s technological prowess in identifying variants was surely one which SA’s government should itself have been making part of our narrative from the start. Finally, President Cyril Ramaphosa included it in the messaging for his “family meeting” on Sunday. But too late to prevent Southern Africa from, once again, being typecast as the dark continent of the racist tropes, the one from which bad variants such as Beta and now Omicron come.

The World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) support for SA’s transparency and timeous disclosure of the Omicron variant, and its warning against closing the world’s borders, also came too late.

And so too did the damage control effort at Monday’s government media briefing, which said all the sensible and panic-allaying things that should have been said in the first place about Omicron.

There’s been heated debate about whether SA should have rushed into the public domain to announce the discovery of Omicron, as it did at a hastily called lunchtime press conference on Thursday, which prompted international panic and almost immediate red-listing.

The government and the scientists clearly couldn’t resist bragging about the discovery. They might have felt under pressure to announce after the story of a new variant was picked up in the UK media. Some would argue the UK and international response was going to be the same whatever we said or didn’t say.

And there can be no question that transparency is essential for any government, or any organisation, that wants to be trusted by its citizens or stakeholders.

But as any CEO who has ever presented a set of financial results or had to address a crisis knows, there are many different ways to tell a (transparent) story; how you tell it, and who tells it, can matter a great deal to the outcome. Did SA’s government leaders talk to their international colleagues in the WHO and in other countries to provide support and even stand beside them before the variant announcement was made — by two scientists — on Thursday?

How much thought was given to how the news of a new variant would be heard, at home and abroad? And did anyone think about the messaging? Was there any sort of clear communications strategy? Or was the panic that resulted just the predictable result of the absence of one?

One of the first rules of crisis communications is you don’t just go out and shout “we have a problem and it’s very bad”; you try to give people a sense that you’re on it, as in “we are working as hard as we can to address this new problem that’s emerged, this is what we know, this is what we don’t know, we will update you at least once a day and will share new info with you as we receive it….”

And one of the next rules is if it is big, the person at the top needs to be seen to be on top of it and doing the talking — immediately, not three days later.

But when it comes to Covid-19 communications government tends to veer between all and nothing. We don’t have regular briefings by the government (as they do in US or UK) nor are we told what the scientists are advising or how government has responded to their advice. It’s all usually a bit of a black box. Then all of a sudden Prof Tulio de Oliveira pops up, dramatically, to announce the discovery of a new variant.

The variant’s unfortunate timing means SA was probably never going to have as much of a tourist season as it so desperately needed, even if messaging had been more nuanced. And the government now has no firepower left to support those affected.

The obvious and only way to mitigate the damage is to vaccinate as many people as possible as soon as possible. But here, too, the government’s communications strategy has been a tragic mess. Ramaphosa’s messaging was all wrong from the start, focusing as it did on, “Nobody will be forced to have the vaccine”. That allowed the fear and the fake news to thrive for months, curbing demand to the extent that SA has now vaccinated only just over a third of its population, despite having plenty of supply.

Only now is Ramaphosa finally talking vaccine mandates and passports — as business has been urging him to do for months. He has appointed a task team to look at the details. It’s late. But it’s not too late, and if the variant provides the platform to accelerate the rollout that can only be good for the health of SA’s people and of its economy.