Namibian PR: Masterclass in Institutional Silence

The open air conditioning Swakopmund provides was crisp and refreshing last week, but it did precious little to clear the fog around our public relations officers and spokespersons.

Two weeks ago, they gathered at the Effective Communicators Conference 2026 under the grand theme ‘Communication Reconsidered: A Driving Force for Constant Progress’.

Watching vice president Lucia Witbooi deliver opening remarks alongside Botswana’s vice president, Ndaba Gaolathe, one could almost forget that the industry being celebrated is currently in a state of self-induced paralysis.

Delegates discussed artificial intelligence, digital transformation, and the noble quest to earn public trust.

Yet, the day-to-day reality of Namibian public relations remains trapped in a subterranean abyss of incompetence.

If this fraternity truly wishes to reconsider its purpose, it must abandon the lofty rhetoric and confront the basic failures that turn our daily news cycle into a comedy of errors.

First, our frustrated brand ambassadors must learn to actually communicate. It is a grotesque irony that an industry populated by individuals holding degrees in communications are defined entirely by silence.

Enquiries often vanish into a black hole of administrative apathy.

Spokespersons treat simple questions about public funds as if they were state secrets, emerging only when forced by scandal, blinking into the light with defensiveness and outrage.

This silence is paired with a comical inability to manage time.

A journalist requesting basic information on a Monday is routinely met with promises of a swift response, only to receive a vague, half-hearted paragraph three weeks later when they hope the story has already died. In the fast-moving digital world, responding to an urgent crisis at the pace of a sleeping tortoise is not strategic patience.

It is institutional failure.

Instead of answering direct questions, these officers prefer to flood newsrooms with self-congratulatory press statements. This clutter is not news. It is expensive, tree-destroying arrogance designed to justify the existence of redundant communication departments.

When these press releases do arrive, they are written with a bizarre narcissism that insists on repeating the company’s full legal name in every single paragraph. Readers are forced to digest eye-watering prose where the Namibian National Widget Development Corporation announces that the Namibian National Widget Development Corporation has met with stakeholders to discuss the Namibian National Widget Development Corporation’s strategic plan for widgets.

This brand-obsessed mutilation of the English language reads less like professional communication and more like the manic scribblings of an institutional narcissist.

This corporate ego goes hand in hand with an absolute refusal to engage in human interaction with journalists.

The Namibian government and parastatal public relations officer has retreated behind a fortress of automated emails, generic social media templates, and stone-cold press offices.

These wannabe motivational speakers treat reporters not as working professionals seeking facts, but as hostile invaders to be managed, delayed, or outright ignored.

The basic, human courtliness of picking up a phone to clarify a point or having an honest conversation over coffee has been entirely replaced by cold, bureaucratic stonewalling.

This isolation is made far worse because most communicators do not have the faintest idea who actually works their beat. They send complex technical mining information to sport reporters, post court updates to entertainment desks, and address seasoned investigative journalists by the wrong name entirely.

This profound ignorance of the media landscape reveals a deep laziness. If a corporate spokesperson cannot be bothered to learn which journalists cover their specific sector, they have failed at the absolute baseline of their job description.

There is the catastrophic failure to prepare principals for any kind of interview. Ministers, chief executives, and board chairs are routinely thrown to the wolves of live television and radio without a shred of preparation, armed only with defensive postures and archaic talking points. They come to read from their iPad during early morning chat shows.

When pressed on real issues, these leaders stutter, dodge, and collapse under basic scrutiny, exposing not just their own shortcomings, but the criminal incompetence of the highly paid communications advisers standing silently in the shadows behind them.

Donald Trump spent more than an hour last Friday at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner insulting journalists and recycling his attacks on the media. He was rightly criticised for it. Yet buried in that ugly performance was one sentence that should perhaps resonate with communicators and politicians.

“I always find that when you don’t speak to the press, you always get a bad story,” he said. “When you do speak to the press, you have a shot at getting a good story.”

– News always deals with serious matters. Here we give you the other side.

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