The stories we tell in a season of fear and scarcity

The shocking treatment of African immigrants and refugees in South Africa is being played out across TV screens around the world. What does it say about that country’s society, and what is the responsibility of the nation’s communications professionals in telling the story?

It did not begin this week, or even this past month. The tension has been building for years. It has been stoked by frustration about jobs that never came, services that keep failing, and a future that feels smaller than the one we were promised. Over time, that pressure has hardened into finger-pointing and a search for someone to blame as a humanitarian failure plays out around undocumented migrants in South Africa.

A “deadline” that the government never issued was taken at face value, and vulnerable people were exploited by those who find their fear useful.

Panic set in, and with it, any last remnants of the philosophy of Ubuntu were discarded in the intoxication of mob justice. Families packed what they could carry and slept on pavements outside consulates, trying to find a way home, with the full realisation that they were out of options.

Whatever one believes about immigration, that painfully visceral image should give all of us pause. It is moments like this that shape a country’s sense of itself and tell the world what to think about it. As the once proud Rainbow Nation, it is not our finest hour.

I work with business leaders across the continent on exactly how to manage the gap between the message we intend and the meaning that lands. What has unfolded in South Africa over recent weeks is, at its heart, both a communication story and a communication crisis. It is the story of how a complex problem is compressed into a simple, human-shaped target, and how myopic and ill-equipped leaders grow reckless in telling it.

Two things about this human tragedy are true. The first is that the grievances driving this anger are real. Unemployment is punishing. Clinics are overstretched, services falter, and many South Africans have waited a very long time for the dignity that was promised to them. To dismiss that pain as mere prejudice is to misread the moment and to insult people who are genuinely struggling.

The second is that none of that is solved by pointing at the most powerless people in the room. When we adopt a scarcity mind set, we make a vulnerable person the focus of an institution’s failure, without fixing the institution. We simply move the anger somewhere it can do no good and a great deal of harm.

None of this lets the state off the hook. The failures are real, and unlike undocumented migrants, they have names and addresses and a place to call home. A public service hollowed out by years of neglect and corruption. Borders left porous by the very Ministers charged with securing them — a leadership failure that has festered while ordinary people paid the price.

But when those responsible for a functioning system fail at their jobs, they do not get to hand the bill to the most vulnerable people in the country. The honest answer to a broken institution is to fix it and hold its stewards to account, not to set upon the most vulnerable because they are within reach.

Malicious intent

That substitution is a deliberate narrative being built with malicious intent by organisations with an agenda to destabilise our lagging economy even further. When credible leaders and institutions leave a vacuum where explanation and accountability should be, that vacuum gets filled.

It gets filled by whoever offers the simplest story, and the simplest story is almost always the cruellest one: it’s not us, it’s them. Fear is an efficient editor. It cuts out nuance, history, and humanity, leaving only a target.

Leaders set the tone. When those with platforms direct grievance toward institutions and demand accountability from them, they channel legitimate anger toward something that can actually change. When they instead direct that anger at the vulnerable — or, worse, stay silent while others do — they lend their authority to a story that ends in shame and destruction.

And some have gone further, fanning the flames for their own advantage — tearing at our constitutional principles and hard-won democratic values that are meant to hold us together. Silence, in moments like this, is a position, not neutrality.

This is where leadership and communication meet, and why I believe we have a responsibility to tell our own story.

Reputational reckoning

There is a reputational reckoning here that business leaders cannot afford to ignore. A nation’s standing is one of its most valuable intangible assets, and it is built or eroded in exactly these moments. South Africa has long held a particular moral authority on this continent — a country that knows better than most what it costs when human beings are categorised and assigned a perceived value based on gender, race and ethnicity.

Each appalling image of anger and vitriol in our streets, now carried on television screens around the world, spends down our cultural inheritance and diminishes this country’s standing. There is a shame in this that we should be willing to name.

The very same country that once dismantled the machinery of exclusion, and whose own exiles were sheltered across this continent, is losing sight of its role in Africa and the world. Investors, partners, tourists and the talented people we hope to attract to help build our economy are watching how we treat those with the least power among us. Trust, once lost, is expensive and difficult to rebuild.

With our country’s reputation in peril, what does this moment ask of us?

It asks our leaders to acknowledge that the pain is real and the scapegoat of the hour is false. It asks us to resist the instant relief of a simple villain and to do the harder work of naming and fixing the actual failures — and the institutions and leaders responsible for them.

It asks communicators, in particular, to refuse our talents and stand our ground to promote any message that makes a frightened public feel briefly powerful by making someone else unsafe.

I am not naive about how difficult this is to say when emotions run high. But communication that only flatters fear cannot be disguised as leadership. It is abdication dressed up as listening. The leaders I most admire are not populists. They are the ones who can hold a room’s anger with respect and still turn it toward something worthy of it.

That is why this moment cannot belong only to politicians, commentators or those with the loudest platforms. It also belongs to communication professionals: the people who write the messages, advise leaders, shape narratives, and understand the difference between what is said and what is heard.

We have a responsibility to do more than make words sound better. We have a moral and ethical responsibility to ask what our words make possible, what they will influence, who they protect, and who they put at risk.

Perhaps this is an opportunity for communicators to renew our commitment to ethical communication, to challenge dangerous narratives before they harden, and to help our leaders tell stories that restore trust rather than spend it down.

We will be judged, in time, less by the problems we faced than by the stories we chose to tell about one another while facing them. The cruel story is already being written for us. It asks nothing of us but our silence. The true story asks more: courage, discipline and community. Our work is not done. I welcome your company in it.

Ilse Blank is a South African communication strategist, business writer and founder of CQ Consulting. She advises executives and boards on reputation and stakeholder relationships, helping leaders use language and strategic communication to build trust, strengthen culture and lead change.

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