What was once a well-understood private indignity, the distance between an institution and the people it claims to serve, is now broadcast, clipped, captioned, and shared before any press office has drafted its first response. The family, illegally squatting on public land, is displaced by a project they were never consulted about. The press conference announcing that project's success, heralding the generous compensation paid to those same illegal settlers, sits as a perky neighbour in the same feed, the same timeline, the same public imagination. The outcry over the state of the environment and air quality, and the ministerial motorcades and unlimited boda boda-led crimes, share the same platform, watched by the same people, in the same moment. These are signs of more than just a communications crisis; they are a consequence crisis, and communication is where it first surfaces.

"Most of my career has been spent at this crossroads, where institutions require clarity and the public has grown cynical about honest communication. In East Africa and beyond, I've observed how governments, companies, and civil society corporations have systematically neglected, fragmented, and ultimately abandoned their communication efforts, resulting in a vacuum that is promptly refilled by an adverse and incapable player. This disparity has gained unprecedented visibility through technology; the divide that was meant to be bridged by the internet's reach and accessibility has, in fact, become a significant facilitator of harmful communications and sentiment.”

The Fragmentation Problem No One is Designing For

Most institutional messages were designed for a uniform audience, aspirational, urban, literate, and connected to the formal economy. While such an audience still exists in some regions, in Africa it grew slowly and has since been overtaken; it no longer constitutes the majority and has not done so for quite some time.It grew slowly and has since been overtaken; it no longer constitutes the majority and has not done …”Today, institutions must communicate with a fragmented population divided by geography, economic conditions, language, and diverse perceptions of scarcity and wealth, all of which influence how messages are interpreted – especially in Africa.

If you're in the business, you understand that a message meant as reassurance for one audience segment can seem like mockery to another. A campaign aimed at the middle class — visually sleek, optimistic, and forward-looking — is often perceived by those in material scarcity as lacking awareness of their situation. They don't oppose the message's substance but struggle to reconcile the polished image with their lived reality. This disconnect has become more evident, immediate, and widely shared than it was a decade ago.

Technology has collapsed the distance between the curated institutional narrative and the unedited lived experience. Institutions (and personalities) that have not redesigned their communications for a fragmented, technologically connected, economically polarised audience are not just missing their target; in many cases, they are actively deepening the distrust they are trying to manage.

The Abandoned Function

Here is what we have observed with striking consistency across the institutions we work with: the communications function has been treated as a finishing layer rather than a structural one. It is the last thing built and the first thing cut. It is staffed by people with insufficient mandate, access to decision-makers, and authority to speak with the clarity that builds trust. And so it does not build trust. It produces content.

The result is what I have come to call, in my advisory work, the Representation Gap — the distance between what an institution is, what it intends, and what the public understands it to be. This gap is not primarily a messaging problem. It is structural. When the communications function has no real seat at the table, it cannot represent the institution accurately because it lacks accurate information. It cannot speak with authority because it has not been given authority. It cannot be responsive because it is not part of the decisions it is supposed to respond to.

The consequence is a cacophony of multiple spokespeople and contradictory signals. Statements are released without context. Clarifications contradict the original communication, and silences last for days when hours were all that were available. We have watched this play out  government ministries, major financial institutions, and multilateral organisations operating across the continent, with the same pattern emerging each time. The institution has something important to say but no coherent way to say it, because the infrastructure for saying it was never properly built. And when institutions are incoherent, populations and markets do not wait for clarity. They find it elsewhere.

Who Fills The Silence?

A communications vacuum in a fragmented, insecure population is never neutral. It is filled not by the most accurate or the accountable voice. It is filled by whoever arrives first with the most emotionally legible version of events. In the current media environment, that means whoever can produce a clip, a voice note, a live stream, or a WhatsApp broadcast that travels faster than the institution’s press release.

Sometimes that person is a genuine community organiser with real standing and legitimate grievances. More often than not, it is someone who has identified the vacuum and is filling it strategically, not to inform, but to position. These are not aberrations. They are the logical and entirely predictable consequence of a communications system that left the door open. The community mobiliser who arrives at a government event as a representative of thousands, with no mandate from those thousands, is not a mystery. They are what happens when the institution responsible for that community never built a direct, honest, two-way line of communication with it. The vacuum existed. They walked into it.

This is the Representation Gap embodied, with consequences that extend well beyond public relations. When the people filling the silence are doing so for personal gain, with no accountability to the populations they claim to speak for, the distortion compounds. The institution responds to a misrepresentation of public sentiment. Policy is shaped by a voice that is not representative. Resources are allocated toward a narrative that serves one person’s interests. The population, watching all of this, becomes more fragmented, more distrustful, and more susceptible to the next person who arrives with a confident story and no obligation to tell it accurately.

The security implications are straightforward. Population fragility isn't primarily a resource issue—though resources remain relevant. It's a legitimacy issue. Institutions lose trust not just by failing to deliver but by failing to be honest about why, especially when that honest space is taken over by those with no genuine stake in the truth.

What Technology Actually Rewarded

It is worth being precise about what the technological shift did to this dynamic, because the instinct in most institutional communications is to treat technology as the problem — to manage, contain, and develop a social media policy for it. That instinct does not solve the deeper issue. Technology did not create bad faith actors in the communications space. It rewarded them more efficiently. The dopamine architecture of every major platform along with the engagement loops, the amplification of outrage over nuance, the speed of sharing over the slowness of verification – means that the person filming the confrontation is, in that moment, a more effective communicator than any press office – in spite of their lack of credibility. They are faster, more emotionally direct, and operate in a medium designed to reward exactly those qualities.

The question institutions must ask is not how to manage that. It is how to make it unnecessary. An institution with a genuine, direct, consistent relationship with its audience, built over time in good faith through honest communication, is not defenceless against a viral clip. It already has a counter-narrative because the relationship itself is the counter-narrative. People who trust you do not abandon that trust the moment someone points a camera at your organisation. People who have no relationship with you, who have only ever been spoken at rather than spoken with, have nothing to hold onto when the clip arrives.

What Genuine Communication Looks Like

The most trusted institutions — and I mean this not in the abstract but in the measurable, observable sense of those that have maintained public legitimacy through genuine crises - share a set of characteristics that have nothing to do with the sophistication of their messaging. They are direct. They are consistent. They speak in one voice, with one record, to one standard, whether the audience is in a boardroom, at a community meeting in a district town, or to a single customer.

That singularity is not accidental. It is the product of a communications function with genuine authority within the institution, genuine access to decision-making, and a genuine mandate to speak honestly, even when the honest thing is uncomfortable. The institutions that fracture under pressure, producing contradictory statements, late clarifications, and multiple spokespeople pulling in different directions, are almost always those where communications was never given that authority to begin with.

Closing the Representation Gap requires something more demanding than better messaging. It requires that institutions redesign the communications function itself — giving it structural standing, real access, and the mandate to facilitate genuine two-way dialogue rather than managed broadcast. It requires speaking to fragmented populations as though they are distinct, with distinct realities, rather than as a uniform audience to be reassured. And it requires the discipline to build that relationship before the crisis, not in response to it — because by the time the clip is circulating, the window for trust-building has already closed.

Open reflection- the kind in which an institution is visibly changed by what it hears from its audience and in which that change is clearly communicated back- is not a communications tactic or a weakness. It is the only communication posture that is durable in an environment where the gap between what you say and what people experience can be documented in real time and shared globally in seconds.

I work with institutions at precisely this point of reckoning — the moment when the gap becomes undeniable and the question shifts from “how do we manage the narrative” to “why did we lose the relationship?” The answer, almost without exception, is the same. The communications function was underbuilt, under-resourced, and undervalued until the moment it was needed most.

The Representation Gap is not a metaphor. It is a measurable distance between institutional intent and public understanding, and it is being filled every day by people whose interests are not yours and who have no accountability to the populations they claim to represent. Closing it is not a campaign. It is a structural commitment to honest, direct, and consistent communication, built before the crisis, maintained through it, and designed not for the audience you wish you had, but for the one you actually have.

That's the work. It’s more challenging than crafting a press release, yet it is far more resilient than any spin cycle.. In today’s world, where the gap between your story and someone else’s daily reality can become everyone’s concern with a single smartphone, this is the only communication strategy that truly endures.