#WPRD2026 | A Golden Age of Strategic PR must also be a golden age of disclosures
In an era of AI slop, synthetic content and algorithmic noise, the pitch for the "Essential Human OS" - judgement, relationships, ethics - is an easy one to make.
We, communicators, seem to be fighting a losing battle to keep our place as the trusted human layer that keeps institutions credible while everything else gets automated.
SA: A live experiment
Our country, South Africa, is currently running a live experiment in how golden this age really is, and the results are not flattering.
For the past month, the political establishment has been consumed by allegations that Resolve Communications - the lobbying and public affairs firm chaired by former DA leader Tony Leon - traded on its proximity to DA public representatives to buy access for paying clients, with Elon Musk's Starlink among them.
Former party leaders, sitting ministers, opposition parties and the Public Protector have all been dragged in.
Whatever the investigations eventually conclude, one thing is already clear: our industry has been caught without an answer to the most basic question the public can ask of it - who is paying you, and what exactly did that buy?
A design flaw
I am, however, not intending to relitigate the Resolve Communications case or to mischievously keep it in the news headlines; that will be settled elsewhere, in evidence and in time.
I intend to say something blunter: an industry that markets itself as the "essential human layer" of trust cannot keep operating a lobbying business with zero disclosure obligations and then act shocked when the public assumes the worst.
This isn't bad luck. It's a design flaw, and it is ours to take responsibility for.
Lobbying isn't the sin; hiding it is
Let's not be precious about this. Lobbying - paid, organised advocacy for the interests of our clients before government - is legitimate work, done everywhere from Brussels to Washington to Geneva, and to Pretoria.
Pretending it is inherently dirty is naïve posturing. What's rotten is doing it in South Africa the way most firms still do: with no register, no disclosure, no paper trail, and no consequence for keeping it that way.
A legislative lacuna shouldn’t lead to an ethical lacuna.
That lacuna, gap, is exactly what turned Resolve Communications into a month-long crisis instead of a footnote.
It isn't lobbying itself that has ActionSA, the ANC and disaffected voices inside the DA demanding investigations.
It's the fact that nobody can independently verify who met whom, when, about what, and to what end.
In that vacuum, every denial sounds like spin, every explanation sounds like damage control, and reputations get destroyed by suspicion because nothing exists to settle the question with fact.
That should terrify our industry far more than it seems to.
A structural feature
Most PR firms haven’t noticed that our post 2024 coalition era raised the stakes.
The Government of National Unity didn't create this problem, but it supercharged it.
Coalition governance means more parties, more ministers, more former colleagues and ex-staffers moving between political office and paid consultancy, often overnight.
This isn't a DA problem dressed up as a national one; it is a structural feature of every party now governing in coalition, nationally and in the metros.
When personal political networks convert directly into client billings, the ethical bar for disclosure should go up sharply. It hasn't.
Most firms are still operating exactly as they did when the stakes were lower, and nobody was watching this closely.
Pick one
This is where the "Golden Age" branding should turn from a marketing slogan into an actual test.
If PR wants credit as the indispensable human layer of judgement and trust, judgement means knowing when a brief has quietly shifted from advocacy to access-selling, and trust means refusing work that can't survive being made public.
We cannot claim the moral high ground of being "essential to institutional trust" while defending opacity as a competitive edge. We must pick one.
What a serious profession does now — not eventually
South Africa doesn't need another round of handwringing about lobbying's optics.
It needs infrastructure, and it needs it built by industry before Parliament builds a blunter, more punitive version on our behalf, all driven by political bias.
I suggest a lobbying register - voluntary now, statutory soon – that could be modelled on the EU Transparency Register or the UK's Office of the Registrar of Consultant Lobbyists.
Such a register would require any firm doing public affairs work to declare its clients and the general subject of its government engagements.
Frankly, the Public Relations Institute of Southern Africa (Prisa), of which I declare to have been president in the past, should be driving this conversation this month, not workshopping it at some point next year.
Firms run by former political office-bearers should publish explicit cooling-off periods and conflict-of-interest disclosures before touching any work near their old party or department.
Anything less is asking the public to simply trust that access isn't the product being sold - and right now, the public isn't buying it.
The difference between strategic communication and access brokerage
Government departments and municipalities should be required to publish ministerial and mayoral meeting logs with lobbyists and consultants, as several mature democracies already do.
Had that existed here, the Resolve Communications story would have been resolved in a day with documents, not dragged out for weeks on competing press statements, media interviews and, seemingly, mischievous political point scoring.
And agencies need to develop the spine to walk away from briefs built on "who we know" rather than "what we can argue on the merits”/
That distinction is the entire difference between strategic communication and access brokerage, and too many firms in this country still can't - or won't - say which side of that line their own client list sits on.
Let us stop naming the golden age and start earning it
Every industry loves a self-congratulatory theme, and Golden Age of Strategic PR is a good one — AI genuinely has made human strategic judgement more valuable, not less, and communicators who build trust in an age of synthetic content deserve real credit for it.
But golden ages aren't declared by press release.
They're earned by value-driven conduct that survives scrutiny. Right now, in a country already exhausted by state capture fatigue, coalition dysfunction and collapsing institutional trust, our profession has been handed a rare, uncomfortable, very public chance to show what "strategic" is supposed to mean: not the cleverest story, but the most defensible one.
If World PR Day is going to be more than an industry pat on the back, this is the year South African PR and public affairs firms must choose disclosure over deniability.
Let the Resolve Communications episode be remembered not as an embarrassing scandal we all quietly wished would blow over, but as the moment our profession finally decided to regulate itself before someone else did it to us.
