• The Dissanayake administration's public communications problem

We Sri Lankans have a habit of judging Governments by the strength of the person at the top, as if one leader can stand in for the whole machinery of the State. To that effect, the current administration benefits from a President who has cultivated a composed and often persuasive public persona. His tone signals humility (which was a major selling point during the campaign as well) without surrendering authority. In calmer times, that might have been enough. But, the effectiveness of a Government’s communication does not rest on the cadence of a single voice. It rests on systems, discipline, coordination, and a clear instinct for gauging the public mood.

That is where this Government falters, and it does so consistently. The issue is not exactly the occasional error, which every past administration has made plenty of, but a recurring weakness in how the Dissanayake administration communicates.  The process looks something like this - under the pressure of the crisis that it is facing, the Government’s initial (more often than not, uncoordinated) message gives way too easily or fails to reach the public effectively. Uncertainty follows. The response is an explanation that hardens into justification and defensiveness, and an army of paid and unpaid sympathetic digital voices are brought in to recover lost ground.

To understand the depth of the problem, it is useful to look back at the public communications effort of this Government during the two most significant crises that it has faced. The first concerns the Ditwah tragedy. The second concerns the ongoing fuel crisis following the Iran war, particularly the abrupt reintroduction of the quick response (QR) code system. In both cases, the Government fell into the same pattern of reactive and uncoordinated messaging, which only compounded an already difficult situation.

Getting the fundamentals wrong

In crisis communication, experts such as Peter Mark Sandman, whose work on risk and public perception has shaped Government and public health responses globally, emphasise that credibility is built through early, transparent, and empathetic communication. The authorities must acknowledge uncertainty, address public concern directly, and provide clear guidance through a consistent voice. When communication is delayed, fragmented, or defensive, public anxiety intensifies and trust deteriorates quickly.

The Ditwah episode exposed a breakdown across each of these pillars, not through silence, but through fragmentation. The Government did communicate, but, it did so in pieces, with different actors putting out incomplete and often unaligned information, while unofficial channels and speculation filled in the gaps. The result was an information environment where rumour and misinformation moved faster than any authoritative account, not because nothing was said, but because nothing carried sufficient clarity or coherence to settle the situation.

That lack of coordination carried through to accuracy. Sure, in any crisis, information is fluid. Facts emerge in stages, assessments change, and early accounts are often incomplete. The task of Government communications is not to avoid that reality, but to take control of it quickly, establish clear lines of communication, and ensure that updates move through a single, credible channel. That simply did not happen. Credibility suffered as a direct result of that absence of a centralised communications structure. Without a single authoritative channel to anchor the message, multiple officials spoke in parallel, each advancing their own framing of events.

Some will argue that this is difficult to sustain in the fluid conditions of a crisis, but, it is precisely in those moments that a clear framework must guide communication, with enough flexibility to accommodate necessary adjustments. Instead, a reactive posture defined the entire communications effort; it became an exercise in myth-busting rather than agenda-setting.

This points to a deeper problem - in a multi-ethnic country, any official language cannot be treated as an afterthought or handled on a delayed track. When one segment of the population receives slower or less reliable information, the State is no longer speaking as a single authority. It fragments its own message, weakening compliance and forcing people to turn to informal networks to fill the gap.

Part of this stems from a shortage of translators. That may, arguably, explain the gap, but, it does not excuse it. In a crisis of this scale, the language capacity is a core operational requirement. If the State cannot communicate simultaneously across its own population, then, it is not adequately prepared to manage the crisis that it is facing.

The QR code rollout - Lessons not learnt

The QR code system enjoys widespread public support, shaped by its relative success during the Covid-19 period and a broader understanding that the present fuel disruption is driven by external shocks rather than direct Government failure. But, that underlying goodwill only makes the communications failure starker.

The rollout was abrupt - there was no sustained pre-communication phase to prepare the public, no clear timeline, and no central information hub to guide citizens through the transition. More than that, senior Ministers had been insisting, even days before the announcement, that such measures would not be necessary while official messaging projected an unrealistic picture of fuel availability. In a crisis, that approach is untenable; Governments cannot manage public sentiment by stretching or softening the truth in the hope of preserving calm. When reality asserts itself, the loss of credibility is immediate and difficult to recover.

This is what produced the confusion. Citizens were suddenly confronted with a system that they had to comply with but it came without sufficient clarity or preparation.

A myriad of questions emerged and all of them were entirely predictable and should have been thought of before the actual rollout happened. Questions like - What happens to individuals who recently purchased vehicles and are not yet in the system? How should those who have changed or lost their registered phone numbers proceed? What safeguards are in place for the personal data collected during the registration?

What we are seeing here is not the consequence of surprise, but very clearly, the absence of preparation. When a system is in place, pressure does not produce confusion at this scale. It produces clarity, even if that clarity evolves over time. A good crisis communication framework exists for these moments; it relies on preset protocols and defined lines of authority to move quickly without contradicting itself. None of that was evident here.

Defend, amplify and astroturf?

To its credit, the Government has always paid close attention to how it is perceived on social media. It has been very effective at amplifying supportive voices online, whether through showcasing genuine public sentiment or through networks of Facebook pages, meme accounts, and coordinated clusters of profiles that, at times, resemble astroturfing.

Astroturfing is the tactic of creating the appearance of spontaneous, grassroots public support where, in actuality, the messaging is strategically organised and artificial. 

What is clear is that these networks move quickly in moments of pressure, stepping in to defend or reinforce the Government’s position when official messaging begins to lose coherence. At times, this can appear very awkward or even counterproductive, particularly when meme pages or overtly partisan Facebook accounts begin offering overwhelming and uncritical support which can undermine the credibility of the message that they are trying to amplify.

The content coming out of these pages and accounts draws on a few familiar angles. One of the more visible ones is to respond to criticism by shifting the focus to hypothetical alternatives, usually framed around how much worse things would have been under previous Governments or the current Opposition. That kind of comparison has its place in political debate. The problem is how it is used here. It often serves to sidestep the issue at hand and deflect scrutiny from the Government’s present performance.

What now?

The recurring nature of these failures suggests that there is a structural issue at hand. There seems to be no integrated communications command within the Government. Without such a structure, communication becomes fragmented by default. Each actor responds to immediate pressures within their domain and so, coordination becomes ad hoc. What happens then is that inconsistencies multiply and each episode of miscommunication contributes to a broader public perception of unreliability.

In a multilingual country like Sri Lanka, this has to be done inclusively from the outset. Language cannot be treated as an afterthought or a secondary layer. Critical information must reach all communities at the same time with the same clarity and urgency.  Because anything less creates uneven access to risk and undermines the authority of the message itself.

The question, then, is a simple one. Whether the Government treats communication as something to manage after the fact, or as something to get right from the outset. Everything else follows from that choice.

The writer is a researcher and analyst focused on political communications 

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The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication