A great deal of history is determined not by what we do but by how we communicate. For example, P W Botha's speech of 15 August 1985 - the famous Rubicon speech - would be our candidate for the worst political communication by any country at any time. President Botha and his advisers did everything wrong.
They chose the wrong platform. Their real audience was foreign governments, hundreds of millions of people overseas and the millions of South Africans who were all waiting anxiously for some signal of hope from the general despondency that had at that time descended on the country. Instead, President Botha chose the National Party provincial conference in Durban as the venue for his historic speech.
He chose the wrong tone and format for the speech. Instead of being encoded in a form that would be comprehensible to his real audience it was couched in the idiom of a National Party stryddag - which was fine for the party faithful assembled in Durban, but was completely unintelligible to viewers overseas.
The speech was badly drafted. It was the product of contributions from many different sources - all of which had been heavily edited or redrafted by the President and his closest advisers. The result was a hodge-podge.
Worst of all, the speech had been wildly pre-sold to the country and to the international community. Pik Botha had flown to Vienna to pre-brief representatives of the major Western Powers. Expectations had been generated that could not possibly be fulfilled. So, when PW stood up to deliver his speech it was as though he was starting a hundred-metre race two hundred metres behind the starting line.
The result was confusion, still deeper despondency and a collapse in international confidence in the country. During the ensuing weeks the value of the rand crashed to unprecedented depths. We calculate that speech cost us about three million rand - per word - and it was a long speech.