Hon Chairperson, Ministers, Deputy Ministers, members and guests, South African foreign policy is always perceived by the public as being elitist in nature. This perception means that our foreign policy is inaccessible to the ordinary citizen. This requires a new way of doing business by the department in an effort to ensure that our foreign policy decision-making process reaches the grass roots.
One of the programmes of the department is that of public diplomacy and protocol services, the primary purpose of which is to communicate South Africa's role and position in international relations in the domestic and international arenas. This, however, has been relegated to mainly providing protocol services as opposed to strengthening public diplomacy. This trend should change. South African citizens should be involved in foreign policy decision-making.
The 21st century calls for governments to modernise their international relations. With the growing influence of mass media, multicorporations and strong lobby groups that have access to resources, it has become essential that the department should partner with these bodies to ensure the effective communication of our foreign policy objectives.
This can be done through a public diplomacy programme, which will promote the national interests of our country through understanding, informing and influencing foreign and local audiences. This will help to reduce the degree to which misperceptions and misunderstandings complicate our foreign relations with the world. It could also assist in alleviating xenophobia by explaining to ordinary grass-roots people South Africa's international obligations to Africa and the world.
Public diplomacy is not only state-centric, but it is rather primarily multicentric. We often see a press statement or an advert from the department on its foreign policy objectives and an explanation of why a particular position was taken by government, and this leads to confusion and misperceptions.
Public diplomacy also means that challenges and solutions do not come from states alone; non-state actors can also contribute. This is evolution - from a hard-power to a soft-power approach - and is the only way to close the gap between domestic and foreign policy. In the modern world order, countries have become brands that should be marketable in a globally competitive economy, hence the need to influence the private sector to instil investor confidence and do nation-building. The challenge with South Africa's foreign policy is that we do not have a common national interest. Hence, the question arises: What is our national interest with regard to our relationship with China, for example? Dialogue should be encouraged between the government, the citizens and non-state actors to define our national interest. We need clear co-ordination and the engagement of stakeholders, and clear positions on issues of major international importance, for example on the Myanmar issue and UN resolutions. All these have an impact on how we communicate with the people on the ground.
South Africa's image has been dented by some of our social problems like crime and xenophobic attacks; hence we need to strengthen our public diplomacy to make an impact on promoting our international image. The key word here, Madam Minister, is "coherence" in our messages to the world. For example, the issue of nationalisation creates a lot of animosity and confusion, both locally and internationally, if it is not clearly articulated to the world, as experienced recently during the visit to the