The Handshake the Algorithm Cannot Replicate
Author: Esme Arendse, CEO Aprio Group
An algorithm can now translate a trade agreement into forty languages in under a second.
It cannot translate trust.
That distinction matters more than ever as AfCFTA builds the world’s largest free trade area on paper – while, in practice, trust between nations is still built the old way: in a room, over time, one conversation at a time.
We are drowning in frictionless communication and starving for real dialogue
We live in an age of instant everything – instant translation, instant summaries, instant “alignment” generated by a prompt. It has never been easier to sound connected. It has never been harder to actually be understood.
Governments issue joint statements. Companies issue press releases. Both sides walk away assuming the other grasped the real barriers – the logistics costs, the regulatory friction, the gap between policy ambition and what it actually takes to move goods across a border. A signed communiqué is not a supply chain. A handshake at a summit is not a signed contract.
This is the quiet risk of our moment: mistaking the appearance of communication – polished, fast, everywhere – for the substance of it.
What I saw in the room
I was recently in the room for the launch of the Namibia–South Africa Business Council, a mechanism built precisely to close that gap – to move from institutions “speaking at” each other to businesses and governments “building with” each other.
Political goodwill is the bedrock. The private sector is the engine. But neither moves without trust, and trust cannot be digitised. A video call is efficient. It is not where a joint venture gets born, or a supply chain risk gets flagged honestly, or a negotiator’s hesitation gets noticed and addressed. That still happens face to face – over breaking bread, in the pause between formal remarks, in simply showing up.
It was a privilege to share that room with H.E. President Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah of Namibia – Africa’s second-ever female head of state – and to hear President Cyril Ramaphosa distil the entire opportunity into one sentence: “Let us turn contact into contracts.”
Why this is a communications problem, not just a policy one
Everyone at that launch will go on to write about government and business working together – about frameworks, ministries, MOUs. That story matters. But it is not ours to tell.
Ours is this: policy creates the conditions for trade. Communication is what makes people trust those conditions enough to act on them. It is the unglamorous, human infrastructure sitting beneath every economic corridor, every cross-border deal, every investment decision that actually gets signed rather than merely announced.
As the world grows more automated and more disconnected in the same breath, the organisations that gather people well – that design the room, not just the release – will be the ones who turn political goodwill into economic reality.
That is our work. Not translating agreements faster. Building the trust that makes them worth signing.
Esme Arendse is the Managing Director of Aprio Group, a strategic communications and reputation management consultancy.
