Sovereign leaders’ extemporaneous eloquence: Strength or achilles’ heel?
LETLHOGONOLO LAMONG | Monday May 26, 2025 16:18
Words are not just inconsequential vocables, they are policy, promise, and posture. For sovereign leaders, particularly true-blue maximalists, every syllable uttered in Kgotla-like gatherings, or press conferences, carries both political freight and historical consequence. In such settings, each utterance by a national leader echoes far beyond the immediate audience. It reverberates through newsrooms, communities and geopolitical alliances. And therein dwells an often-underestimated danger: the impromptu word. Particularly in an era when the public square has migrated to digital platforms and archival tools are readily accessible to the Everyday Joe. It is a cosmic irony, that one of a national leader’s most celebrated traits; eloquence, may, unfortunately, ossify into his most ruinous flaw. Leaders who are impressively expressive in the English language, endowed with the prowess to effortlessly weave words with elegance, emotional weight, rhetorical finesse, rigorous and exacting diction, often get tempted to eschew a prepared text in favour of extemporaneous brilliance and self-adulating rhetorical swagger.
But in politics, unguarded spontaneity is a dangerous luxury. Sovereigns who personify the state and preside over its executive machinery must tread with almost monastic caution when they speak. They are not merely participants in national conversation; they are, in an inarguable sense, authors of the national narrative. Whether conscious or subconscious of it, leaders tend to legislate through implication, govern through nuance, and occasionally make history with a pause, a shrug, or a single misplaced metaphor. When such leaders choose to deviate from their carefully prepared texts; expressions meticulously sculpted by speechwriters, they do not merely improvise, they risk upending governance itself. The prepared speech, often maligned as robotic or stiff, is in fact the product of intense collective labour. Speechwriters, often drawn from policy advisory, legal, economic, and diplomatic circles, operate as high-level guardians of fact, tone, and consequence. They are attuned to nuances that a head of state speaking in the heat of the moment might overlook. Behind polished paragraphs of speeches lie hours of interministerial consultation, legal vetting, policy alignment, geopolitical modulation, and tactical diplomacy. Every phrase is weighed not just for its emotive value, but for its regulatory implications, its fiscal assumptions, its compatibility with domestic and international frameworks, and its sensitivity to political phrasing that could in the absence of due care alienate key stakeholders or unsettle volatile demographics. When a sovereign speaks from such a text, he speaks with the voice of the state, not merely his own. The moment leaders veer off this path, however well-intentioned or charismatic the detour may be, the fallout can be both swift and profound. They risk swinging into territory that has not been legally vetted, politically endorsed, or financially assessed.
This is not to cast aspersions on eloquence. Eloquence is lauded as the midwife of inspiration and the motor of civic energy. It is eloquence that stirs the hearts of the electorate, reassures markets, and wins global admiration. But this caveat is in order; eloquence, when untethered from discipline, can quickly become a kind of tyranny of personality, a seductive but unreliable compass in the extremely sensitive world of governance. It is no surprise that the most linguistically gifted leaders are the ones most tempted to abandon the written word. They are tempted to lean into the applause, to improvise in pursuit of greater resonance, to personalise what was meant to be institutional. And therein lies the rub: what begins as rhetorical adornment can end as political implosion. From Churchill's wartime radio addresses to Obama's stirring campaign oratory, history celebrates those who can think on their feet and stir hearts without the mechanical crutch of a prepared text. Yet this very talent, when exercised without restraint, contains the seeds of political catastrophe. The modern head of state operates in an environment where a single unvetted phrase can trigger diplomatic incidents, roil financial markets, or become fodder for years of political attacks. The question facing today's leaders is not whether they possess eloquence, but whether they possess the discipline to harness it. The digital revolution has transformed political communication into a minefield of permanent consequences. Social media platforms have created unforgiving armies of amateur fact-checkers and opposition researchers who delight in contrasting a leader's spontaneous promises with later realities. Where once a leader's unguarded remark might fade into the ether, today every murmur or roar is archived, analysed, atomised and weaponised within moments. A momentary lapse in discipline is clipped, captioned, and circulated across the globe within minutes. Internet natives, netizen archivists, and nimble-fingered sleek forces of digital sleuths with an eye for contradiction and a flair for viral content, are perpetually on standby, ready to juxtapose a leader’s latest ad-lib with a previous proclamation or published policy.
Denials by those in power are always a futile exercise; the record speaks louder than the retraction. The result, more often than not, is self-serving falsehood and reputational carnage. When a head of state ad-libs into uncharted territory, declaring a dramatic policy shift without proper vetting, or committing funds not yet appropriated, they do more than stir the political pot. The dangers manifest in several distinct but interconnected ways. Factual errors creep into extemporaneous remarks and ultimately upend technocratic machinery. The machinery of government moves through careful processes; legal review, fiscal analysis, interministerial coordination, all of which may be compromised by impulsive announcements. This type of improvisational governance places an untenable burden on civil servants, policy advisors, and diplomatic envoys, thrusting them into unenviable corners, where they are forced to account for declarations they neither authored nor endorsed. They often end up scrambling to make reality conform to rhetoric. At media briefings, technocrats are grilled by journalists seeking clarification on policy shifts that are at best ambiguous and at worst fabricated in the heat of the moment.
Further aggravating the problem; to contradict the head of state is to risk professional suicide, and to endorse a mistake is to compromise one’s integrity. Each path leads straight into a minefield. Imagine a head of government casually dishing politically expedient promises without the benefit of cabinet deliberation or treasury scrutiny. Such statements, though appealing to popular sentiment, may lack administrative grounding, and can easily set off a cascade of operational confusion. Legal departments scrambling to determine its enforceability. Finance ministries forced to reckon with unfunded mandates. And the judiciary, if the issue is litigated, pushed into the precarious position of arbitrating whether a speech constitutes policy. When rhetoric overshadows regulation, governance loses its anchor. Consequently, bureaucratic paralysis, policy confusion, and a battered chain of command prevail. The media fraternity, ever keen to exploit the cracks, always pounce with sharp questions that expose inconsistencies. In the process, the sovereign’s credibility suffers, not for lack of intent, but for lack of discipline. Political psychologists warn that leaders who come to crave the comforts of applause and acclaim for their spontaneous remarks may develop a dangerous overconfidence in their improvisational abilities. This phenomenon, sometimes called 'rhetorical hubris,' can lead to a pattern where preparation is increasingly seen as unnecessary.
For instance, the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez's marathon extemporaneous speeches, while initially electrifying his base, eventually contributed to a perception of erratic governance as his off-the-cuff announcements frequently contradicted official policy. You are likely familiar with comparable regional and local examples that I purposefully refrain from detailing. Speechwriting teams serve as essential bulwarks against these dangers. Far from being mere semantic stylists, modern presidential speechwriters function as a last line of defence; fact-checkers, policy coordinators, and legal reviewers all rolled into one. Their mission is not to make a national leader sound good; it is to make him sound coherent, responsible, and in alignment with state policy. Written speeches are not merely ceremonial scripts to be endured. They are judiciously conceived documents that tend to resonate with the broadest possible audience. In their most distilled form, they are the architecture of governance expressed in language. A well-written speech prevents the inadvertent articulation of untruths, the accidental revelation of classified information, or the unintentional commitment of resources the state does not possess. It wards off Freudian slips that, though often dismissed with humour, can have lasting psychological and political ramifications. In essence, the best speechwriting operations ensure every claim can be defended and every promise kept. Notwithstanding that, we must avoid lapsing into the opposite extreme, where a leader is so tethered to the script that they appear robotic, inauthentic, or disconnected from the moment. This is not an argument against presidential passion or rhetorical flourish. It is a plea for strategic discipline. A well-timed, carefully guarded deviation, one that has been rehearsed, approved, and aligned with policy, is not only permissible but can be powerful. Such departures from the script, when rare and deliberate, humanise the presidency, allowing for an emotive or spontaneous, but natural connection with the public. During episodes of national tragedies, a carefully guarded deviation from the script can provide a necessary emotional aperture. The operative word is “guarded.”
Abuse of this practice risks turning the noble art of governance into a tragicomic spectacle of walk-backs, propaganda-laced self-preservation manoeuvres, deceptive clarifications, and avertable damage control. The solution to impulsive on-the-fly-linked risks is not to eliminate all spontaneity from political discourse. The most memorable moments in political oratory often come when leaders speak from the heart. Think of U.S. President George W. Bush's 9/11 bullhorn address at Ground Zero. With his arm around a firefighter and a bullhorn to his lips, Bush stood on the wreckage of the World Trade Centre and spoke from the heart, steadying the spirit of a shaken nation. The art lies in distinguishing between a meaningful and deliberate act of resonance and an impulsive self-focused seat-of-the-pants damage-infused manoeuvre. The difference lies in intentionality and restraint. A national leader who drifts for applause, for provocation, or for ego, puts the whole edifice of democratic accountability at risk. Such a leader mistakes charisma for substance and performance for principle. Sovereign leaders must internalise this humbling truth; it is not the brilliance of one’s words that defines a presidency, but the fidelity of those words to the enduring, invisible architecture of responsible governance. Eloquence must be tamed by an abiding sense of responsibility and appreciation of the fact that what is needed is not a suppression of rhetorical talent, but a purposeful governance of it. State leaders must embrace the fact that their words are instruments of statecraft, not instruments of spectacle.
In this age of accelerated scrutiny and shrinking margins for error, national leaders and panjandrums of politics who will navigate complex governance issues successfully are those who unmoor themselves from showmanship and the temptation to unnecessarily flaunt their gift of the gab. History judges leaders not by their most dramatic improvised moments, but by the consistency between their words and their governance. The true test of statesmanship may well be the wisdom to know when not to improvise. And street-smart leaders who will be remembered not just for their eloquence but for their wisdom will be those who instinctively rejected the urge to thumb their nose at taming their tongue. Pared-down, this truth is irrefutable: within the command vestibules of sovereign power and principled governance, extemporaneous eloquence, when disciplined becomes a strength, when unfettered becomes a liability.