We train communicators to execute. We do not teach them to push back.

There is a structural gap in how communications is taught and practised in East Africa — and it is most visible in the people doing the work most conscientiously.

I think about a particular kind of person when I think about this gap. The junior communications officer, two or three years in, competent, quietly excellent, who has learned to sit with a specific discomfort in silence. Not because she lacks judgement. But because the profession she was trained in has no framework for the thing she is experiencing.

The discomfort arrives with the brief. Not every brief, most briefs are straightforward. But some of them require her to produce communication she knows is not entirely accurate. Not dishonest in any dramatic sense. Just slightly off. A simplified version of a complicated reality. An impact story that is technically true but omits the context that would change how it is read. A statement of commitment that everyone in the office knows is aspirational rather than operational.

She notices. She carries it. And because the culture does not have a named space for the thing she is noticing, she does not raise it. She executes. And the professional who executes the questionable brief carries something of its consequences, even though she never made the decision that produced it.

What communication education needs to include

A framework for identifying ethical tension in a communications task, not as a dramatic confrontation but as a professional judgment.

Language for raising that judgment constructively within an organisation, without it becoming a personal conflict.

An understanding of what accountability looks like for the person who produces communications, not just the organisation that commissions it.

The practice of distinguishing between discomfort that should be acted on and discomfort that is simply the difficulty of the work.

The ability to push back, thoughtfully, professionally, with grounded reason, is not a personality trait. It is a skill. It can be taught. And in a communications profession that handles increasingly sensitive and consequential material, it may be one of the most important skills that is currently missing from the curriculum.