The top story on a daily news bulletin distributed by one of South Africa’s more serious newspapers in January shouted, “Weekly excess deaths more than double last winter’s peak”. The story just beneath it was headed: “Western Cape pushes for relaxation of level 3 lockdown restrictions.”
We’re getting hammered, so let’s reduce our defences...
The first story quotes statistics from the Medical Research Council’s weekly mortality report; the second, a politician whose party has – very painfully – regarded every step the country has taken to manage the pandemic as an opportunity to oppose, second-guess, divide and confuse with bluster, mixed messaging and law fare.
South Africa has not covered itself in glory in its response to the pandemic. In the beginning, funds set aside for our defence were looted. Now there are concerns about delays in the procurement of vaccines.
From the beginning, analysts correctly characterised the greatest challenge the pandemic posed as achieving the appropriate balance between saving lives and saving the economy. But the virus came without operating instructions...
None of us – that is, nobody in South Africa or anywhere else in the world – knows for sure what twists and turns lie ahead before the pandemic has run its course. The best sources of information we have are scientists, with their models, experience and educated guesses, not opposition politicians fighting for the light.
We instituted an almost total lockdown early last year and have since eased and tightened the regulations as the pandemic has ebbed and flowed.
Our economy, already ravaged by mismanagement and theft prior to the pandemic, has tanked even further. Important business sectors, not least tourism, hospitality and alcohol, are on their knees.
Few governments have got the regulations introduced to slow the spread of the virus entirely right. This is borne out by the fact that we are in a second wave and talking of a third. In South Africa, some of the rules have seemed ill-conceived. These perceptions are heightened in a society of extreme inequality in which, depending where you live, you probably have very little idea of how people on the other side of the highway or railway track get by.
We can’t have different rules for different people. And we can’t judge the integrity of the rules on the basis of their inconvenience to people living in the suburbs, only. Unlike South Africa’s official opposition party, the pandemic has no regard for colour or class divisions. It recruits across all communities.
Holding governments to account is a critical task of opposition parties in democracies across the world. But few countries are loaded with the weight of the transformation deficit that we bear. And in few democracies is the official opposition party as serially divisive as in ours.
The South African cocktail of an incompetent government being held to account by a patronising and sneering opposition – evidently content to boss one of the country’s most strategically important provinces without ever being able to contest for national power – benefits nobody but those who draw salaries for supporting one or other of these old parties.
GOOD has an alternative recipe to fix South Africa. It is based both on keeping government honest, and drawing in active citizens, across our old boundaries, who share the passion to contribute constructively to developing a country built on four pillars: Social, economic, environmental and spatial justice.
It is said that crises create opportunities. Let’s stop the whining and, from the barrenness we now feel, develop an equitable and resilient country that works for all its people. Such a country will be much better placed than the present one when the next crisis hits.
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