The quicker the government eases its Covid-19 lockdown rules the more strictly it is going to have to enforce them. From the moment on Friday when 1.5-million South Africans get to go back to work, the new rules might allow them to buy smokes again (we won’t know until the last minute because there’s a fight about it in President Cyril Ramaphosa’s cabinet), but there’ll suddenly be an extra 70,000 soldiers on the streets and an all-night curfew to enforce isolation, social distancing and obedience in general.
Freak out if you must, but any rational leader would do more or less the same in our situation. And, of course, the moment the economy begins to work again, the number of infections will rise, no matter how many police and soldiers, nor how many precautions we may take. Someone should tell Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, who has threatened the return of level 5 lockdown as a sort of punishment if infections do rise in level 4.
That’s like allowing you to swim again but threatening dire consequences if you get wet. Of course infections are going to rise from May 1. That’s the whole point. Listen again, doctor, to Salim Karim, your government’s chief adviser on the coronavirus. An interview with him appeared on Times Select last Saturday, just as you were wagging your finger at the rest of us.
“It is inevitable that we are going to have a severe epidemic,” Karim said. “It’s inevitable. We’re going to have it. We can’t avoid it.” Drinks, anyone?
All we have done, Karim is saying, is delay the virus’s progress by maybe a month, and through that delay we may have better organised our health services to cope with it.
The actual truth is that no-one yet has a clue how this will play out in SA, though you could avoid disappointment by taking the pessimistic view. There are too many unknowns. What will TB and HIV do to (or with) the virus? We are still testing a maximum of 10,000 people a day when capacity is for 15,000 or (in theory) 36,000. Why?
I’m not particularly thrilled to be 67 years old right now, because I’m at risk and I take the virus seriously. I’m glad Ramaphosa locked down when he did. By all accounts, distant and from within my own family, Covid-19, if it smacks you, is like nothing you’ve ever experienced before. I don’t want it and I’m staying home. Because I can, obviously.
But what about people who need to go to work, or to be on the streets selling what they can? The government’s approach to opening up the economy manages to be at once understandably cautionary and insanely dictatorial. Checkers can open and sell me an onion, but not the electric kettle in the next row? Stupid and fatuous rules like this will kill the legitimacy of the fight against the virus.
We should allow absolutely any economic activity that is safe, and then police it. I am absolutely sure Ramaphosa knows this in his heart. But he has to truck with ministers of all sorts of ideological and psychological idiosyncrasies. Dlamini-Zuma is one. Trade & industry minister Ebrahim Patel is quite another. Honest and true as the day is long, it’s his weakness that gets him into cabinet — he seriously believes he can anticipate every one of a gazillion entrepreneurial synapses and regulate them.
Only he can’t, which is why he has been so mingy with his easing of the lockdown. The job has defeated him. At level 4, unless something dramatic happens to the plans he outlined last Saturday, the economy won’t open so much as begin to ooze. If you can manufacture and transport electric kettles within responsible social distancing and hand-cleaning structures (how hard could that be?), then why prevent the said manufacture and sale?
Look, as far as the SA response to the coronavirus is concerned, the science has now run its course. From now on it is all politics and Ramaphosa needs to tread carefully, both with his own party and government, and with the public.
Attempts by the ministers of tourism and small business to reserve emergency lockdown funding for black-owned businesses in their sectors already threatens to shatter Ramaphosa’s carefully knit coalition of public and private sector responses to the crisis we face.
His hope must be that the courts will disallow both, and save him the trouble. He should talk to both ministers so they understand what is at stake, especially as he tries to reshape the economy post-virus. Or that the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) will finally charge someone of consequence. The mere suggestion of such received enormous publicity the other day, but calm yourself. The NPA occupies a different level of the space-time continuum than we do. “Soon” there means up to five human years.
He had also better be very careful with the looming curfew. Soldiers may be basically decent people but they are trained by brutes to be brutes. Even the cooks and doctors. Leaving the country to them for nine hours at night unobserved is just asking for trouble. The media must be allowed, encouraged even, to cover the curfew, wherever it takes them.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.