EDITORIAL: Ters payments welcome, but a little late in coming

In about a week from today, hundreds of thousands of workers, forced to forfeit their salaries as the government imposed a blanket ban on alcohol sales, travel restrictions and an earlier curfew, will start getting money under a revived wage relief programme. 

It’s a laudable move but one can’t help wondering: Why did it take so long?

President Cyril Ramaphosa tightened restrictions three weeks ago as the third wave of the pandemic took hold, threatening to overwhelm hospitals in Gauteng. The province emerged as the epicentre of the pandemic in SA at the inopportune time when Charlotte Maxeke, one of its biggest hospitals, was still out of action, about two months after a fire.

After a review last week, it came as no surprise when the president extended the so-called level 4 lockdown by two weeks as there were few signs that measures introduced two weeks earlier were having an impact in bending the curve. 

To be fair, Ramaphosa acknowledged the financial toll the measures were taking on workers in industries hard hit by the lockdown in his most recent speech, promising that business, labour and the government would hammer out a deal in the coming days.

So from July 26 money would start flowing to some of these workers, who for three long weeks had no idea how they were going to pay their bills at the end of the month or how they would buy groceries.   

It should have been clear to them from the start that the government would have their back in the form of a relief programme, dubbed Temporary Employee/Employer Relief Scheme, as it did during the early days of lockdown in 2020 as it tightened restrictions, 

There is no acceptable reason for the government, which is holding the purse strings of the UIF, to have taken this long to reassure workers that their wages would be protected when it forced the industry into lockdown.

To begin with, since April scientists have been warning the government about how the next wave of the infections would be worse than the previous one.

Second, the government was aware, or ought to have been, that there was never a realistic chance of avoiding harsh restrictions on economic activity given the slow pace of inoculations. By mid June, as the third wave was taking hold in Gauteng, less than 2-million people had been fully or partially vaccinated, far from reaching the herd immunity target forecast for the first quarter of 2022.  

It’s the sort of certainty businesses in the leisure, airline and alcohol industries are crying for. AB InBev’s SA division, SA Breweries, and Vinpro, which represents wine makers in the Western Cape, have launched separate legal challenges to the prohibition that will hopefully set the standard on what they should expect when new Covid-19 cases go through the roof.  

Two studies have come up with conflicting findings about the role of alcohol restrictions in freeing up hospital beds, the primary reason behind the government’s orders. One of them, commissioned by the industry and unreviewed by scientific peers, maintains trauma admissions likely dropped because people were at home under curfew rather than being out. 

But a peer-reviewed study, published two weeks ago in the SA Medical Journal found that the government’s periodic bans on alcohol sales during the coronavirus pandemic were associated with a big reduction in deaths from non-natural causes.

It’s not just the liquor industry that has had to contend with the unpredictability of lockdown restrictions. The airline sector was caught off-guard when the government announced travel restrictions in and out of Gauteng two weeks ago, forcing the likes of Comair to abruptly suspend flights. 

Considering the impact it must have had in redrawing flight schedules, one would have thought the government would have at least said something before tightening restrictions. No such luck for the sector trying to mount a recovery from the 2020 collapse.

As it becomes clear that the looting orgy and riots of the past week will require an immediate liquidity injection for affected businesses and individuals, it will be good for the government to move with speed, soften the blow and put the economy back on track.