Crowds, traffic return to Alex streets on day two of national lockdown
ALEX – Proportional representative councillor in Alex, Shadrack Mkhonto, believes community leaders should have conducted community meetings to heighten awareness which could have encouraged people to stagger their shopping.
Alex woke to even longer queues at shopping centres on day two of the national lockdown.
Soldiers and police are commanded to limit human movement, except those offering essential services.
Here is what happened on the first day of the lockdown: Alex councillors, police worried about residents’ poor compliance with lockdown rules
Proportional representative councillor in Alex, Shadrack Mkhonto, said despite these measures, human movement and interaction in overcrowded Alex seemed difficult to contain.
“They started congregating before 7.30am on this second day of the shutdown to shop,” Mkhonto said of the comparatively longer and winding queues at Pan Africa and Plaza malls, where Shoprite, Pick n Pay and Boxer supermarkets and Waltons Butchery are located.
He commended some of the shops saying he gave the customers trolleys for social distancing while others self-complied. “This will hopefully assist when they queue inside for payment.”
Mkhonto added that there were also bigger crowds and Avanza taxi traffic at Freedom Square shopping centre across from Pan Africa Mall. “Life is as usual with congested vehicles’ movement, some parked along the streets as only human traffic is allowed into the malls.”
He attributed the difficulty in controlling people’s movement to staggered payment of salaries from the twenty-fifth of the month to month-end. With most of them lowly paid, without savings and with no options against crowding. Mkhonto said government should have planned better for this situation.
“Those waiting for grant payments are still to flood the shops until the end of the month and will want to buy food daily.”
Also, he said community leaders should have done better. “We didn’t conduct community meetings to heighten awareness which could have encouraged people to stagger their shopping, remain indoors where possible and limit loitering on the streets as we see now.
“We assumed they heard the warnings on television and radio, forgetting that many don’t have them and are semi-literate.”
He was also worried about migrants who left for Zimbabwe, Lesotho and Mozambique. “If the mitigating measures are not properly synchronised, how will they be handled when they return?”
The public is advised to call the coronavirus hotline on 0800 029 999” with any suspected cases of corona, or to report or obtain information relevant to the pandemic.
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