Covid-19 will tell us how much true character we South Africans still possess

Technologists, doctors, accountants, psychologists, process engineers and tyrannical bosses all regularly apply some variant of the stressing principle.

Does it bend or does it break?

While an absence of pressure is to be desired and embraced, it tells one nothing about resilience.

Until one loads extreme pressure on to a steel bar, or a financial institution, or a human heart, or a government, one knows next to nothing about its real strength.

Not since 1939 has the world been put to such an extreme test as Covid-19.

There have been unexpected failures and surprising successes. France, Italy and Spain regularly feature in the top 10 of international health performance indexes. Yet they have coped poorly with the pandemic.

Germany, ranking a sluggish 25 in the health efficiency index of the World Health Organisation (WHO), has done far better.

That’s probably because dealing with a national emergency is not the stuff of routine annual assessment for an index. A black swan event, such as Covid-19, is when systemic flexibility, political agility and – dare one say it? – national character come into play.

On the indices, South Africa is more a never-was than an also-ran, slotting in at 175 out of 191 on the WHO index.

Despite this, Covid-19 has been a relatively pleasing stress test for government. The ability of the state and private health sectors to cooperate fluently runs contrary to the National Health Insurance programme’s conceit that the state should and can control everything. But the self-congratulations and back-patting is premature.

The health system stress test has some way to run. And in the equally critical economic test, Covid-19 has already ground out a large assortment of cracked, snapped and shattered components.

Here, South Africa’s indexed inadequacies are proving to be only too accurate. An economy already under strain is about to break.

Whether those key success factors – systemic flexibility and political agility – can avoid a meltdown is not clear. The signals are mixed.

On the upside, government appears to have come to terms with tossing overboard the maggot-ridden carcass of the national airline. Nor is there money, more surprising, for a loyal ANC constituency, that of the public servants, with government reneging on the three-year pay deal.

On the downside, there is still a failure to face reality unfettered by antiquated beliefs.

Just the thought of accessing International Monetary Fund (IMF) assistance has sent many within the governing alliance into a mental meltdown.

There has been a similarly irrational and emotional response to Moody’s downgrading SA to subinvestment status.

Those raging at the IMF and the World Bank need a reality check. No government, including those that the ANC ideologically identifies with, will entirely ignore financial criteria when investing or giving loans.

Ramaphosa acted with admirable decisiveness with the lockdown, the authoritarian part.

He has been dangerously hesitant about the second part: trusting South Africans to responsibly implement eased lockdown regulations.

To survive the stress test, South Africa has to pass both parts.

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