Lockdown Diary: Threat of real prison can’t scare hungry people

I’m standing at the taxi rank, keeping my safe distance. I have to go to work, being “essential services”.

The man next to me is at arm’s length, but we can talk while we wait.

“How are you surviving the lockdown?” I ask him.

“Please don’t mention it,” he says.

“This morning I had to go to my friend to ask for four slices of bread so that I can eat because I sent most of the money I had home.

“My grandma and my two little sisters must have something to eat during the 21 days.”

“You are a good man,” I tell him. “Although you are left with nothing, at least your family will have something to wake up to every day.”

It is the hunger that gets my people, I think in the taxi. Many survive on cash they make daily. They used to wake up every day to sell something or do “piece jobs” to put food on the table.

But President Cyril Ramaphosa’s national lockdown has changed their lives.

The cash has dried up.

Few of the poor get a food parcel.

And what those in the suburbs don’t realise is just how this lockdown affects the poor.

They never had the luxury to panic-shop and stockpile.

They were not in the long queues in malls with trolleys stacked sky-high with food on the last day before the lockdown. There just wasn’t money for it.

They all have just one question now: how will I survive the 21 days? Just 21 days – but for poor people it feels like a long year.

This so-called lockdown may be good for your health, but it is bad for hunger.

We are now seeing police and soldiers punishing people in the street for not being home; making them roll home as punishment. But I want to ask those cops; those soldiers: that man you are rolling down the street, what is he going to eat tonight?

Will he sleep with a happy face because he has eaten or will he sleep with a sad face because of the pains all over his body from rolling down the street?

Is the government being hard on its people in trying to control Covid-19?

I don’t have the answer. All I know is: our people are hungry and that is a prison in itself.

The threat of real prison, by either the army or cops, can’t scare them.

Lucas Khumalo.

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