Hurray the post-lockdown era

If those in the know are to be believed, the lockdown will soon be a thing of the past when the government announces the relaxation of the regulations to Level 2. And so will we begin the return to “normalcy”. This would be in response to many imperatives, the economic ranking uppermost.

With each passing day, the lockdown becomes more unaffordable and pushes prospects of recovery further and further away. There is, after all, a threshold beyond which society and the economy can tolerate drastic measures like lockdowns, however well-intentioned, before nasty comebacks start manifesting. More so for an economy that was already in dire straits before the lockdown and an environment where moral depravity of the sort we have witnessed with incidents of rabid corruption play themselves out.

As the six months from the commencement of the lockdown in March draws to an end, we are mopping up the remainder of the initial R500 billion budget allocation announced when the lockdown was inaugurated. Further borrowings to sustain the lockdown as initially conceived are neither forthcoming, nor would they fetch a premium in the court of a suspicious public opinion.

While the Covid-19 threat remains, self-preservation also presupposes an individual and community’s obligation to the self. We have reached the inevitable point at which that clause can no longer be deferred; it has to be invoked. From now on, the individual and the community, more than the government, must take greater responsibility for our collective safety.

In the coming period, we can anticipate official circles to “stress and reiterate that the government is not shirking its responsibility; it is rather reprioritising to maximise its capacity to respond to the commitment to deliver a better life for all the people”.

The other imperative is the necessity to ease the inconvenience of the self and publicly imposed regiments of the lockdown. Put mildly, it has not been easy and the tendency for exaggeration and to substitute information for the fear factor has not helped either.

Yet another consideration is the potential for the decline of the government’s relevance in the public imagination. It would likely arise, over time, out of anything ranging from Covid-19-related corruption to the fact that, unlike others, government is just about the only sector that is still largely home-bound.

Everyone has been out there fending for themselves with or without the government. It is not unlikely that, sooner or later, there will commence ideologically and politically opportunistic questions about the relevance of the state machinery as it exists, much as there will be legitimate ones.

As the 2021 local government elections draw closer, these sentiments will assume party political lines while they will also take factional overtones within individual political parties. Alas, there will be less debate and analysis and more Tweedledee and Tweedledum-like blame games that target and ratchet up the real and trumpedup failings of individual political office bearers.

While this has its own legitimacy in politics, more so in an environment in which accountability seems to be relegated to the periphery, it is important not to lose sight of the overall systemic context in which the individuals do politics. It is therefore useful to see the forthcoming period as one that presents another opportunity in the fight against corruption and to claw back on lost ground with respect to accountability in the public sector.

Whether this becomes the case or not, it will undoubtedly also produce new political shifts – which may not necessarily be seismic, but shifts nonetheless – especially within the ruling party. The jury is still out as to whether the ANC would survive the strife that would arise from acting or not acting against corruption.

However the party responds will be yet another important self-descriptor, especially as the local government elections approach. In any case, we should expect that corruption will be one of the unavoidable issues for nationwide reflection and discussion in the context of the elections.

In this context, it is worth recalling that not long before the 2016 local government elections, an extraordinary whirlwind whose vexing curriculum sought to educate all and sundry to eschew the conscience in political decision-making took place within the ANC. In their wisdom, the protagonists reasoned that political activists were monolithic creatures of consciousness while the conscience was the luxury of the ignoramus and the counter-revolutionary.

Arguably, the 2016 local government result was not irrelevant to that ruinous self-description, which was essentially an attempt to provide an intellectual and political justification for the many brazen wrongs that some in the party no longer cared to conceal. Is history repeating itself today with the legally, politically and ethically inexplicable tone-deaf insistence that there is nothing wrong with family members of political office bearers doing business with government?

Hopefully, as a country, we will critically examine the trends emanating from the Covid-19 footprint in South Africa and the world to draw lessons about our sociological make-up as it relates to the lingering apartheid spatial geography that worsened our exposure to Covid-19, public transport as a feature of that spatial geography and continuing inequalities in education that have seen private schools continue with the teaching and learning process relatively unscathed, while public schools ground to a halt.

Our recovery rate also seems to be more impressive than may initially have been thought. We also need to understand what lies behind this positive development, the lessons we must draw from the government’s handling of the public communications around Covid-19 and what we can do to improve the population’s attention to such important public messages, especially as the regulations are eased further.

Another unavoidable issue for discussion is the tendency of South Africans to talk past each other and to drown national problems and challenges in party political and intra-party factional calculi that produce a stalemate, which is ultimately injurious to all. Obviously, politics is, by definition, hard ball.

But in developing as in developed countries, the players, especially those vested with the responsibility of leadership, ought to appreciate the national interest as it expresses itself in specific national programmes.

• Ratshitanga is a consultant, social and political commentator.

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