Ramaphosa must look beyond next 30 days in Covid-19 battle

One of the many social media memes doing the rounds on how humanity must approach 2021 urges everyone “not to touch anything, walk calmly in a single file, behave yourself and don’t claim the year as yours”.

It might be intended to be humorous but the central message is “keep cool heads going into the new year”. It’s a message everyone – citizens and government – will do well to heed.

It’s quite easy to forget that the coronavirus pandemic is less than a year old for most of the world. It was first detected in Wuhan just over a year ago but South Africa’s pandemic only began in March, a mere nine months ago.

Those nine months have taken a lot out of everyone and the temptation to “do something” to return to normal life can easily have the most terrible of unintended consequences.

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The raging second wave of infections has seen calls for government to “go back to Level 5”. These calls seem sensible and filled with good intentions but might be self-defeating in the long term. Level 5 lockdown regulations were almost draconian in nature, although necessary for that period.

And they served their intended purpose of slowing down infections whilst the government got itself ready for anticipated flooding of hospitals with Covid-19 patients.

But the hard lockdown also exposed weaknesses in government systems. The president’s hard war talk was not matched by security cluster personnel enforcing regulations in places like the townships. In fact, many can attest to the fact that social distancing in crowded townships was just not observed, even at the height of the hard lockdown.

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The ban on cigarettes and alcohol simply drove those trades underground. Even the men and women in blue saw a chance to make a quick buck.

In other words, the hard, unenforceable regulations of a hard lockdown created conditions for corruption of a different kind to thrive while preventing normal business from operating.

So, what’s the government to do in the face of these daily record infections?

Try a different approach. Yes, limits of personal freedoms via the curfew and restrictions on liquor consumption and sales can slow things down, but the focus must move from enforcing regulations to ensuring that citizens learn and know that the new normal is here to stay.

Sanitise, mask up and keep distance between people. The past nine months have contained lessons that cannot be ignored – enacting laws to force people into certain behaviours cannot work if there is no capacity to enforce them.

As SA edges into 2021, the focus must be to make ways of the new normal work better for citizens. The delays and backlogs in the administrative side of government, the courts, home affairs, traffic authorities cannot continue to wait for a vaccine. New ways must be developed and immediately put to use to stop citizens from having the feeling that their lives are on hold.

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It is that frustrating feeling that “we’ve been waiting for solutions but none are forthcoming” that makes citizens lose their heads and in the process, worsen the pandemic.

SA’s economic structure does not permit for a prolonged total lockdown. There are far too many daily earners who suffered the most during the first hard lockdown.

The president and the National Coronavirus Command Council must contain the second wave but for the sake of SA’s future, they must start looking beyond the next 30 days. The new normal is here to stay, for the next couple of years most probably, and the country’s decision-making must reflect that.

Sydney Majoko.

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