Wartime is no time for grandstanding

The unimaginable has happened. The country has, for all intents and purposes, been shut down because it is under attack.

It was surreal watching President Cyril Ramaphosa in military fatigues addressing the SA National Defence Force, exhorting them to go out and “defend our people against this invisible enemy”. It must have been quite irresistibly tempting for his political opponents to have a go at him for “wearing a uniform he didn’t earn”, so much so that the minister of defence had to come out and defend him the following day.

The president’s critics missed the big point he was making. The country is at war. Yes, there will be no airplanes dropping aerial bombs on citizens, but Covid-19 is perhaps worse than those: it comes without a warning and its heaviest toll is on the immuno-compromised and the elderly (the equivalent of women and children in a physical war.)

Unsurprisingly, the government’s actions have come in for criticism from some sectors of society. This is South Africa after all, criticism comes at all times for leaders, whether they do good or not.

The point these critics miss is that in times of war, time is of the essence. It would be all nice and wonderful if wars had formal and official declarations of their start time and date because then governments would be judged against whatever preparation time they had given to put up defences against an enemy who announced the time of their first attack. Covid-19 did not do that.

Critics like Ntsiki Mazwai, who have built a social media profile by attacking the president during peacetime, found this to be the opportune moment to remind the president of his Marikana “murders”, accusing him of engineering the lockdown from the “comfort of your mansion” with scant regard for people living in informal settlements.

What is rich of these critics is the accusation that the president engineered the lockdown to enrich his friends without for one second suggesting an alternative. If in their fantasy-filled worlds the government could have done things differently, it would assist all South Africans if they could send their suggestions in bullet-point form through to the government, along with their expected implementation dates and times ahead of the coronavirus attack, which has already infected over a thousand people.

Wartime is no time for grandstanding. This is not the time to be shouting that the country needs to solve all its social problems before implementing measures to save its citizens. South Africa’s socio-economic problems cannot be used as an excuse to let everyone perish.

Maybe the problem for the people who are criticising government’s every move is their limited understanding of what a pandemic is. Like a war, it takes lives in a very short space of time. Covid-19 kills its victims in a matter of days, especially if they do not receive medical attention.

This is not a time to be overly critical. In fact, this is a time to stop criticising and start imploring strangers to do the right thing.

In his latest book, Talking to Strangers, social engineer and bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell says: “We have no choice but to talk to strangers, especially in our modern, borderless world. We aren’t living in villages anymore.”

It is getting those strangers to accept that their painful existence in informal settlements will for now be secondary to the primary need of all South Africans: staying alive.

When Covid-19 has been defeated and the war is over, the battle to transform South Africa must continue in earnest.

Sydney Majoko.

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