President Cyril Ramaphosa’s commitment to easing the coronavirus lockdown slowly – to contain the disease and reduce the number of deaths – is not the only option he has, says the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) think-tank. More than that, the IRR believes the Covid-19 pandemic provides the ANC with a perfect opportunity to extend its control over businesses and other key sectors. Ramaphosa told the nation on Wednesday that the lockdown – now on level 4 – has, after nearly eight weeks, bought the government time to prepare health facilities for a flood of infections. He claimed that, had…
President Cyril Ramaphosa’s commitment to easing the coronavirus lockdown slowly – to contain the disease and reduce the number of deaths – is not the only option he has, says the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) think-tank.
More than that, the IRR believes the Covid-19 pandemic provides the ANC with a perfect opportunity to extend its control over businesses and other key sectors.
Ramaphosa told the nation on Wednesday that the lockdown – now on level 4 – has, after nearly eight weeks, bought the government time to prepare health facilities for a flood of infections.
He claimed that, had the restrictions not been imposed, the country would have topped 80,000 infections and more than 1,600 deaths. At the time of his address, infections totalled just over 12,000 and deaths were at 219.
But in a report titled “Keeping Liberty Alive”, the IRR called the lockdown “unreasonable” and claimed it had failed to curb the spread of the pandemic, while curtailing civil liberties, sometimes with brute force, and economic activity.
This economic meltdown would enable the ANC alliance government to press ahead with the Soviet-inspired national democratic revolution to which it has been committed since at least the ’60s, it claimed.
The author and head of policy research at the institute, Dr Anthea Jeffery, said the “total destruction” of the economy would allow for the reconstruction of the economic system from capitalism to socialism and, ultimately, communism.
She said Ramaphosa last week blamed this destruction on the virus when most of the damage had, in fact, arisen from the lockdown and would grow worse the longer it was maintained.
Jeffery was sceptical about Ramaphosa’s assessment and said the lockdown regulations had little, if any, health benefits but only served to destroy the economy.
“It is fairly uncertain that we have made major gains in the lockdown. I know the president said this on Wednesday, but at the same time I find it very important to pay heed to what Professor [Alex] van den Heever said, that we have not brought the infection rate down … and Professor [Shabir] Madhi has said that we have not managed to track and trace as we should have done, which means now we are incapable of controlling the spread of the virus.”
Jeffery said Ramaphosa had several options available other than lockdown, as countries like Sweden and South Korea completely avoided lockdown but their approach was successful.
SA could have focused on protecting the vulnerable because the majority of the population was young and, if they did contract the virus, would either be asymptomatic or have mild symptoms.
“We may well have ended up with the worst of all the worlds with a very lengthy lockdown which does not do enough, by far, to reduce the number of infections and deaths because we cannot reduce the rate as we should.”
If the lockdown had not been instituted, the 30,000 deaths then anticipated by Health Minister Zweli Mkhize would have been much the same as the 28,700 TB deaths that were recorded in 2017, she said.
The multibillion-rand potential revenue collection shortfall and the Covid-19 economic meltdown could spell trouble, with experts worried about the state’s ability to sustain society and warning of social unrest as people get desperately hungry.
Jeffery said Ramaphosa had also stated that this “total destruction” presented an important opportunity to “reconstruct” the economy, stressing the need to “put in place the pillars of a new economy”, in which “the government would identify new sectors and find, create, and build jobs for the many of our people who are going to lose jobs”.
“In this new economy, state capacity would be built and strengthened, state-owned entities would function in a developmental, ethical and innovative way – and radical economic transformation would underpin the economic future. This is a recipe for ever greater state intervention and control,” she said.
Jeffery said the ANC alliance “wants to use the crisis to weaken the private sector, build dependency on the government, introduce prescribed assets for pension funds and other financial institutions, induce the Reserve Bank to print the money needed to maintain state spending, overcome resistance to the nationalisation of private healthcare under the National Health Insurance, and open the way to the uncompensated expropriation of land and other assets”.
– siphom@citizen.co.za
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