Dear Mr Ramaphosa.I am so glad I am not in your position. I cannot even try to imagine how difficult it must be to be in the hot seat you occupy as President of our beautiful SA.
I have sleepless nights when I have to make decisions in our small company with 25 people, when I know that the decision that needs to be made can be detrimental to one or two of those people. It is therefore unimaginable for me to think what you must feel like when you have to make decisions that influences 57 million people.Even though you have an entire cabinet and advisory teams who advise you, AND even though you don’t make any decision (or most decisions) yourself, you as President are the person we look to and who mostly everybody holds responsible for everything that happens. It cannot be easy and you have my empathy.
You dealt so fantastically with the Covid-19 pandemic when it started that nobody could fault you in those first few weeks. Unfortunately, as the weeks have passed, this cannot be said anymore.
Now, I cannot tell you or even try to advise you on what should be the next steps, but since this is a free country, I would like to offer a few insights from the sidelines based on what I have experienced lately.
Don’t stop talking to us. Even if you feel you don’t have anything of real value to say, check in with us regularly as you did in the beginning. All the jokers and ignorant people aside, the majority of the population listens to you and believes in you.
Encourage your parliament and specifically your party, the ANC, not to use this dreadful period to score political points and play political chess. There will be plenty of time for that later. I ask this of you and the ANC because you are the biggest and the people in charge at the moment. Make no mistake, the EFF, DA and the rest of the political parties of this world will not stop to play the political game now, but it is time for you and yours to lead by example now. I bet you will win even more votes at the polling stations if you do what is best for the people now and stop playing politics for a while. The ANC is too much of a super power at the moment to be scared of any other political parties in any case.
Get the rest of the economy going again. Let’s face facts Sir, if you live in Gauteng and you have been moving around lately, you would have seen that the masses are out and the crowds are gathering. Maybe not at these businesses mentioned, or churches, but every shopping centre is crowded with more people that can ever be in a church or restaurant together.
You might not believe it, but many of us understand the thinking when it comes to why government wants to keep these places on lockdown. The sale of cigarettes is causing more harm than good. All cigarettes sold by the reputable cigarette companies are harmful; there’s no way of getting past that fact. It will be detrimental to those who smoke if they get Covid-19 and their changes of surviving are less. BUT, surely these companies’ cigarettes are not as harmful or bad as those being sold on the black market. If those cigarettes were legal and passed ‘acceptable’ standards, it would not be sold on the black market. I have not seen any of the people I know to be smokers, give up smoking. They are still smoking as much as they always have. The only difference now is that they are all smoking black-market cigarettes because they can?t get their own brand. Surely this move is creating a bigger health risk? The police force are chasing numbers. I have heard from more than one police officer that they are looking to arrest people to ensure that their statistics are in line with what the station commander and the minister want to see. At a West Rand police station, the arrests over a weekend at the end of last month, amounted to two for robbery and housebreaking, and 37 for Covid-19 related offences. Reason for this: ?We need more arrests to get our statistics up?. This is a sad state of affairs in our country. When arrests and figures are driven for statistics’ sake and not because of good policing, then there is something very wrong with the management and as you know, management starts with our minister of police.
Government has done a brilliant job in making everybody aware of exactly how important it is to take personal responsibility, washing hands, disinfecting, keeping social distancing and not gathering in large groups. There is not a person left in SA and most probably the world who does not understand this.
It is now up to every individual to take personal responsibility and keep themselves save.Those who do not want to do so will be shunned by the responsible ones among us.
Sir, if you do not convince your fellow decision-makers to follow this route, think of the human impact this is going to have. So many people have already lost their jobs, their incomes. Depression and negativity are growing daily and I fear the impact this negativity is going to have on the moral of our nation.
Are all the precautions and rules really working considering the Covid-19 death rate? Are we not going to experience more human loss because of it, rather than of Covid-19 infection?
Those businesses that remain closed, such as bars, and those still limited in terms of the number of people who are allowed to gather, such as conference venues, are about to lose their businesses, while the people who frequent these places have not stopped socialising. They merely meet in private now, but still socialise the way they would have at the locked-down businesses. My question then is, who is being protected while these poor businesses are going under?
Please Sir, let common sense start ruling, instead of political points-scoring and personal agendas. Yours truly.
