The next three weeks will likely prove to be something of a litmus test of the legitimacy of state authority in South Africa.
For obvious reasons, it must be hoped that it will prove to be enough to not make the coronavirus crisis more difficult than it already is, or to not provoke state action more draconian than what is already in place.
In South Africa, it’s always difficult to say for sure – simmering anger and resentment have always gone hand in hand with a hard-to-fathom forbearance, if not docility. Ours is a society with a long history of putting up with a shabby state, and demanding too little from it.
Over the next three weeks, we might well thank our lucky stars for it.
We should hope the vast majority will simply shoulder this extra burden, put up with the bans on the sale of various categories of what the government considers non-essential goods, and willingly stay-put in their homes and keep themselves harmlessly amused. There is undoubtedly at this time an overriding virtue in everyone acknowledging their part in defeating the greater enemy of an unseen virus which, left unchecked, could swamp our health services, kill many, and take that much longer to be neutralised, at possibly incalculable cost.
Could be ugly
If the forbearance, or the obedience, turns out to be insufficient, the consequences could be ugly.
But a far greater – perhaps seemingly ironic – risk lies in our collective forbearance outlasting the epidemic.
The risk is – almost certainly unintentionally – captured in a Facebook post I saw this week that ran: ‘I am persuaded to think that the Haves – who have always practised self-isolation and social distancing due to apartheid spatial planning – feel less threatened by Covid-19. It is the Have Nots that should be very afraid and are not.’
flawed policy choices over a whole quarter of a century find us in 2020 in circumstances in which it remains possible to draw a crude line between the middle class suburban life of a minority and the rest
There’s a dig, there, at the ‘Haves’ and some wrong-headed thinking about their, or the ‘Have Nots’ for that matter, feeling unthreatened – but the post captures a deeper truth about our society that precedes, and will follow, Covid-19: flawed policy choices over a whole quarter of a century find us in 2020 in circumstances in which it remains possible to draw a crude line between the middle class suburban life of a minority and the rest.
Though many among the commentariat still insist on seeing this divide as a racial one (and on explaining it as a consequence of racialism, if not racism), the poor – who are indeed mostly black South Africans – have little to thank them for, since weak analysis and self-serving racial scapegoating have abetted the failures of the past 25 years.
Disproportionate risk
We should hope that it is dawning on growing numbers of South Africans in these difficult days that we face a disproportionate risk – to our health and to our socio-economic wellbeing – precisely because of these failures.
In its special report this week, Friends In Need – Covid-19: How South Africa can save #LivesAndLivelihoods, the Institute of Race Relations offers a comprehensive raft of practical policy suggestions to assist policymakers and others in dealing with the immediate crisis presented by the coronavirus pandemic.
But it goes beyond the immediate challenges, recognising, in the first place, that ‘weaknesses in the South African state stand as a serious obstacle to the implementation of even the most well-considered strategy’.
‘The country is at a crisis point, its funds have been badly depleted, and the resources that would make for a robust and reassuring response are not available. Misdirected policies and governance pathologies for many years and the failure to seize the opportunity for reform in the recent past have created a dire fiscal situation.’
‘Post-pandemic orientation’
This is the critical context for what the report describes as the need for South Africa to ‘prime itself for post-pandemic reorientation’.
‘Great damage will have been done by the time it is over. This will not be irrecoverable, provided appropriate policies are put in place to encourage the type of wealth-generating, job-creating growth that South Africa requires. The need to rethink B-BBEE, to reject expropriation without compensation and to ensure that the civil service is depoliticised and properly skilled and motivated will be essential.’
In urging the country to ‘keep our planning oriented to the future’, the report notes: ‘The pandemic is showing that strong, competent institutions, the availability of appropriate skills, the judicious application of technology, hardy infrastructure and the transparent exercise of power can enable a society to get through it.’
None of this warrants the slightest measure of forbearance
It doesn’t take much imagining to recognise how different South Africa’s Covid-19 response would have been had we had stronger institutions and services managed by competent, trustworthy professionals, and a strong economy not needlessly hobbled by costly and ineffective race-based empowerment edicts, not undermined by investment deterrents on the scale of such cruelly misleading policy drives as expropriation without compensation and National Health Insurance, and not sapped of the billions lost to corruption, fraud, theft and waste.
None of this warrants the slightest measure of forbearance.
There should be no tolerating miscreants in senior government and state ranks – none of whom are in orange overalls yet, despite the now two-year-old promises about getting tough on corruption – who have stolen, misappropriated, misspent and wasted billions of rands that could have made all the difference in this time of trial.
There should be no tolerating cadre deployment and so-called empowerment measures that have undermined the disadvantaged and got in the way of the appointment of competent managers to run municipalities, hospitals, Eskom, water resources, schools and so on.
Enterprise, ingenuity and dynamism
And there can be no tolerating damaging policy proposals such as EWC that stand in the way of investment, economic growth, jobs and the truly empowering agency of enterprise, ingenuity and dynamism which will remain only a dream until the government extracts its spanner from the economic works and lets the engine work to the best effect for all.
Once we have got through the present crisis with life and limb and sanity more or less in one piece, we will need to confront our national condition – and those who must bear most responsibility for it – with everything but forbearance.
It will be up to the country to make it clear to the ANC that our post-coronavirus recovery will require thorough reform, and deeds to match words, or else it will deserve to lose its last chance to evade an otherwise certain fate as an unwanted hindrance to the better society its long-suffering citizens deserve.
South Africans could do worse than to invoke the message of Finance Minister Tito Mboweni at the tail end of his lament about Moody’s junking South Africa (further proof, if any were needed, of the willfully ignored failures of the past decade) when he said: ‘We shall rise. We have to rise. We owe it to ourselves.’
That we do.
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