The Covid-19 crisis in South Africa has been overtaken by an ‘ANC lockdown crisis’ that is ‘destructive’, has turned citizens into ‘subjects of an authoritarian state’, and can no longer be justified, according to Democratic Alliance (DA) interim leader John Steenhuisen.
He warned President Cyril Ramaphosa that if the government failed to lift the lockdown, millions more citizens would start breaking the law in the coming days and weeks.
‘If you don’t end it, the people of South Africa will take charge and end it for you.’
He added: ‘We are no longer dealing with a Covid-19 crisis. We are dealing with a lockdown crisis. An ANC lockdown crisis to be precise. Let me be very clear about this: There is no longer a justification to keep this hard lockdown in place. The government cannot produce this justification.’
Steenhuisen dismissed the Presidency’s claim in relation to the widely criticized cigarette ban that the minutes of the National Coronavirus Command Council were ‘classified’, saying: ‘I don’t buy that for a second, and neither should you.’
The DA had filed a Promotion to Access to Information (PAIA) Act application to obtain not only the minutes of its discussion on cigarettes, but of other decisions relating to the lockdown.
‘If there is a good reason for maintaining the lockdown, based on a scientific modelling of this pandemic, then we need to know what this reason is. We need to see government’s modelling. If no reason and no modelling can be shared, then we have no choice but to suspect that government is acting irrationally, or deliberately instilling fear to further some other agenda.’
The DA proposed localised lockdowns based on information, allowing more businesses to open and people to return to their livelihoods, still using precautionary measures such as physical distancing, masks and regular washing of hands.
In a hard-hitting column on Businesslive, Steenhuisen wrote: ‘The severe national lockdown of unspecified duration, coupled with inadequate, patchy support, is irrational, badly planned, badly executed, disproportional, unsustainable, unjustified and unjustifiable. It is more damaging than the virus itself. Bear in mind, locking down for another month will not eradicate the virus, it will merely delay the peak by another month.’
He wrote: ‘The truth is, mortality estimates are too low to justify this national lockdown. Scant progress has been made in building hospital capacity — the government has clearly failed to achieve in six weeks what it initially planned to achieve in three. And the government has no handle on the data and therefore cannot make data-driven decisions. This is unconscionable, considering the cost and sacrifices borne by the citizenry.’
Government is also facing mounting pressure from business and civil society. The Business for South Africa (B4SA) Covid-19 alliance urged the government to hasten the opening of the economy or face greater than warranted economic devastation and joblessness.
Tensions are evidently mounting in the ruling party, too, with a report yesterday indicating ongoing friction between outspoken pro-economic growth finance minister Tito Mboweni and others in the African National Congress (ANC).
News24 reported that Mboweni was ‘in hot water – again’, this time with his having been ‘condemned at an ANC national executive committee meeting for “acting out of the collective leadership” and behaving “out of order”.’
The report, based on unnamed sources, noted pointedly that the President ‘did not come to Mboweni’s defence as his detractors – like secretary-general Ace Magashule – lambasted him for contradicting the government’s position on the lockdown’.
Writing on the same news platform this week, columnist Mpumelelo Mkhabela warned that the risk of Ramaphosa’s consensus-style of leadership in the coronavirus crisis was that Mboweni’s ‘frustration’ (at not being supported in advancing sound economic arguments) would become ‘permanent’ and ‘would translate into economic policy uncertainty’.
Johannesburg mayor Geoff Makhubo said yesterday almost a million people in the city were in need of food aid due to the lockdown. ‘As more and more people get unemployed, the incidence of poverty and food insecurity start to increase,’ Makhubo was reported as saying. ‘Social distress is something that is real.’
In other news, the government announced it would be releasing on parole some 19 000 inmates from prisons across the country being held for ‘petty crime’ such as ‘shoplifting, theft and trespassing’ to relieve the risk of infection in the country’s notoriously overcrowded jails. Justice and Correctional Services Minister Ronald Lamola anticipated that once completed, this process ‘is expected to reduce overcrowding by 12.15%, should those considered for parole by the boards be granted parole’.
Here, too, the DA called out the government, with MP Glynnis Breytenbach warning the release might create a ‘greater humanitarian crisis’. She pointed out: ‘Many of the prisoners who stand to be released do not have families or homes to return to. Those who do may well return to a home where there is already little or no food.’ Furthermore, she said, ‘finding employment, difficult enough under the best of circumstances for those with a criminal record, will be impossible in the current economy.’
The Independent Police Investigative Directorate said it was investigating 10 cases of death due to police action during the lockdown.
Positive cases in South Africa rose by 663 to 8 895, and there were 17 more deaths, bringing the toll to 178.
In other virus-related news
- The Financial Times reported that US unemployment surged to 14.7 per cent, its highest level since the Second World War, after 20.5 million Americans lost their jobs last month following lockdowns that choked off the world’s biggest economy. Earlier, the newspaper reported that tech stocks helped lead Wall Street higher, sending the Nasdaq Composite index into positive territory for the year, ‘underlining how the resilience of the technology sector in particular has helped equity markets claw back a lot of their coronavirus-related losses’;
- Madrid’s public health chief Yolanda Fuentes resigned in protest against the Spanish capital’s bid to start lifting its lockdown from Monday. Madrid has seen more Covid-19 fatalities than other areas of Spain but the rate of infection has declined;
- The BBC reported that Russia declared another 10 669 infections in the past 24 hours, the sixth consecutive day that the number has been above 10 000; and
- UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called for an all-out effort ‘to end hate speech globally’, noting that the coronavirus pandemic had unleashed a ‘tsunami of hate and xenophobia’. He said: ‘Anti-foreigner sentiment has surged online and in the streets. Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories have spread and Covid-19-related anti-Muslim attacks have occurred.’