As the government moved yesterday to reopen trade for online shopping – except for alcohol and cigarettes – pressure mounted on Cyril Ramaphosa’s administration to go much further and limit the blow of a looming humanitarian crisis.
The president made it clearer – after his vague reference to easing the lockdown from level 4 to level 3 on Wednesday night – that ‘I must make it clear that we will be moving to #Level3Lockdown’.
Evidently ceding to pressure from the private sector and others, trade and industry minister Ebrahim Patel ditched his 48-day resistance to e-Commerce yesterday and announced online shops may now sell anything, barring cigarettes and alcohol.
The regulations said that ‘(in) order to limit the social and economic hardship caused by the pandemic on local industries and enable consumer choice to support local producers, retailers must give prominence to those goods which are manufactured in the Republic of South Africa’. Online retailers are also urged to ‘provide for as many payment options as possible for consumers, that are based on reducing risks of transmission, and enabling poorer consumers to access delivery services’.
Kim Reid, the CEO of Takealot, told BusinessInsider: ‘We are very pleased to see that the government has decided to open up e-commerce at Level 4 fully’, adding however: ‘We hope that it is not too late for many small businesses to make up for lost opportunities and save jobs.’
BusinessInsider quoted the regulations as saying “e-Commerce can be a critical enabler to opening the economy …(and) can accelerate innovation, support local manufacturing and increase access by the informal market and poorer South Africans’. But the report noted pointedly: ‘There is no explanation as to why that had not been true for the previous 48 days of the lockdown.’
The Democratic Alliance (DA) yesterday said its lawyers would file papers in the high court challenging the rationality of three separate lockdown-related decisions: The night curfew, the restrictions on e-commerce and the limited three-hour window for exercise. Said DA interim leader John Steenhuisen: ‘These cannot be justified and should be immediately reversed.’
He added that the party would today file more court papers challenging the constitutionality of the Disaster Management Act.
Steenhuisen said that ‘if the act does not meet constitutional muster, it means the decisions taken by the National [Coronavirus] Command Council under this act are not valid’.
Western Cape Premier Alan Winde gave notice yesterday that he would push for the province to be moved to level 3 as soon as possible.
‘With our healthcare system prepared, it is simply no longer possible to maintain Level 4 restrictions anywhere in the Western Cape or South Africa.
‘The economic crisis caused by these restrictions has resulted in a life-threatening humanitarian disaster that will only worsen in the months ahead.’
He said the Western Cape’s ‘data-led, evidence-based approach’ enabled ‘targeted interventions in hotspots’ which ‘are not whole provinces or even districts … (but) geographical areas where people live, down to street-level’.
In addition to economic damage, the IRR warned yesterday, the extended lockdown held grave risks and threats for South Africa’s political and economic freedoms.
The dangers to liberty in this time of crisis are addressed in the report, Keeping Liberty Alive, by IRR head of policy research Dr Anthea Jeffery.
In an online media briefing yesterday, Jeffery warned that as it had become clear that the lockdown ‘is not a temporary phenomenon but a fixture for the foreseeable future, it is all the more vital to examine, and counter, the threat it poses to the political and economic freedoms of all South Africans’.
Threats and risks include the constitutional status and decision-making of the National Coronavirus Command Council; abuses by the police and army; a mounting threat to freedom of speech; the failure of the government to disclose the modelled data informing its decisions, and its failure to meet the Constitution’s founding values of ‘accountability, responsiveness, and openness’; and the sharp erosion of economic freedom, with the government even bizarrely determining what kind of T-shirts people can buy.
Jeffery argues that if liberty ‘is to be kept alive, it is vital to challenge every unreasonable and unjustifiable decision – from the irrationality of specific rules to the constitutionality of the lockdown as a whole’.
‘It is also important for South Africans to think ahead to the period beyond the virus, when the key need will be to revive and reinvigorate the economy after the devastation resulting from the lockdown.’
Positive cases rose yesterday by 665 to 12 739, and deaths rose by 19 to 238. There have been 5 676 recoveries.
Health minister Zweli Mkhize said: ‘We have managed to flatten the curve to some extent due to the lockdown. Flattening the curve is an ongoing process and we must continue to battle this.’
In other virus-related news
- US security agencies have said hackers backed by the Chinese government are trying to steal American research dealing with the response to the Covid-19 crisis. The statement comes amid increased tensions between the two countries over the source of the outbreak. It was reported that the FBI was investigating digital break-ins by cyber-actors linked to China who were trying to steal data on vaccines, treatments and testing. It warned scientists and public health officials to be on the lookout, but didn’t identify the institutions that had been targeted; and
- The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that the coronavirus ‘may never go away’. WHO emergencies director Dr Mike Ryan warned against trying to predict when the virus would disappear. Even if a vaccine was found, controlling the virus would require a ‘massive effort’. Almost 300 000 people worldwide are reported to have died from Covid-19, with more than 4.3 million recorded cases.