Nicholas Lorimer and Terence Corrigan
With President Cyril Ramaphosa’s address on Sunday evening, the lockdown of the economy was – by all outward appearances at least – placed on notice. The bedraggled economy is set to reopen next week, and with some exceptions, South Africans fortunate enough to still be employed in firms that have been resilient enough to have weathered the lockdown will be able to return to work.
It is a moment that will be greeted with relief by millions.
The past two months have been intensely testing. As the Covid-19 pandemic took hold, South Africa was unexceptional in scrambling to find some variant of the shutdown, distancing and isolation approach that was credited with having brought it under control in the People’s Republic of China. Indeed, South Africa adopted what has been described as among the world’s most severe responses.
It was, however, always apparent that this approach would be fraught with problems. State capacity has always been a major problem for the country, and an endeavour on the scale of the lockdown would push that to the limit. So would the social conditions – crowded living spaces and extreme poverty – that so many people endure.
It’s fair to say – unsurprisingly – that we ended up with a situation in which the lockdown was unsustainable. The author of Kasinomic Revolution, GG Alcock, recently penned a piece in which he argued that across much of the country, the lockdown had effectively been ended as people looked to their own survival. At the same time, a great deal of ill-feeling has been engendered by the misbehaviour of security officers harassing – even killing – people for perceived infringements of the lockdown. Some in the executive seemed to enjoy their new-found powers rather too much.
Interestingly, exhilaration at government flexing its muscles was not confined to ministers and generals. Many journalists and analysts cheered this on. Some tried to help in enforcing the lockdown by tagging the presidency or the police on reports of errant strollers. Others penned sarcastic and condemnatory articles about people’s frustrations with the lockdown (a goodly number of which made doubtful racialised claims).
Perhaps most seriously, a number of commentators decried concerns about the economic impact of the lockdown through crass and unfounded accusations that these were a callous case of ‘profits before people’.
Rather, it seemed, a strong narrative emerged that concern for the economy was callous, and South Africa’s people should surrender themselves to the wisdom of the state and those advising it – #weareled.
We at the Institute recognized the economic threat that the lockdown posed early on. This is not to say that no case existed for lockdown, but that significant trade-offs would be forced. And for that reason, we set out within days a raft of policy ideas for boosting health capacity, providing financial support without crippling the fiscus completely and ensuring social stability and food supply.
We followed up with critiques of the hard lockdown – hosting economists Dawie Roodt and Mike Schussler and financial commentator Magnus Heystek – and proposing a trim-down approach. Here we suggested eliminating the government’s distinction between essential and non-essential businesses and getting as much of the economy running while maintaining measures to safeguard health.
It was not only the economics of lockdown which we warned against, but also the threats to civil liberties and the rule of law. These concerns we expressed early on; after all, the lockdown was always – inevitably – backed by the threat of coercion, enforced not only by the police, but by the military as well. (These our colleague Dr Anthea Jeffery wrote up in a report entitled Keeping Liberty Alive.) The lockdown has been accompanied by some 50 deaths attributed to police and army brutality, according to a report to the oversight committee on policing.
And we have also warned of the threats to the rule of law posed by the National Coronavirus Command Council – a body with seemingly enormous powers, but lacking constitutional authority.
Fortunately, the announcement of a move to Level 3 signals that at least some of this has been taken on board. We at the Institute warned that South Africa could simply not continue along the path that it was travelling. We are nevertheless all paying the price for these decisions – however necessary they may have been at the outset, and however enthusiastically many of us may have endorsed them. We will continue paying for some considerable time to come.
The pandemic and the lockdown should perhaps have taught us that a constitutional democracy and a free society should never surrender its critical faculties. It remains an unbroken civic duty to probe and question – and an essential resource for effective policy. We at the Institute believe that the evidence shows our concerns about the economic costs of the lockdown to have been well-founded and correct. We fear that the same will be shown to have been the case for civil liberties.
As we embark on rehabilitating the economy (in the face of a still severe public health crisis), we dare not be seduced by the appeals to national unity, to societal resolve and to widespread approval of the actions of those in power. Rather, we need reasoned analysis and robust debate. Our future may depend on this.
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