President Cyril Ramaphosa told the nation early in the lockdown: ‘We are resolved not to merely return our economy to where it was before the coronavirus, but to forge a new economy… to restructure the economy and to achieve inclusive growth. … [W]e will forge a compact for radical economic transformation… Our new economy must be founded on fairness, empowerment, justice and equality.’
This is standard socialist Ramaphosa when he wants to express continued progress towards a socialist society and a command economy, while implying to the free marketeers that he is making good process in going in their direction.
On 9 April, President Ramaphosa looked forward to ‘a process of fundamental reconstruction’. What does he really mean?
Minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs and de facto ‘prime minister’ Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma was also clear: ‘…Covid-19 also offers us an opportunity to accelerate the implementation of some long agreed-upon structural changes to enable reconstruction, development and growth. These opportunities call for more sacrifices and – if needs be – what Amilcar Cabral called “class suicide” wherein we must rally behind the common cause.’
All the signs of socialist zeal have been there throughout the lockdown. The government has become increasingly autocratic and less democratic.
Socialist societies are economically deleterious and dismissive of individual rights, with the state interfering with the right of individuals to conduct their lives as they choose. Ramaphosa has on numerous occasions alluded to Covid’s responsibility for the state of the economy.
Legal challenges
The lockdown has been an unexpected opportunity to remodel the economy. This is best demonstrated by the fact that there have been and continue to be legal challenges to the lockdown on the grounds of its being either unconstitutional or unlawful.
The charity, Cradle of Hope (COH), will go to court to challenge guidelines issued by the Gauteng Ministry of Social Development, which prevents it from distributing food, including peanut-butter sandwiches for hundreds of Krugersdorp West residents. COH argues that the regulations pertaining to the requirement of permits are at odds with the constitutional rights to sufficient food and water.
The Democratic Alliance is challenging the constitutionality of the Disaster Management Act, especially its ‘lack of provision for the importance of upholding the principle of parliamentary oversight over the executive’.
The Helen Suzman Foundation is seeking an order compelling parliament and the executive to exercise their constitutional powers.
The Fair Trade Independent Tobacco Association (FITA) will argue that the government has failed to demonstrate a scientific link between the spread of Covid-19 and use of tobacco products. Health Minister Zweli Mkhize’s support of the ban appears to be limited to the general ills of smoking and not to its aggravating the spread of Covid-19.
The fact that the African National Congress (ANC) is forcing these parties to progress these matters to court is symptomatic of a ruling party enthralled by its new-found power, and unable to back down.
The Glenda Gray furore points to the compulsion to shut down free speech. Dr Gray publicly criticised the lockdown on the grounds that the regulations served no purpose and that the rules were being ‘sucked out of thumbs’. Mkhize wrote a lengthy letter challenging Gray. But the kicker came in a letter from Acting Director-General of Health Dr Anban Pillay to the chairman of the Medical Research Council (MRC), of which Gray is the president.
Pillay complained that Gray’s allegations in the media ‘are damaging to Government’s response to Covid-19’.
‘These media statements cause confusion … and are likely to erode public support for behaviour change’, says Pillay.
Grovelling apology
Pillay concluded by recommending that ‘the Board investigates the conduct [of Gray] on this matter given the harm it has caused to South Africa’s Covid-19 response’. In response, the MRC issued a grovelling apology and cravenly undertook to launch an investigation. Public opprobrium helped reverse this decision.
Instead of accepting the right of a person, particularly a medical expert, to level criticism, the government tried to shut the opposition up.
The IRR takes the view that these undemocratic tendencies are not just a matter of the current lockdown, but merely reflect an exaggerated example of a ‘lockdown’ that has been in force for at least ten years. This article argues that a ‘lockdown’ has actually been in place for nearly twenty years.
GroundUp editor Nathan Geffen reminds us that in 2001 a Medical Research Council (MRC) study on mortality was leaked to the media. The study showed how HIV was killing hundreds of thousands of South Africans. The report was one of the most important published in the MRC’s history and it contributed to an eventual improvement in government policy in 2003.
Its findings contradicted those of the AIDS-denying former President Thabo Mbeki, and his Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang. But their immediate response to the leak was to pursue a witch-hunt for the leaker of the document.
South Africa’s response to the general election in 2002 in Zimbabwe was significantly responsible for the ruinous state Zimbabwe is in today.
Mbeki, president at the time, mediated talks between the ruling Zanu-PF and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change just ahead of the elections. Notwithstanding this, Mbeki met President Robert Mugabe afterwards, and went on to say there was no crisis in Zimbabwe.
The very next day the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission announced a recount in 23 constituencies for the election at all levels of government.
Mbeki had asked former Constitutional Court judges Sisi Khampepe and Dikgang Moseneke, who were leading the Judicial Observer Mission, to draft a report on their observations.
Not ‘free and fair’
In short, the judges found that the elections were not ‘free and fair’. This contradicted Mbeki’s already public view that the elections were ‘free and fair’.
To his shame, Mbeki continued to endorse the Zimbabwe elections and support the view by the South African Observer mission (SAOM), which oversaw the elections, that they had been ‘legitimate’. Mbeki also dismissed the evidence in the Commonwealth Observer Mission report, which highlighted a number of irregularities.
Mbeki refused to make the report public. He and former presidents Kgalema Motlanthe and Jacob Zuma spent more than six years opposing legal action to release the report to the public.
Mbeki’s failure breached the public’s right to know what he was doing in their name, and made no small contribution to Zimbabwe’s slide into chaos and bankruptcy.
The Mail & Guardian’s attorney Dr Dario Milo commented: ‘The [president’s] office acted contrary to the values of openness and transparency enshrined in PAIA [the Promotion of Access to Information Act] and the Constitution. Three successive presidents opposed the report’s release when they should have known that the public had a clear right to know, and when they should have known that their opposition was baseless and dilatory.’
The right to know triumphed, but the damage had been done. The ANC during the struggle was never a democratic organisation as described in its propaganda. Its undemocratic impulses will keep us in lockdown to some degree as long as it is in power.
‘It is not because men’s desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak.’ – John Stuart Mill
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