Sensible South Africans were dumbstruck on Friday by the news that a leading mining executive had been hauled before a court and made to pay bail of R60 000 for an alleged company contravention of the lockdown regulations.
We don’t know all the facts yet – but we know enough to judge that, for all the frivolous sentimentalism of ‘we are led’ praise-singing on social media by the cossetted WiFi elites, the inept handling of the Implats matter tells a truer story about how poorly led the country really is.
The poor will understand this far better than the privileged let’s-find-cheerful-things-to-do-at-home minority.
You have only to think of a single statistic from the relatively better-off Western Cape from the past few days to appreciate the economic crisis the country is facing: 14 500 calls on the province’s helpline from people going hungry. No work, no money, no food.
News24 reported yesterday: ‘On Friday, the Presidency tweeted that applications for food parcels could be made by calling the South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) hotline or emailing the agency. Sassa responded, saying it was receiving 9 000 calls an hour.’
Violence
In the same report, senior research consultant for the Institute for Security Studies’ Justice and Violence Prevention ProgrammeDr Johan Burger was quoted as saying: ‘My next worry is that [the security services] will be forced into a situation where the violence becomes so big, so threatening, that they will use more force than is necessary and people will be seriously injured or maybe even killed because of a need for food.’
The unavoidable truth of our present condition is that without the country’s productive capacity – the private sector – South Africa’s bloated, mismanaged, wasteful, ineffective and corruption-prone state can go nowhere.
How could it be possible, then, that the chief executive of Impala Platinum’s Rustenburg Operations, Mark Munroe, could end up being treated as a villain without there being any indication of sensible intervention on the part of Cyril Ramaphosa’s executive? Did any senior person in government ask: Are we mistaken? Has there been a misunderstanding? Is there confusion about the lockdown rules? Are the lockdown rules workable? Should we not meet Implats and get to the bottom of this?
We are not, after all, talking about a corner café peddling contraband cigarettes.
Permission
And this after several days of news reports about the intentions of Impala Platinum (Implats) to ensure what the company described in a news item of 14 April as the eventual ‘safe and orderly return to work for all once the lockdown was lifted’ in the context of what it said was ‘(permission) granted from the department of mineral resources & energy to ramp up operations’.
Was any senior person in government reading the media?
Had they been, they would have recognized in that 14 April news report the chronic disconnect between dealing simultaneously with saving lives and livelihoods, and the risk of the zeal of lockdown enforcement jeopardizing the greater objective of flattening the curve of infection by creating conditions guaranteed to imperil measures intended to secure it. If the economy continues to decline and people run out of money and food, lockdown breaches will mount and so will the risks to society’s most vulnerable.
Ordinary readers learned from the report that while Impala Platinum had ‘issued a notice to employees on Sunday to return to work during the lockdown, saying it had been granted an exemption by the department of mineral resources & energy … “many” workers could not get to work after being turned back at roadblocks’. The company made it clear this was not all workers, and the objective was to ensure safety in the eventual resumption of mining.
Serious questions
The obvious inference, you would have thought, is that if Implats was engaged in or intending to engage in a defiant lockdown contravention, it would hardly have gone public in this way. True, we don’t know all the facts – but very serious questions arise about how this situation was allowed to develop in the way it did.
Mining and other executives could be forgiven for thinking they’d be on much safer ground if they blithely disregarded their responsibilities to the national economy and settled for having lunch with friends instead.
As one report observed pointedly: ‘While the wheels of justice have moved with speed in Munroe’s case, the progress in [suspended Communications Minister Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams’] case is unclear.’
Much clearer by far is the patent need for fresh, imaginative thinking on dealing with a crisis that is mushrooming with menacing speed.
This is the thrust of the IRR’s second major policy contribution of recent weeks, aimed at developing practicable solution-orientated proposals that place #LivesAndLivelihoods at the centre of the national campaign against the spread of Covid-19 and its potentially devastating consequences.
Safe economic activity
At the core of the report, A Trim Down Approach for South Africa: Getting SMMEs, the economy, and the country into a state of recovery, is the proposal to clear every possible obstacle to the resumption of safe economic activity, and resuscitate the heart of the economy – the many thousands of businesses now facing the wall, along with the millions of employees who depend on them.
This, the IRR proposes, could be done by scrapping the distinction between essential and non-essential business in favour of a Covid-19 Risk Scale to be used to judge which businesses can safely resume operations, as well as what businesses can do to match the minimum requirements for reopening.
It offers an effective, proactive way for businesses themselves to take measurable steps aimed at simultaneously rescuing the economy from disaster and protecting society’s most vulnerable from infection.
The first step would be an industry-based classification by government of broad-risk categories to establish baseline restrictions of allowable operational capacity, based on virological and epidemiological advice and economic and financial considerations. The second stage would be enabling businesses to determine their own risk quotients, and improve on them.
Risk categories
Criteria to be used in establishing the broad risk categories would include the inherent virological and epidemiological risks in the industry’s operations; the ability of the industry to financially survive at limited operational capacity; and the inherent risks and requirements in the normal functioning of the industry and relevant supply chains.
This would determine industry-wide baseline restrictions on operational capacities, with higher-risk categories necessitating lower baseline restrictions on operational capacity, and vice versa.
The second stage in applying the Covid-19 Risk Scale would be in the hands of individual businesses or entities, providing them the scope to improve their specific risk quotients to levels exceeding industry-wide baseline restrictions.
The report explains: ‘All industries would therefore return to some state of economic activity in line with relevant risk categories, but individual businesses would be able to adopt measures to improve their risk profile and so function at a level above the given industry-wide baseline restriction.’
How would this work in practice?
‘Restaurants, for example, which would generally be considered high-risk businesses in terms of the Covid-19 Risk Scale, could operate at a general sectoral baseline restriction of a set percentage of capacity, and pay employees accordingly within special legal parameters exempt from pre-crisis labour legislation and regulations. But, under the Covid-19 Risk Scale, unlike a fixed lockdown approach, a restaurant, for instance, could expand its operational capacity by taking further steps to diminish the risk to public health. (This would be done through employee and consumer-based assessments, coupled with independent inspections provided by contracted entities, functioning in a manner similar to existing auditing processes and best practices.)
‘For example, a restaurant should be allowed to operate at a baseline restriction capacity plus X% capacity if it provides sufficient sanitization equipment for staff and customers; at base capacity plus Y% capacity if it adopts a staggered time schedule to accommodate at-risk age groups; or at base capacity plus Z% capacity if it instals isolation measures, such as acrylic barriers already in use in places like Hong Kong.’
Incentives
Driven by such incentives to improve their risk quotient – all the while reinforcing public health objectives – SMMEs would be able to open, function within reasonable constraints, and improve the operational and income capacity of their business – with livelihood-saving knock-on benefits for employee pay and income.
Should an infection be detected – in employee or customer – a ‘circuit breaker’ mechanism should be implemented, with the business closing operations for a given period, or until it can be confirmed that all staff members test negative for the virus. After this is confirmed, the business can reopen. The period of closure should be used to track and trace the movements of anyone who may have come into contact with the infected person. Such a strategy would also help more accurately identify possible carriers of the virus so that they can be isolated sooner.
Government has a key role to play in the success of this proposal by
- providing a once-off Risk Quotient Improvement Subsidy (banks could be incentivised to provide very lenient Risk Quotient Improvement Loans);
- using resources freed up by scrapping non-essential state-owned enterprises to fund an independently managed ‘Trim Down Income Protection Plan’ to lessen the income shortfall of employees of businesses operating under ‘trim down’ capacity regulations; and
- clearing obstacles to SMME growth by scrapping all race-based criteria for government assistance and employment, temporarily suspending all minimum wage regulations and providing appropriate tax relief to SMMEs, based on their positions on the Covid-19 Risk Scale.
Focusing on the economy is now of paramount and growing importance. It is emerging as the biggest health risk we face.
It’s not about choosing between saving lives or saving the economy, as economist Mike Schussler told News24. ‘It’s lives versus lives.’
[Picture: Ashraf Hendricks, GroundUp]
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