President Cyril Ramaphosa told the country last night consultations were under way on a proposal to place most of South Africa on a level 3 lockdown ‘by the end of May’.
But cities or regions with ‘the highest rates of infection’ would likely remain on the current level 4.
In addition, further easing would be announced ‘in the coming days’ through ‘certain changes to level 4 regulations to expand permitted business activities in the retail space and ecommerce and reduce restrictions on exercise’, he said.
He said the decision on differing levels of lockdown would be made ‘according to the rate of infection in an area and the state of readiness and the capacity of its health facilities to cope with treating infected people’.
‘For now, infections are mostly concentrated in a few metropolitan municipalities and districts in the country. It is important that we maintain stringent restrictions in these areas and restrict travel out of these areas to parts of the country with lower rates of infection.’
Ramaphosa said the government believed the lockdown had been effective in slowing the rate of infection, thus giving health authorities time to prepare for a greater case load. ‘The best current estimate is that, without the lockdown and the other measures we have taken, at least 80 000 South Africans could have been infected by now. And the death toll could have been at least 8 times higher than it is.’ (The toll last night was 219.)
He acknowledged that in the ‘unprecedented challenge’ of confronting the crisis, ‘there may have been times when we have fallen short of your expectations’.
‘Some of the actions we have taken have been unclear, some have been contradictory and some have been poorly explained. Implementation has sometimes been slow and enforcement has sometimes been inconsistent and too harsh.’
He said he wished to reaffirm the government’s ‘commitment … to take whatever action is necessary to safeguard the life, the dignity and the interests of the South African people’.
‘I pledge once again to ensure that your rights are respected and upheld, especially by those who have been entrusted with this responsibility… Where we have disappointed, we will continue to make amends. Where we make mistakes, we will continue to correct them.’
Positive cases in South Africa rose yesterday by 724 to 12 074.
Earlier yesterday, scorn was heaped on Minister of Trade, Industry and Competition Ebrahim Patel over the release of a detailed but perplexing list of clothing the government was willing to allow South Africans to buy.
Democratic Alliance MP Dean Macpherson said the party was ‘stunned by the bizarre and extraordinary clothing list that has been gazetted by Patel, which seems to have been plucked from Alice in Wonderland’. The regulations were ‘frankly mad and seem more at place during the 1980s under the Soviet Union than they do in a democracy like South Africa’.
Criticism of the government’s handling of the crisis came from other quarters, too.
Former finance minister Trevor Manuel has delivered several sharp comments over recent days, most recently in an interview with News24, in which he questioned the ‘rationality’ of some regulations, and singled out the sometimes violent conduct of security forces.
‘Once you start using the language of force,’ he said, ‘then you’re on the wrong side of history.’
On Patel’s clothing regulations, Manuel said: ‘Look at the regulations about the sale of clothing that were published today: you aren’t allowed to sell T-shirts or flip-flops? What is this? It is not rational. We all agreed that, when the president announced the lockdown, it was necessary to prevent the spread of Covid-19. But, as this has unfolded, I have increasingly started to see the irrationality of much of it.’
In a report on BusinessLive, headlined ‘SA’s economy is past tipping point, says Neal Froneman’, the head of Sibanye-Stillwater commented: ‘It’s incumbent on the government to do the right things. They’re doing more damage now by keeping businesses at level 4 than they are doing good by preventing Covid-19.’
He perceived the problem as a ‘lack of alignment’ in the Cabinet.
The BBC’s Andrew Harding reported yesterday that ‘the shocked silence and prompt conformity that greeted Mr Ramaphosa’s early diktats has been replaced by an increasingly sceptical, angry, and politicised debate’, and that ‘the image of a united African National Congress (ANC) cabinet – so important in terms of convincing the public to endure such hardships indefinitely – is being eroded’.