Government’s management of the Covid-19 pandemic and the need for a lockdown exit strategy

By Stef Terblanche

One subject that is ultra-topical at present is of course the Covid-19 induced national lockdown announced by President Cyril Ramaphosa on 23 March and since extended with adjustments. It affects everyone, and so naturally everyone has an opinion about it, the regulations that accompany it and the way the government is managing it.

These responses have covered the full range from mostly praise in the beginning to mostly rejection and criticism more recently. Citizens and experts alike have vented their concerns and frustrations over the adverse social, business, employment and financial impacts of the ongoing lockdown regulations… but notably not so much the health impacts or outcomes.

To many, some of these regulations and determinations seemed to have been made arbitrarily and enforced high-handedly, even illegally. The extent of proper oversight and legality was questioned, both by ordinary citizens, opposition politicians and by experts across a range of relevant disciplines.

So, when it was suddenly announced that Ramaphosa would address the nation on Wednesday 13 May, South Africans waited with high hopes for good news. All they were given, however, was a promise that consultations would immediately begin with stakeholders over a proposal to ease the lockdown to level 3 for most of the country. No details were available or given and an upgrade to level 3 was not even a certainty yet.

In the rest of his address the president repeated the rationale behind the lockdown of buying time to be better prepared for the full onslaught of infections when it came. He also heaped praise on South Africans  for their “great courage, resilience and responsibility” and the sacrifices they had made.

Ramaphosa’s damage control

The sudden timing of this address after weeks of silence was odd and unexpected and offered little that was new. The tone and content sounded more like a pep talk of sorts, or damage control. Which is most likely what it was; an exercise in soothing and calming the public for which there was ample reason.

People were growing tired of being locked indoors. Food and money were running out. Businesses and jobs were going down the drain. Domestic violence was increasing. The rising infection rate and death toll despite the lockdown is scary. And there is no apparent end to the lockdown or the pandemic, with talk of a September peak, recurring waves of infections over the next year or two, six more months or more of lockdown, and more.

In the days and weeks preceding the president’s address, criticism over the government’s management of the lockdown had mounted. But more worrying was the mood on the streets, and the suburbs and townships, which was fast turning ugly. By mid-April already some 400 schools had been vandalised or badly damaged while mobs were looting food and alcohol stores and trucks. Popular criticism of Ramaphosa and his ministers on social media started taking on an ugly tone. The ban on alcohol and cigarette sales gave rise to thriving criminal enterprises.

And then protest actions started popping up everywhere – by nurses who lacked protective equipment and testing; by surfers kept out of the sea; by citizens limited to crowded public areas and a few hours per day to exercise; by hungry people lacking food or shelter or both; and by township residents confined to their homes without electricity, among others. Legal challenges of the government’s managing of the lockdown mounted, while editorials became more scathing.

Security and intelligence

There has been a heavy focus by government on security-related aspects. Every available police officer has been deployed, assisted by a large contingent of SANDF soldiers, with more than 70,000 additional troops on standby. The state’s intelligence agencies make up a significant component of the government’s response. The message Ramaphosa was getting from them could not have been a very reassuring one.

So yes, against such a background it does indeed seem that President Ramaphosa and members of his cabinet and the controversial and strangely named National Coronavirus Command Council (NCCC) may have felt a need for him to exercise damage control, try and calm down the public, while they bought time to consider whether  and how the lockdown restrictions could be eased without escalating the health risk.

But what does all of this say of Ramaphosa and his government’s management of the pandemic and the lockdown?

Government’s management of the pandemic

First, this was never going to be easy in a country with so much cultural, demographic, economic and social diversity exacerbated by high levels of poverty, inequality and unemployment. A uniform one-size-fits-all response by government would not be fully effective, while SA does not have the money and resources for a diversified response.

Over the past six or seven weeks the entire gamut of South African public emotions and responses arose: from impoverished black shack-dwellers in informal settlements who more clearly than ever saw themselves as the victims of apartheid’s legacy and 25 years of neglect by an ANC government, suspecting they would have to bear the brunt of the pandemic; to white business owners feeling unfairly excluded from state relief funding on racial grounds by BBBEE-linked preconditions. The middle classes were feeling increasingly frustrated and burdened, while the poor felt more destitute and trampled on. And every kind of emotion in-between. Few other countries, if any, had to deal with the pandemic through such a lens.

Secondly, from the government’s perspective there were multiple factors that had to be weighed and considered: public health, science and data, emerging trends and appropriate risk-adjusted responses, the already depleted economy, jobs and poverty, social and security issues, the politics involved, and a myriad of sub-factors in every category.

Any government’s response to the pandemic was only going to be as good as how strong and effective it and the country had been immediately before the pandemic. In South Africa’s case there had already been major systemic and structural fault-lines and failures before the pandemic, and the country was almost broke, a situation worsened by a downgrade of its credit rating status to junk that coincided with the start of the national lockdown. It certainly was the worst time to have to manage a pandemic of such potentially devastating proportions.

All of this occurred while accurate guiding science around this novel coronavirus was still very much lacking. Most responses were and still are by trial and error and part of a learning curve. Different parts of the world applied different responses with differing results. There was no go-to manual or existing expertise that could be consulted. This while the virus, once it had left China, was spreading in leaps and bounds around the globe.

SA’s much-praised health response

In South Africa’s case most experts locally and internationally, and much of the public, seemed to agree that government’s initial health-focused response to Covid-19 was largely the correct one: restrict contact and movement of people and thereby limit or delay the spread of the virus. This bought time to strengthen the capacity of the health system and to put in place wide-ranging public health programmes that would be better able to manage the inevitable increase in infections.

It appears that by and large, purely in terms of the health response or focus, this is still widely supported by the public and mostly by public health experts too. But even on this front some scientists or medical experts have started questioning aspects of the state health authorities’ approach, methodologies, responses, use of data, areas of focus, screening programmes, rates and levels of testing, laboratory turnaround times, and so forth. That is to be expected, because like the rest of the world, South Africa has been navigating its way through uncharted territory.

Nonetheless, this effort has been ably led by the seemingly capable and increasingly respected political rising star, Health Minister Dr Zweli Mkhize. Unlike most of his colleagues in the cabinet and on the NCCC, he surrounded himself with world-renowned experts and was willing to listen to them. He didn’t appear to be just making it up as he went along, an accusation levelled against many of his cabinet colleagues.

Lockdown exit strategy needed

Many commentators around the world have pointed out that in a response to the pandemic the health considerations cannot be separated from economic and other ones, or played off against each other, and that a balance must be found. And yet, in South Africa as in many other countries there seems to be an imbalance that has given rise to considerable criticism and concern.

What South Africa needs now, like so many other similarly inflicted countries, is a clear lockdown exit strategy, a roadmap back to a kind of normality, even if it is the so-called ‘new normal’. And one that won’t undermine the required correct balance.

President Ramaphosa’s recent address to the nation showed the government does not have such a strategy… at least not yet. But there is broad consensus that the country needs one, that the lockdown is killing what’s left of the economy, and that the country desperately needs to get its economy working again. Otherwise, many commentators seem to agree, the economic consequences will be worse than the health ones.

Against the above background, however, a number of non-health issues related to the government’s management of the pandemic and the lockdown have been cause for alarm, both in the immediate sense and  with a view to the longer term. It is these non-health factors that may be seriously complicating the drawing up of an appropriate lockdown exit strategy that enjoys broad support and consensus. These can be grouped into roughly three broad areas: (1) political and legal; (2) economic; and (3) social stability and security.

Political dynamics at play

South Africa’s political environment was already uncertain, arguably unstable, and heavily contested before the Covid-19 pandemic. Since the establishment of the NCCC and the announcement of a national lockdown, the country’s unsettling political dynamics, or more specifically those of the governing ANC, seem to have migrated into the NCCC where they appear to directly influence management of the lockdown.

ANC apparatchiks increasingly displayed a tendency towards centralised micromanagement and authoritarianism that manifests itself in over-regulation, to the point where even the types of clothing people may buy has been ridiculously dictated. This is not new, having long been one of the underlying dynamics in the political tradition of much of the ANC and its formal allies, the SA Communist Party (SACP) and Congress of SA Trade Unions (COSATU).

It is this influence and tendency that has given rise to some of the most criticised and ridiculed regulations announced by the NCCC. But these have also been influenced by personal political agendas (health ban on cigarette, alcohol sales), as well as factional power struggles and policy differences in the alliance (attacks on Finance Minister Tito Mboweni over proposed structural reforms and proposed loans from the IMF and World Bank). All of these seem to have found their way into the NCCC, no matter how vociferously the concerned political actors may deny this and claim consensus in collective decision-making.

Compromises and more nuanced approaches – finding middle ground between all of these positions, allowing some things with limits and leaving others to an expectation that people will act responsibly – would also have helped to prevent negative public perceptions of heavy-handed authoritarianism or abuse of power. Without public support the government’s best efforts will not achieve the desired results.

Power and policy contests

The political power and policy contests within the ANC and the broader alliance would probably have been ventilated at the ANC’s National General Council (NGC) scheduled for mid-2020, and a factional attempt to move against Ramaphosa was anticipated. But Covid-19 has probably put paid to the NGC for now. As a result these power struggles continue behind the scenes and one would therefore expect them to have found their way also into the NCCC where political actors from across these divisions are found. In effect the NCCC offers a new platform where these power struggles and policy squabbles are able to play out with far less rules or checks and balances.

It would also explain why President Ramaphosa, ever the consensus-seeker looking for unity, has not yet presented any definitive proposals for the next phase going forward, and why he needs to engage in more consultations. It also explains the lack of transparency and the seemingly arbitrary and baseless nature of certain of the regulatory decisions coming out of the NCCC.

What should be of most concern, however, is the shift towards a more powerful, unaccountable state and the extent to which politicians and security chiefs now enjoy powers beyond what the constitution normally grants them. The question arises: once used to this, does it become the new status quo and something they will not easily give up? Fears have already been expressed in some quarters that an indefinite extension of the state of disaster, or shifting from it to a state of emergency, will be all too easy.

Legality of the NCCC

This is where the legality of the NCCC and other aspects related to the lockdown enter the picture. The government now faces several legal challenges, chief among them the exact legal status of the NCCC and whether this council, which initially had a limited number of ministers, had illegally usurped the powers of the cabinet. While senior government leaders have been careful to state that the NCCC plays an advisory role only and that all decisions are taken collectively by the cabinet, various ministers serving on the NCCC have contradicted this in the language they use.

John Steenhuisen, the leader of the Democratic Alliance (DA), which is also taking the government to court, has pointed out that the Disaster Management Act that governs the current state of disaster and the NCCC, makes no provision for parliamentary oversight. This means the NCCC answers to no-one but the cabinet or President Ramaphosa. Even a state of emergency, generally viewed as more severe than a state of disaster, has no such sweeping powers and is subjected to parliamentary oversight.

Meanwhile – and this is important also with a view to next year’s local elections – the role and visibility of opposition parties have also been dramatically reduced under lockdown. The sole actor on the central political stage is the ANC government. The DA has managed to maintain some limited visibility and role – but subject to the whims of central government – by virtue of it governing the Western Cape and some metros. Other parties have had to take a back seat, like the EFF which has lost much of its militant and vocal visibility, while smaller parties have completely disappeared off the political stage.

Structural reforms

The fact that the country was already in poor shape because of systemic and structural fault-lines and failures when the pandemic hit, and thus limited in how it could respond, should have finally moved the government towards a fundamental reformist shift in its policies and economic strategy. The current limitations on political activity, which will also hamper opposition inside the ANC and the alliance, created an ideal opportunity. Instead factional and ideological opposition have been allowed to continue to hold back or undermine the reformers in the ANC.

Ramaphosa and the ANC government should also be concerned over how their management of the pandemic and the lockdown will impact on next year’s local government elections, assuming these will go ahead as expected. What will be the impacts of incidents of police and army brutality? Or that of some of the seemingly arbitrary, heavy-handed, or unjustified lockdown regulations? How will the closure of businesses, job losses, more poverty and general hardships play into the elections?

Economic disaster and social stability

Against this background of the political dynamics at play, the questionable boundaries of the state of disaster and its appendages like the NCCC, the apparent drift towards a more powerful and authoritarian state, the question of economic disaster and social instability arises.

There is seemingly no plan or a roadmap yet for a relatively speedy and efficient exit from the national lockdown. President Ramaphosa and his government also seem to have chosen not to use the current window of opportunity to adopt a new economic strategy and implement structural reforms that could vastly assist in rebuilding the economy after the national lockdown ends.

Instead, and unless Ramaphosa comes up with a clear plan to the contrary, the economy is faced with collapse as hundreds, perhaps even thousands of businesses shut down, hundreds of thousands of jobs are lost, tax revenue is dramatically reduced, and hunger and poverty increases. This would be a recipe for major social unrest and the question thus arises, is this what the government fears and why it has over 70,000 troops on standby? In most situations of adversity there is often opportunity to be found. But it may well be that a great opportunity to lead South Africa out of its many pre-pandemic troubles, has been missed. One can only hope President Ramaphosa still proves otherwise.

• Stef Terblanche is a Cape Town-based political analyst/consultant and journalist. He provides political risk analyses to corporate, research, diplomatic and other clients for over three decades. He writes for DDP in his personal capacity and his views do not represent those of the organization.