JOHANNESBURG - Coronavirus has thrown all sorts of conundrums across the world.
Why is it then that we have endured the current levels of poverty and unemployment that are ravaging lives, paying very scant attention to them?
What has prompted the world to respond the way it did to this new pandemic? Did poverty and unemployment not present the specter of death like the virus is doing to both the rich and the poor? Or has poverty and unemployment cushioned the immediacy of death so much that urgent action got delayed and we got comfortable with it?
A slow social death that coronavirus relates to the education of the poor. The middle class can connect to the internet and secure the best teachers and materials there ever have been, whilst the poor cannot.
This is a feature of increasing disparities that we brought to the attention of the UN Secretary
General Ban Ki Moon in 2014 in our report on data revolution – The World that Counts.
Schools are closed and tuition has stopped. The question is how will student progression be handled.
Can it result in the postponement of new enrolments for 2021?
This reminds me when Lesotho cut primary education by a year in 1970. Pupils in standard five and standard six wrote entry exams into high school. That created a nightmare for high school infrastructure which translated into the university six year later.
Halls of residence and lecture rooms overflowed with students.
Today the world is going to face supply chains on a grand scale.
The question is what are the parameters of the spirit of human solidarity? Are they in the socialisation of burdens and benefits or in the socialisation of burdens and privatization of benefits?
Should the threat be the inevitable socialization of death that prompts us to action?
Late Apple founder Steve Jobs said on his deathbed: “I reached the pinnacle of success in the business world. In others’ eyes my life is an epitome of success. However, aside from work, I have little joy. In the end, wealth is only a fact of life that I am accustomed to. At this moment, lying on the sick bed and recalling my whole life, I realise that all the recognition and wealth that I took so much pride in have paled and become meaningless in the face of impending death. You can employ someone to drive the car for you, make money for you but you cannot have someone to bear the sickness for you. Material things lost can be found. But there is one thing that can never be found when it is lost — Life.”.
Job’s story resonates with that of Alfred Nobel. Nobel held several patents, but the one that expanded his reach to riches was that of manufacturing dynamites. Upon reading an obituary that mistook him for his brother, Nobel realised how the public perceived him. He turned his wealth into a commitment to human prosperity and he launched the Nobel Peace Prize.
Jobs and Nobel’s stories suggest that the advent of death as a phenomena is socialised even though the end of life is an individual occurrence.
Yet in the eye of the coronavirus storm, the richest nation on earth is withdrawing $400 million from WHO because it praised China in the way it dealt with the pandemic and perhaps failed to praise the US as a major funder.
That death is so individually worrisome suggests that not only is life gregarious, but its burdens and benefits must be socialized if we are to lead a life worth living.
A virus has just taught us that lesson
Dr Pali Lehohla is the former Statistician-General of South Africa and the former head of Statistics South Africa.
BUSINESS REPORT