JOHANNESBURG - Cyrus the great of Persia is attributed the character of democratic centralism – Diversity in Counsel – Unity in Command.
This is how President Cyril Ramaphosa has seized the stage as we face the threat of coronavirus. Ramaphosa has declared a state of disaster which provides for normal privileges such as visiting and dining with friends to be discarded.
The biggest public victim of the regulations thas to be Communications and Digital Technologies Minister Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams.
Ramaphosa suspended and demanded that she apologises after pictures of her dining with former higher education minister Mduduzi Manana went public this week as the country was observing the 21-day lockdown declared last month. He also docked Ndabani-Abrahams’ salary for one month and left the rest to the law.
The sanctions have been preceded by the predictable insinuating dribbling drama of unforgivable spin when people have contracted the virus, some are dead and others are still to contract.
Ramaphosa has acted decisively to articulate what unity in command represents.
This is an honour to millions whose lives have been disrupted in South Africa. I would have appreciated a tenfold dose of reprimand - something close to summary dismissal.
However, Ramaphosa has also shown the quality of mercy required when we are faced with a crisis.
The continued counsel now revolves around the advice of science on whether he should extend the lockdown.
The strategies and interventions carry with them heavy burdens on choices to be made given that the unfolding phenomena is not laboratory based controlled randomized designs.
For the first time scientific reasoning leads.
This is what is refreshing about the debilitating and deadly stench of coronavirus. Health Minister Dr Zweli Mkhize, his cooperative governance and traditional affairs and international relations counterparts Drs Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma and Naledi Pandoor make you feel in a different world. In the mix of difficulty in attribution is the memory of how sunlight soap had always been a companion. As most were not fortune with toothpaste a luxury, sunlight doubled up for it.
Scientists tell us that the virus sits on the throat for up to four days before finding its way to the lungs to perform its ungodly task. If coronavirus fears soap that much, are these rickety methods worth thinking about as part of diversity in counsel to be judged by science. Another claim which has science based data behind it at least, is the effect that the BCG vaccine has against tuberculosis has on coronavirus infection.
Some scientists in South Africa and elsewhere have cautiously and advisedly floated this notion.
Others have spoken about malaria tablets. Another science based discovery has been the preliminarily successful genetic sequencing of the coronavirus genome by the University of Western Cape researchers. Accompanying these science based speculation is a plethora from the lowly’s belief based practices of sunlight soap that form part of diversity in counsel.
The choices are tough on the economy. Should we have five thousand killed by the virus or a hundred thousand killed by starvation in the future because we tried to save 5 000?
After all herd immunisation is the best thing to happen.
A cold statistics is one quoted by Minister Bheki Cele, that coronavirus lockdown has saved us about 290 murders in this period. So revealing of our severe societal fault lines, that a bad becomes a comforting substitute for the worse. The test that Cyrus of Persia has for South Africa’s Ramaphosa is how to sustain diversity in counsel and unity in command beyond coronavirus. It is in defeating systemic challenges of poverty, inequality and unemployment.
Only in the diversity of scientific plurality of macroeconomic solutions that include employment, poverty and inequality with money supply, prices and growth can there be hope.
The less the monolith of debt to GDP ratio and the IMF “Corona” we have been treated to, the better for the country.
Dr Pali Lehohla is the former Statistician-General of South Africa and the former head of Statistics South Africa.
BUSINESS REPORT