Editorial
On Monday, one million doses of the Covid-19 vaccine arrives in South Africa. It’s the beginning of what President Cyril Ramaphosa has called the “largest and most complex logistical undertaking in our country’s history”.
For once, it isn’t his speech writer’s flight of fancy.
For almost a year under lockdown, we have seen the best and the worst that South Africa has to offer. There have been well-documented cases of tenderpreneurism and brazen profiteering with PPE contracts. There have been allegations of unscrupulous politicians withholding food parcels from desperate citizens.
There have been claims that the government is deliberately under-declaring the true mortality rate. Some of the lockdown regulations have veered from the Kafkaesque to the illogical. Others have been just simply capricious.
And yet there have also been incredible successes, not least the alacrity with which the tenderpreneurs have been brought to book. We have seen fantastic public and private partnerships that have been forged.
Perhaps the greatest triumph has been that our health services may well have buckled, but have never collapsed despite the advent of a second, more rapid and more virulent wave of the pandemic.
The greatest challenge for the government, though, begins on Monday.
The way in which it secured vaccines and announced its plan, despite ostensibly not having one as the curtain dropped on 2020, is a very good omen that there is a plan. It’s not something the Department of Health is often given credit for.
Covid-19 is one of the most hotly contested crises of modern times, between scientists and the clamours of pseudo-scientists freshly graduated from the echo chambers of social media. No one, anywhere, has a definitive answer for the greatest public health crisis in living memory. But, if we don’t screw this one up, South Africa might well astound its critics yet again.