Editorial
The entire country has been on tenterhooks this week. It has been several weeks since President Cyril Ramaphosa last addressed us – and the State of Disaster is due to expire today.
The expectation that we will move to Level 2, with a return of legal travel between provinces for pleasure rather than business and finally an end to the legal sale of alcohol and tobacco, reached fever pitch by mid-week.
Perhaps the Union Buildings misheard our entreaties, for instead Eskom gifted the nation with Stage 2 load shedding, a particularly worrying development given the contraction of our economy, the throttling of our manufacturing sector and our spiralling official unemployment rate, which has breached the 50% mark.
South Africa has endured one of the toughest – and longest – lockdowns anywhere in the globe, ostensibly to flatten the curve of the infection while the government prepared for the inevitable surge of infections in what is widely recognised as the worst global health crisis in living memory.
What has been most heartening is that even though our number of infections ultimately skyrocketed, our recovery rate is higher than the global average and our mortality rate far lower than any of the scientists dared hope. Our hospitals have not been overwhelmed as feared, and because of all this the scene is set for all our lives to become a little less restricted.
The devastation wrought on our businesses, especially the critical SME sector, has been unimaginable. Lockdown has exerted a tough toll on the economy, even moreso in the light of the uncontrolled – and almost frenzied - PPE profiteering by politically connected businesses.
While we wait for the world to find a vaccine for COVID 19, is it too much to expect Ramaphosa to tell us how he intends vaccinating us from tenderpreneurs – or at the very least impose serious social distancing in our worst prisons?