SA govt’s ‘abuse of power’
Covid-19 has exposed how even governments as ostensibly liberal as South Africa can abuse their authority in times of crisis and how political power sometimes trumps the need to save lives.
This was the sentiment of analysts in the wake of the government facing political pressure to open up about its Covid-19 vaccination plan.
From the onset of the National State of Disaster declared on 15 March, 2020, the country slipped into an era of unprecedented state control in the new democracy.
Civil society eventually stepped in to fight attempts by government to exert power unnecessarily, said political analyst Ralph Mathekga.
Examples were the various items banned from sale in the earlier months of 2020, which at one point included flip-flops.
“Maybe they focused a lot more on authority than on consensus. But you need collective reasoning. At some point they even shut down parliament and they faced a backlash when they tried to close the courts,” said Mathekga.
Much of the policing reported and witnessed around the Covid-19 regulations happened in the townships.
The poor also continued to be the most vulnerable to the other negative effects of the Covid-19 response. From sweeping job losses to the shutting down of entire operations in the informal sector, South Africa’s poor bore the brunt of the economic fallout of the pandemic.
“The imbalance here is that the poor are the ones that are always hard-hit by any excessive measure. The rich can defend themselves and also those who live in areas where people have access to information and know about their rights,’ said Mathekga.
Epidemiologist Dr Jo Barnes had long complained that politics mired the Covid-19 response in SA in a similar fashion to the political fallout of Covid-19 in the United States, where thenpresident Donald Trump employed the politics of chaos and anarchy.
“The ANC employed a communist style authoritarianism in policing people’s behaviour instead of trying to educate people about the reasons behind the regulations being put in place,” she said.