Pandemic exposes biases of ‘saviours of poor’

The Covid-19 pandemic has caused many deaths, much illness and social collapse (I include the political economy in social).

It has, at the same time, produced many experts, and exposed some of the worst and most treasured, but deadly toxic, beliefs and values among the population.

It is sometimes difficult to grab hold of any one angle or perspective, without, at least, acknowledging that there are other perspectives or angles.

Though there was almost unanimous support for the state’s initial lockdown, that support has now frittered and frayed into hundreds of strands that anyone can pick, and pull on for any number of reasons.

Smokers feel hard done by. Those who enjoy a tipple feel hard done by, but were given a reprieve on Sunday night.

Those who can’t get their hair done, or a manicure or pedicure, feel like they have been denied a basic human right.

On the surface, we haven’t reached the insanity of the US, where heavily armed far-right-wingers refuse to wear protective face masks and demand an end to the lockdown.

But read carefully the social media posts, and the arguments for a complete lifting of the lockdown, conspiracies about the state’s objectives, and you will find nuggets that resonate rather well with militia-led supporters of Donald Trump.

Take, for instance, a tweet by Dave Bullard at 9.45am on May 24: “White Saffers ..... do you ever get the feeling you’re being rounded up for the final slaughter? Well. it’s no longer a bad dream, it’s reality.”

Bullard is a notorious right-winger and was fired by the Sunday Times in 2008, for what the editors thought was “extremely racist” column.

The issue was well covered at the time, and we don’t need to go into it.

In reality, Bullard is pitiful and irrelevant, on his own, but he represents the tip of the iceberg of people who would smile, and be ultrapolite in public (including people in the media and academia) then do their worst to be objectionable, hidden behind a veneer of “rationalism,” “reason,” or “freedom”, or empty slogans like “we care”.

With this language, the lockdown — (extremely problematic as it is in so many ways) which prevents people from getting their hair or nails done, shopping at their favourite boutiques, or just walking their dog — is given the moral equivalent of Nazism or fascism.

The worst are those who have suddenly discovered the poor.

There are journalists, for instance, who have built careers reporting on finance, capital markets, and companies.

They have now moved from the Trumpian “open the economy” position to “the lockdown is an infringement of our liberties” to “what about the poor”.

Going back to everything (as far as possible) that some of these journalists have written in the past decade, it is clear that they never did care about “the poor,” nor have they found any reason to support workers.

So their latest obsessions with “the loss of jobs,” and the “poor will suffer most” become a ruse for their most egregious attempts to “open the economy ”— as a priority, never mind the highly likely infection and possible death of workers and their families.

The economy is on its knees because of the most outrageous maladministration, corruption, and lack of ethics of the Zuma-led ANC.

SA lost its moral authority after the Mandela presidency, with only Tito Mboweni (as governor of the Reserve Bank), and Trevor Manuel (as finance minister) gaining any respect in the global political economy.

Since Jacob Zuma became president of the ANC in December 2007, the country’s finances have become a feeding trough and business has been treated as an enemy.

President Cyril Ramaphosa retains mass credibility — among most of the public and more important actors — but seems to be surrounded by a cluster of fools, with the exception people like Zweli Mkhize or Pravin Gordhan.

There is no doubt that Ramaphosa has made mistakes. He may be surrounded by some clever people, but there are, also, people around him who we could well do without.

No-one is sufficiently deluded to think that the political economy — from production and manufacturing to finance — is on the verge of complete collapse.

I certainly am not. But in times of crises, such as the one in which we find ourselves, there are some difficult trade-offs to be made.

Those critics, referred to above (and the Trump lot) would be prepared to sacrifice children on the precept that they don’t get the virus, or old folk, because they are close to death anyway.

They make the fatal mistake of thinking that the virus decides whom it will infect, and whom it will spare.

That’s not how a virus works. It does not conform to the whims of politicians, nor does it serve to confirm the biases of public intellectuals posing as saviours of the poor.