Ramaphosa’s mettle is shown

Even after the recent restrictions on everyday life as a result of the Covid-19 outbreak, from Friday SA will look and feel like a different country. While, thankfully, we have not had any fatalities, the rate of increase in infections over the past week is cause for alarm.

When we watch our television channels or read on the internet about the nightmare unfolding in European countries and then imagine that sort of escalation engulfing our fragile healthcare system, it’s hard to make an argument for a stance different to that taken by President Cyril Ramaphosa on Monday.

Our economy was already on its knees and shutting down most of it for nearly a month cannot be anything but extremely damaging. The president acknowledged as much but made the point that the lives of citizens are worth a lot more.

The lockdown is the right thing to do, despite the economic hardship. If the government is later shown to have overreacted, better that than have the blood of thousands of people on its hands because it put short-term economic calculations ahead of the wellbeing of South Africans.

It might not be good at it on a daily basis, but the main function of the government is to ensure the safety and security of citizens. After their typically inept reactions to the crisis, even Donald Trump in the US and Boris Johnson in the UK realised that. It took hundreds of deaths and thousands of infections before they got serious about containing the crisis, and the belated action was taken in response to political pressure.

A man was reported to have died after taking an unproven drug that was promoted by the US president as a potential treatment for Covid-19. The days when the world could count on US leadership during a time of crisis are truly gone.

Sure, there is a lot to be gloomy about, but we can celebrate that at least when the country needed leadership at a time of crisis, it had a president who was ready to provide it. Rewind about two decades and look back to what happened when the country needed to be united around fighting HIV/Aids. We are still paying for that failure because as the country with the highest number of infections, there is a big worry about the effect that Covid-19 might have on a population with a very high burden of HIV and TB.

South Africans have had more than enough reason to be disappointed with their leaders — from corruption that has deprived us of reliable energy supply to a lack of prioritisation that has left us with an unsustainable fiscal position. The ruling party as a whole, with its internal factions, is not fit for purpose.

But when it comes to the president, we can rightly be proud that we have a solid person in charge of the government with citizens’ interests at heart.

If the saying that one should never waste a crisis is true, then this could be an opportunity for Ramaphosa to emerge on the other side with a new confidence that if he does the right things for the country, broader society will stand by him even when elements in the ANC oppose him.

Before the coronavirus crisis, the frustration with Ramaphosa was that he was too easily swayed by ideologues in the ANC and Cosatu, and as a result, key decisions on everything from how to secure energy supply to finally dealing with SAA were either deferred or simply dropped. More of the decisiveness he is showing now will ensure his presidency keeps the momentum.

There will be debates ahead about whether the government and the Reserve Bank- have been ambitious enough with the steps taken to cushion the economic impact of the lockdown. What the state could do was always going to be limited by its fiscal constraints.

On Friday, Moody’s Investors Service is meant to issue the latest ratings review, another potential risk for the country’s battered markets. Perhaps after this the Bank can assess whether it has more room to provide monetary stimulus.

As citizens, we also have our responsibility, which is to respect the lockdown and do what is needed to make it a success. That will give us the best chance of life returning to some sort of normality in three weeks’ time.

HE CAN EMERGE WITH CONFIDENCE THAT IF HE DOES THE RIGHT THINGS, BROADER SOCIETY WILL STAND BY HIM