This is no time for agendas and incompetence
As SA enters its next phase of lockdown, job casualties will mount at a rapid rate. Many businesses have been shut down altogether by the lockdown, or have lost substantial revenue. Some will have managed to keep paying their employees, at least in part, for the first few weeks. But now that it’s clear that the economy is not going to go back to normal any time soon, we can expect that many more firms will have to start retrenching. The estimates from economists are bleak. SA is set to lose many more jobs this year than the 900,000 or so it lost after the 2008/2009 global financial crisis. Worst-case scenarios suggest an absolute bloodbath in which somewhere between 2-million and 7million jobs could be at risk if SA cannot get the coronavirus under control swiftly and has to stay in some sort of lockdown for the rest of this year. SA already had one of the world’s highest unemployment rates.
This is a national emergency and policymakers need to focus on doing whatever it takes to save jobs. There should be no other objective. Tourism minister Mmamoloko Kubayi-Ngubane’s insistence that beneficiaries of the R200m emergency fund for small and medium enterprises be black-owned is a most disturbing sign that some in the government are not focused on the main issue. That the Pretoria high court upheld her decision this week, in the face of a challenge from AfriForum and Solidarity, just makes it worse and risks pitching thousands of (black) workers in tourism into poverty.
Disturbing, too, was the time and trouble it took to get the Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) to start processing and paying out claims to employees under the R40bn emergency fund that was put in place right at the start of the lockdown. That money can go a long way to help keep firms in business and people in jobs, at least in the short term, and the UIF — which has benefited from significant private sector help in recent weeks to bail it out of its inefficiencies — must focus on doing whatever it takes, as swiftly as possible. The same goes for other public entities charged with getting emergency aid to businesses and employees impacted by the Covid-19 crisis. We cannot afford the public sector incompetence and obstructionism that have become so sadly typical.