To avoid a state of emergency, remember that rights come with responsibilities

Twelve years ago, the government introduced the Bill of Responsibilities at schools. It was a companion to our highly acclaimed Bill of Rights. Angie Motshekga, as minister of basic education, launched the Bill of Responsibilities campaign in 2011. The campaign intended to let the youth understand that rights and responsibilities go hand in hand. It’s important to focus on this as we face possibly our greatest disaster.

The preamble to the Bill of Responsibilities reminds us that many rights and freedoms were inherited from the “sacrifice and suffering of those who came before” and are inseparable from our duties and responsibilities to others.

The right to equality means that we are responsible for ensuring that everyone is treated fairly, irrespective of race, gender, religion, national, ethnic or social origin, disability, culture, language, status or appearance.

The right to human dignity obliges us to be kind, compassionate and sensitive to every human being, including greeting them warmly and speaking to them courteously.

The right to life obliges us not to endanger the lives of others by carrying dangerous weapons, or by acting recklessly, or disobeying our rules and laws.

And so it goes on, creating an obligation for each of the rights enshrined in our constitution: family and parental care, education, the right to work and respect the rights of others to work, the right to own property and the obligation to respect other people’s property, the right to a safe environment, to freedom and security, and the freedom of religion, belief and opinion.

It often seems we have lost sight of these responsibilities. Take citizenship: the responsibility is to obey laws and ensure others do too. How many take our right of citizenship seriously? In the past five weeks, the disdain and disobedience shown for the disaster by some is dire.

People have ignored the instruction to stay at home, have ignored the prohibition on selling alcohol, have abused the loopholes. Those loopholes are to make conditions more bearable as we try to flatten the curve of Covid-19, not a challenge to exploit them. But try telling that to people who attended a funeral in the Eastern Cape, ignoring the rules around physical distancing. Try telling that to the people who unilaterally attempted to move back to the Eastern Cape for the Easter weekend. Try telling that to the man who tried to smuggle his girlfriend to Mpumalanga in the boot of his car.

We don’t seem to understand there are consequences. Because we can’t be trusted to do what we are asked, to be responsible not just for ourselves but others, it becomes essential to deploy more soldiers to help the police patrol streets or put up roadblocks on the major arteries between our cities. Those soldiers are supposed to be on standby if the pandemic gets a grip and the number of sick and dying overwhelm our medical system, as has happened in the US and in Italy.

If we don’t flatten the curve over the short term, we end up giving the government no option but to keep implementing indefinite lockdowns, making these even harsher to protect us against ourselves.

As we speak of the Bill of Rights — and our right to assemble as we wish, or to move where we like — we forget that just at the end of this section in our constitution stand sections 36 and 37. S36 allows for those rights to be limited; S37 allows for the president to declare a state of emergency when “the life of the nation is threatened by war, invasion, general insurrection, disorder, natural disaster or other public emergency”.

We haven’t got there — yet. At the moment this is only a state of disaster. Let’s not get to a state of emergency. We can do that by doing as we are told, not just because it’s the right thing to do but because if we all keep to the regulations we have the greatest chance of flattening the curve and getting back to the lives we once knew because it will be safe to do so.

At this stage it isn’t safe. Because of that, those who break the regulations because they feel their human rights outweigh those of the larger society show their contempt for that society. But it’s more than that. Being selfish, breaking the law because they think they are allowed to, they don’t understand what it means to be South African. They don’t know how to honour the sacrifice and suffering of those who went before, which gave us those rights in the first place.

Covid-19 has given us pause to think about the future, about life, about our own plans. Maybe we should think about honouring and appreciating what it means to be South African, to practise ubuntu and care about other people. Human rights aren’t just for individuals — we all have them. It’s high time we understood that.