Peter Bruce

Is Ramaphosa frozen by fear of blame?

The coronavirus is throwing up some joyful moments. On Friday the Financial Times carried a story headlined “Johnson team seeks slogan to send fearful back to work” — a work of art on its own in just four decks in a single column — on top of an article which began: “After successfully scaring Britons into staying indoors during the lockdown, Boris Johnson’s government is set to launch a more sophisticated messaging strategy for the next stage of its fight against coronavirus.” And people think journalism is simply reporting the facts.

The English will enjoy watching the Johnson government try to cajole people back to work over the next weeks just as we should watch ours try to do the same back here.

Because, having locked us inside on fear of death the government now wants us to go, er, outside and work. We should get into taxis and cars and trains and go back to shops and factories and offices.

It is probably the right thing to do and the science agrees, but no-one should be required to put themselves in danger and no matter how well scrubbed your workstation may be by the time you get to it, the manner of your journey there is bound to be less than wholesome. So anyone who goes to work next week, or has already been, will understand they are taking a risk with themselves and their families.

Not necessarily a big one, but if the virus gets you and you are in the small percentage of unlucky infectees you’re going to have an experience you’ll not quickly forget.

Which is partly why I’ve been surprised at how meekly the unions have responded to the call to go back to work. I understand members will be struggling financially, but they are also, in theory, in a very strong bargaining position.

“When death slowed production, goods became scarce and prices soared,” writes American historian Barbara Tuchman in A Distant Mirror, her brilliant account of the Black Death (bubonic plague) in Europe in 1348. “In France the price of wheat increased fourfold by 1350. At the same time the shortage of labour brought the plague’s greatest social disruption — a concerted demand for higher wages. Within a year after the plague had passed through northern France, the textile workers of St Omer near Amiens had gained three successive wage increases.”

Post-plague wage demands elsewhere in Europe were met with repression but, generally, plagues have seen workers, their numbers having been decimated, emerging better rather than worse off in the decades that follow disaster.

Here, and now, not so much. The virus hasn’t killed enough people but it has backed the government into a corner. It created the world’s hardest lockdown. Now that it better understands what has happened to its source of income (the economy) it would rather like to remove the lockdown but hesitates, for fear of being blamed for the deaths that will, anyway, come with even a little easing.

That, more than anything else, is the dread that terrifies Cyril Ramaphosa’s administration. It’s the blame. It’s Julius Malema pointing his finger. The government is scared of being blamed for deaths it cannot possibly stop but for which, by virtue of having delayed them with a timely lockdown, it also cannot resist taking the credit. I think Ramaphosa was claiming his actions had “saved” 17,000 lives the other day on television. That’s nonsense.

But you listen to the scientists around him, all of whom now seem to be saying the lockdown no longer serves any purpose because community transmission is widespread, and you want to scream at the television. DON’T SAY IT! Because how will he now explain the loss of life still to come?

How will he explain the spike in tuberculosis, our biggest killer, as testing (and thus treatment) halves during lockdown?

Or the possible sharp reverse in our once-falling maternal and infant mortality that Unicef, using Gates-funded research, says could, where basic medical services are diverted, kill more than 1,700 babies here a month, and more than 90 mothers.

It’s just research, and those numbers are worst case. But they illustrate the jam the government is in.

The state has finally realised it needs an economy to generate taxes to pay for its health services but whether we crank that economy up quickly or slowly no longer seems to matter. The virus is running free and you can almost feel Ramaphosa trying to run faster and ease up quicker. Level 3 is just days away.

Let’s hope he’s not too late.