Denial is the deadliest response of all
Leaders of the Trump and Mbeki ilk tout dangerous theories when what is needed is planning, action and a deep shift in our relationship with nature
● The coronavirus has exposed the Achilles heel of the human relationship with nature. Neither military might nor wealth nor race nor history of struggle will protect one against it. And as in everything else, black people are getting the short end of the stick.
Finding a vaccine may stop this particular coronavirus, but there are millions of other viruses out there. Only an über-vaccine will protect us against them, but that might come too late for the human species.
The viruses were all minding their own business before we started devastating their habitat through deforestation, hunting and other environment-destroying activities. Our bodies have become the only hosts for them to inhabit. Unless we reset our relationship with the natural world, there will be no end to the viruses coming our way.
My biggest fear is that while powerful nations will be able to use technology to re-engineer their societies and reshape the world, poorer countries will go back to doing things as they did before.
Take education as an example. Online learning will most likely be the new normal in the delivery of education. Because of the coronavirus I have had to jack up my technological skills, so that my students can join class whether they are in China or South Korea. With imagination and investment in technology, this could be an opportunity to deliver high-quality education to students and pupils in SA.
We could break down the walls of learning by getting pupils to take classes with experts all over the country.
We could use online teaching to compensate for a lack of educational materials and even relieve the overcrowding in our schools. I could teach a class to the high school in my township. Online teaching may not solve all of SA’s educational challenges, but it could be the intervention that makes the difference for large numbers of students.
The same reimagination could be extended to the public health system. The growth of telemedicine could be a way to deliver public health services to remote rural areas. It could be used to bring global medical expertise to villages and townships.
Investment in public health is therefore in everyone’s obvious interest. Racial equality is not only a moral question but an existential one for everyone. We are all either alive and well together, or dead and buried together.
US President Donald Trump’s denial of the dangers of the new coronavirus reminds me of former president Thabo Mbeki’s HIV/Aids denialism. According to a Harvard School of Public Health study, at least 300,000 people died as a result of Mbeki’s cruel refusal to provide life-saving medicines. Like Trump’s musings about using disinfectants to kill the coronavirus, Mbeki and his minister of health put forth beetroot and garlic as the cure for Aids. We will never know how many more people died because of Mbeki’s hubris and the moral cowardice of his underlings.
I am glad that President Cyril Ramaphosa and health minister Zweli Mkhize have taken the lead in the fight against the coronavirus.
The lack of preparedness for the coronavirus highlights the importance of government planning. For years, previous US administrations have warned about a potential outbreak.
The present administration not only closed the pandemic unit established under former president Barack Obama, but Trump was found asleep at the controls.
By the time he woke up it was too late. The horse had stormed out of the barn.
Trump then resisted calls to activate the Defense Production Act, which would require US companies to manufacture ventilators and personal protective equipment. He would not do it because the US does not do national planning. Even in times of crisis, ideology trumps reason (forgive the pun).
Racial equality is not only a moral question but an existential one for everyone. We are all either alive and well together, or dead and buried together
As Andrew Shonfield demonstrated in his classic book Modern Capitalism, planning works best when it is institutionalised within a government, so that it guides what takes place across that government.
Now in case you think I am proselytising for centralised planning, I have long advocated regional governance arrangements in place of our wasteful and corrupt provincial system.
In the US the coronavirus exposed the meaninglessness of state boundaries. The governors of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut quickly fashioned a regional response because they realised it made little sense to have a lockdown in New York state if neighbouring New Jersey and Connecticut were open for business.
The coronavirus has also demonstrated that the most effective responses can come only from the local level. Which brings me to the importance of smart green urban planning.
I was blown away by a student project. A maths and physics whizz kid who possesses the sociological imagination, this student calculated how much carbon dioxide could be removed from the air if we got rid of cars and planted trees on all the highways and roads in Washington, DC. The corollary of that, of course, would be investment in public transport.
The project reminded me of a fight I had with the ANC leadership in my township in the 1990s. I was protesting against a decision to cut down our local forest to make way for RDP houses. They accused me of bourgeois sentimentalism at a time when people needed houses. I pointed them to the large tracts of vacant land between the township and the white area of town. They would not admit it, but they were afraid to build those houses next to the white people. As they would later admit, their housing policy entrenched the spatial geography of apartheid throughout the length and breadth of the country. Those houses make apartheid’s matchbox houses look like mansions.
An important aspect of planning is its social function of raising a community’s collective consciousness of past practices and future prospects. The historian Eric Hobsbawm put it best when he warned that “we are wrong to put a face and particular costume to the visitor whose arrival we were told to expect”.
We may not know what specific form the next threat will take, but it will come from the same source — human destruction of the natural environment. To prepare the nation will require a wholesale change in consciousness and smart leadership — heroism against apartheid will not cut it. Viruses don’t care about that.