Leadership failures and a lack of public trust mean lockdown is in your hands

Eastern Cape premier Oscar Mabuyane summed up SA’s Covid-19 crisis of credibility this week when he said: “We are calling for a paradigm shift from a top-down to a bottom-up approach. People are folding their arms, waiting for the government and police to tell them don’t do this, don’t do that. It’s about being patriotic, it’s about every individual, it’s about protecting the country. It’s not about the government any more. We want to talk to our people and not talk at our people.” Unfortunately, though, the premier’s sentiments, while noble, are much like the book everybody should read but few ever will, as the lockdown regulations are increasingly viewed through the prism of what one can get away with, rather than as a necessary brake on a disease that poses an existential threat to our social order.

Of course, from the outset it was going to be difficult for this government to bank on public trust, goodwill and co-operation to achieve the end we all want. That is, clearly, to get through the Covid-19 pandemic with as few deaths as possible, while supporting those whose ability to generate a livelihood is compromised.

After years of state capture and flagrant corruption at all levels of government, trust in the government and its ability to see through a complex and self-sacrificing project like the lockdown was limited from the start. This scepticism, verging on cynicism, was to some extent ameliorated by the high levels of public trust in President Cyril Ramaphosa.

It’s fair to say that Ramaphosa and his government capitalised on a wave of goodwill and enthusiasm at the start of the lockdown in late March. Since then, no-one in the public sphere — business, labour, media, churches or law-enforcement agencies — can claim to have got every aspect of the Covid-19 challenge right. There have been missteps.

But it is the government that must be at the centre of any assessment of the lockdown, and if it is honest with itself it will acknowledge that public trust in the lockdown has been severely compromised. We are now seeing the results of this failure to take the public along with it, in skyrocketing infection rates and the seeming widespread disobeying of the most basic rules. For many, masks have become a fashion item to be hung casually around the neck, all the better to be pulled in place on nose and mouth when the law is in sight. Social distancing is rare; sometimes it is just near-impossible, at other times it’s just a hassle.

Perhaps we as South Africans underestimated the gravity of the Covid-19 crisis from the start, not fully aware of the sacrifices it might demand of us.

Certainly the perception that some of the lockdown regulations are confusing and contradictory has not helped. And the rash of court cases has further eroded confidence. Apparent instances of profiteering — the Eastern Cape ambulance scooter debacle and the fake hand sanitiser scandal — have fuelled cynicism. The ANC’s determination to use Covid-19 to “transform” the economy has come across as opportunistic and fed perceptions of a possible perverse incentive on the part of those who claim not to want to “waste a good crisis”. Breaking the lockdown rules has become fashionable in some circles, with each offending celebrity claiming special treatment — and getting it.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of ordinary South Africans have become criminals overnight, with all the implications that could have for their job and other prospects. The cigarette ban is a joke, with the criminal underworld in permanent rejoicing at the godsend it has been given. It was also the spark that lit the fire of doubt as to whether Ramaphosa, who alone enjoyed special trust, was actually in charge.

Perhaps, as the storm closes in, it will dawn on people that their future is literally in their own hands. The government has made the point, disputed by some, that it has been guided by science. That’s well and good, but until there’s public buy-in and a change in behaviour, no amount of science is going to save us from the apocalypse on the horizon.

We are now seeing the results of this failure to take the public along with it