DA call to end lockdown all about politics

DESPITE the public agitation by the DA to end the lockdown abruptly, it is being gradually phased out. At least, this is the expressed position of the government.

Consequently, even if they materialised, threats of court action intended to force the government’s hand are likely to amount to nothing more than an academic exercise of little, if any, practical value.

As repositories and sticklers for rationality, the courts would probably insist on a government plan to mitigate the potential for widespread public health dangers before returning the country to “normality.” However well-intentioned, an unplanned end of the lockdown is not desirable.

Which begs the question: why the frenzied appeals to the hearts and minds of South Africans for the immediate end of a lockdown which is inevitably coming to a close?

Certainly, the number of people infected by Sars-CoV-2 has risen substantially since the lockdown began, with the expressed support of the DA, among other political parties.

One plausible cause is that the party may have been initially petrified by the demographic profile of those infected before the lockdown. By then, the virus was largely concentrated among the affluent – the DA’s core constituency.

But calls for ending the lockdown informed by the migration of the virus out of suburbia are foolhardy, for the virus respects neither class nor racial divides.

Another plausible explanation for the DA’s posture is that the socio-economic effects of the lockdown pose dangers for the stable exercise of political power by governing parties across the world in the short to medium term. From the point of view of a poor-visioned opposition, dramatising the government’s real and perceived weaknesses as much as possible is considered a politically profitable venture. What could be better, with a (local government) election around the corner, as in the South African case?

The DA’s calls have, therefore, nothing to do with getting the economy back on an even keel; they are intended to bolster its political standing within its constituency while at the same time attempting to endear itself to those who stand to lose the most from the effects of the Covid-19 outbreak.

The enormity of the challenge before us requires South African statespersons – nation-builders – more than (career) politicians whose sights are permanently fixated on the five-year electoral cycle at the end of which their employment contracts are renewed or expired by an electorate of whom the politician can be contemptuous by churning out hyperbole.

The DA’s superior deportment in communicating its demand for the end of the lockdown has not escaped the notice of an overwhelming majority of South Africans.

That none of the apparatchiks of the essentially white party has as yet seen the need to intervene to tone down what are increasingly becoming scenes of whites yelling at supposedly obtuse natives illustrates the illiteracy of some of our white compatriots to forms of behaviour that are steeped in whiteness and, therefore, deeply offensive.

One thing is almost certain: failure to conceive a post-Covid-19 development agenda runs the risk of alienating millions of people, black and white.

Hopefully, our experience in handling Covid-19 will help the country, and humanity more broadly, to respond better to the outbreak of diseases and disasters in future.