Wash your hands and stop whimpering for nanny

THE world is an innately dangerous place that puts us at risk at every turn. Life is full of sharp edges and things that go bump in the night.

For previous generations, that was a self-evident truth. In much of the world and certainly, for most people in Africa, that is still the case.

The deaf-blind activist Helen Keller summed it up neatly in 1940, as the US poised fearfully on the brink of involvement in the horrors of World War II raging across the oceans from it. “Security is mostly a superstition,” she wrote. “It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.”

That’s a truth the “Snowflake Generation” shudders to contemplate, suckled as it has been on 70 years of peace and steadily increasing prosperity. That’s a reality that the cosseted citizens of Europe, North America, Australia and parts of Asia, as well as the cushioned elites of Africa, fervently seek to deny.

Instead, like young children, they want mommy – as embodied by the state – to intercede, to banish the nasties and make it all better with a kiss. As a result, the currency of most of our leaders, in every sphere of modern life, is one of honeyed reassurances. Whether it’s actual bodies from a foreign invasion or bruised feelings from hurtful words, the assumption from government and governed alike has been that the state must and will intervene.

The Covid-19 pandemic has challenged that premise. It’s no longer possible and, in fact, is politically counterproductive, for national leaders to make exaggerated promises of protection against something which is moving so fast, changing so quickly.

There is now a peacetime equivalent of the military metaphor “fog of war”, used when events are moving so rapidly that the true situation is essentially unfathomable. It’s the fog of disease that we are now enveloped in. It’s a situation where the parameters are constantly changing and the final outcome will be unknowable for quite a while yet. Clarity and certainty are some way off in the future.

Leaders who pretend otherwise are being quickly exposed. So, paradoxically, those politicians who have not pandered to public hysteria and demands for “solutions” are the ones who might come out best. Best not to pretend infallibility when tomorrow is likely to leave you wiping egg from your face.

The impossibility of certainty can be seen in the attempts to model Covid-19 mortality rates.

In April, the World Health Organization warned that Africa was shaping up to be the next epicentre of the disease, with an estimated 300 000 deaths this year. Last month, it cut that to 190 000.

South Africa’s initial projections were 350 000 deaths over a year. A fortnight ago, the government, in response to pressure, released details of its new modelling. Its optimistic scenario projects 40 000 deaths by November and all 3 300 ICU beds nationwide filled by July. The pessimistic scenario projects them to be filled by June and 48 000 deaths by November.

Given that the pandemic has transformed every South African from being the Springbok rugby coach to being the nation’s chief epidemiologist, you will all have your own views on those estimates. It doesn’t really matter what numbers you come up with.

The point is that large numbers of the public reject the official, government, version of what the size of the problem is and what has to be done.

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s government’s insistence on laying out what’s good for us and what the next moves are, has faltered in the face of court challenges, scorn over bureaucratic pettifogging, and our deeply ingrained national inclination towards lawlessness. In the government’s top leadership, it’s only Ramaphosa who seems to understand this. In his most recent broadcast, the president was honest:

“It’s going to get much worse before it gets better”. He was also frank about the limitations to what the government and its agencies could do, quoting Nelson Mandela: “It’s now in your hands…”

So go wash those hands, keep your social distance, and look out for yourself instead of crying for Nanny. Helen Keller, who also wrote “life is either a daring adventure or nothing”, would have been proud of you.