TONY LEON: Too many Covid-19 puzzlements an uneasy resonance with pre-Nazi Germany 🔒
As South Africans endure the seventh week of home imprisonment, the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic is, to borrow from the song inFirst puzzle is our new overlord, Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. She seems to imagine that viral microbes possess an intelligence wing.
How, for example, is there a justification for the banning of most, but not all, forms of e-commerce? Or allowing purchases of winter pyjamas but not summer underwear? Or permit newspapers to be printed and purchased but not magazines? Actually, the latter idiocy has resolved itself since most of SA’s fabled magazine titles have gone out of business.
President Cyril Ramaphosa, channelling his inner Donald Trump , announced that we are in a state of war. Most fascinating — and offering us parallels for SA today — was the tug-of-war inside his administration on the weapons of response. It pitted the extremist axis in his circle, led by vice-president Dick Cheney and defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, against the moderates personified by secretary of state Colin Powell.
Instead, in the most explicit terms, we now know that the extremists have the upper hand even as the economy crashes to levels not experienced here since the 1930s. In his May Day remarks, Ramaphosa announced that the gloves are off. offered “class suicide” as a means of achieving this opportunity. Aside from showboating her prejudices, she offered us an explicit warning on the contours of post-Covid SA.But what of the opposition? The DA has taken an economically moderating position and called for a sensible and phased opening up of the economy and a junking of ideology as a determinant for both aid and level adjustments.
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