There must be the mother of all battles going on in the cabinet, or the National Coronavirus Command Council, which seems to consist of the entire cabinet. There is still no sure sign that there is agreement on whether President Cyril Ramaphosa's announcement that tobacco sales will resume when the national lockdown softens slightly from Level 5 to 4 on Friday after the President was openly challenged on the issue. The lockdown has left science behind it. From now on it is a political affair.
Pathetic, I know. But while the president announced on Thursday last week that tobacco would be back on sale at Level 4, the co-operative governance and traditional affairs minister directly challenged him at a media conference she and trade and industry minister Ebrahim Patel gave on Saturday. Answering a planted question about tobacco sales and why it was being allowed now when it wasn't before, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma didn't hold back.
I did not hear the questioner being identified and the question was introduced by someone relaying questions to Dlamini-Zuma.
“She's asking if the sale of cigarettes during Level 4 of the lockdown is not an antithesis of what government is trying to do given the effects of smoking on the respiratory system,” the question announcer said. “What scientific evidence and risk analysis was relied up to conclude that its logical to open the sale of cigarettes during a respiratory virus wreaking havoc all over the world?”
Dlamini-Zuma didn't miss a beat. “I did say that we are listening,” she replied. “Yes, the President announced the issue of cigarettes; [but] we are hearing you, your arguments, and we will take it back and see what happens after those discussions. We are a listening government and we have listened to you and I think the other people who wanted smoking also have been speaking, but we are hearing. We will take the matter back and discuss it and see what comes out of it. But it’s interesting that indeed quite a lot of questions have come up around this [indistinct] issue and understandably so.”
— The President is up against it if he is going to continue seeking political consensus on decisions that should be made on the science alone.
And with that a line was drawn in the sand. Nowhere in a world hit by the coronavirus has the sale of alcohol and tobacco been banned. Only here in SA. Even in countries teeming with people and who have more than weathered the first wave of the virus have done so without these bans.
But Dlamini-Zuma has been trying to stop South Africans smoking for 20 years or more. The coronavirus is just another lever for her to pull on. She'll now challenge Ramaphosa on the matter in cabinet though it is hard to believe she didn't know he was going to announce the dropping of the ban last Thursday.
The President is up against it if he is going to continue seeking political consensus on decisions that should be made on the science alone. I know smoking is bad for your lungs but the lockdown is supposed to stop the spread of Covid-19 and smoking patently doesn’t contribute to transmission of the virus. So Ramaphosa was fine on the science.
But we have left science behind, no matter how much we try to convince ourselves that it is still driving our response. It isn't. Politics is. It's a whole new thing.
Two weeks ago we were introduced to the science that led to our early (and impeccably timed) initial declaration of disaster and then a hard lockdown. That was because Prof Salim Abdool Karim, our most celebrated infectious disease specialist and head of the government's advisory committee on Covid-19, was hauled onto the television and, sitting next to health minister Zweli Mkhize, patiently explained what the virus did and how we had to combat it. For a while after that, his word was enough.
But Karim, before the week was out, gave an interview to Rapport, the Afrikaans-language Sunday paper. The interview was conducted in English and a recording of it exists. In it he says, “I think we've already reaped the benefits of the lockdown. I'm not sure how much more the lockdown can help us.”
That's pretty clear English, and I have to say I was surprised to see it. If he is “not sure” the lockdown serves any more purpose then why are we still in one?
Other people would also have been taken aback, especially politicians such as Dlamini-Zuma. Presumably someone had a word and it wasn't surprising, a day or two after the Rapport interview appeared, to see Karim back-peddling on News 24: “I have not said the lockdown should or should not be ended. I just suggested some criteria for the decision. I have also not said whether the lockdown has or has not achieved its goals." [Um, Prof, actually, that's exactly what you did say in the Rapport article].
“I have shown that the cases are not going up rapidly up to 9 April. I have not said anything on whether the lockdown should end as this is not my domain to comment.”
Moving at warp speed now away from “I'm not sure how much more the lockdown can now help us”, Karim then gave an interview to the multimedia team at Arena Holdings, owners of the Financial Mail. That flighted last weekend, a week after he had said the lockdown had reached its sell-by date.
“It is inevitable that we are going to have a severe epidemic,” he says in the interview. “It's inevitable. We're going to have it. We can't avoid it.” Listen to that interview here: https://bit.ly/3f08dQH
I think the best thing to assume is that the epidemic is going to have its way with us no matter what level we're at. It also means that while the health services and medicine remain important, the thing that brings medicine and maths together — epidemiology — has done what it can. Karim called the epidemic, government listened and locked down and now the rest is politics.
We need to recognise that for Ramaphosa, going to Level 4 is a political risk he simply has to take. It may be too little for the DA, which wants a wider opening, arguing that whatever is safe should be allowed, and for common sense. “Why,” asks one slogan I've seen on social media, “can't I open my hair salon and have four clients in it when a taxi a fraction of the size can carry seven people?” It's a perfectly good question.
But no-one is listening. The pressure is too much. And while the DA complains of too little, the EFF complains of too much. EFF leader Julius Malema says Ramaphosa will have blood on his hands if he goes to Level 4 on Friday. Malema supports the hard lockdown. Why? Because the harder the lockdown, the greater the economic devastation at the end and the better the political playing field is for him. Again, it’s just politics.
The move down one level, with tobacco allowed, opens a new political fault line in Ramaphosa's cabinet. How might it play? Dlamini-Zuma, going back to cabinet with (probably) her own question still ringing in her ears — “What scientific evidence and risk analysis were relied on to conclude that it is logical to open the sale of cigarettes during a respiratory virus wreaking havoc all over the world?” is trying to squeeze Ramaphosa by shifting the focus of the lockdown, which is to stop the spread of the disease the virus causes.
In all likelihood, she would have introduced the cigarette ban all on her own. She is, after all, the last minister to see the rules before they are gazetted. If that is the case then her position in trying to keep the ban going is weakened, but not completely beaten.
There are not many smokers in cabinet; in fact, none I can think of, and of course all of the ministers running the regulations are teetotallers, which is why it is so easy for them to hold the alcohol ban in place, even though there's scant evidence that lifting it would suddenly flood our hospitals with the results.
We're in lockdown. That's why the hospitals are empty. Not the alcohol ban. And on Level 4 you still can't go out in public except to buy supplies and to go to work. And there'll be a curfew at night. If anything, the relaxation of the lockdown is accompanied by even more stringent rules.
And our hospitals are empty. It's just crazy. Dlamini-Zuma threatened on Saturday to take us back to Level 5 lockdown if the rate of infection rises on Level 4. But that is almost guaranteed! It's rising on Level 5, for crying out loud. What is she saying?
Are we too slow to monitor the rates of illness in such a way as to be able to manipulate human behaviour depending on the capacity of the health services? If we see hospital cases rising, clamp down more socially. If the pressure recedes, ease off again. Logic, though, has nothing to do with it and even as the epidemic rises, as Karim warns it is politics now, and not science that will be making the calls. The political balance of forces will decide.
On smoking, it would be a case of the President and some powerful ministers against the puritans, led by Dlamini-Zuma and Bheki Cele, the police minister. Ramaphosa's allies would draw close if it came to a fight that could embarrass him — Pravin Gordhan, even Ebrahim Patel, Tito Mboweni and, crucially, Zweli Mkhize.
I also think he'd get support from defence minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula and the military in general, if push ever came to shove over a pack of Camels or worse.
Mobilising just about the entire military has fed a frenzy of warnings from normally sensible people (and some incurable show-offs) that we are now dicing with the end of democracy as we know it. That's just nonsense. The military may have a screwed-up view of what their constitutional role is but they sure like Ramaphosa and, given the circumstances we're in and the political strain it is causing, I can live with that. The military will be able to help in health, transport and engineering. And they're a balance to Bheki Cele's police, and that may matter.
And of course there'll be bad behaviour. Watching soldiers make people do push ups in the street reminds me of my own enforced military training as a teenager back in 1971 with the infantry battalion in Grahamstown. The permanent force guys were all thugs. You did press-ups and squats for every tiny infraction and what was interesting is how many of the new schoolboy recruits joined in with them. They all became officers, little assholes. From what I can see of the army on the streets, not much has changed.
But for the moment it's Ramaphosa's army. They were thrilled when he put on a uniform to speak to them at the beginning of the (initially small) deployment. He's their commander-in-chief and there's a whole new political dimension to that that needs to been measured with an unfevered brain.
The big work going on behind the scenes, which the democratic warriors in the media ought to be more worried about that the army, or perhaps even the virus, is the creation of a so-called “new economy” after the virus has passed.
This has been Ramaphosa's dream, along with Pravin Gordhan and Ebrahim Patel, from the moment he won the ANC leadership back in 2017. It was there when he opened parliament two years ago with a speech dreaming of new cities and fast trains and was laughed off the stage because it was the day after his MPs had elected some actual criminals to run portfolio committees.
But the dream persists and there are some big brains working on it. It is Ramaphosa's radical economic transformation — not stealing, as in the Jacob Zuma version, but actually changing the way we live, the way we make money and profit and the way we distribute it.
The only way to get out of the economic hole that junk status, poor economic management and, now, the virus has given us, is to spark an economic boom the likes of which this country has never seen. Imagine building a new city between Johannesburg and Pretoria, between East London and Mthatha or Durban and Pietermaritzburg. Imagine the jobs, the contracts and the wealth you could create. Imagine 100 new hospitals built and operated by the private sector for 20 years before handing them over to the state.
Build fast trains from Johannesburg to Durban and Cape Town. Put workers on the boards of all companies where they are organised. Force trust down the throats of capitalists and socialists alike. Figure a way, once and for all, for make an economy that works for SA instead of the clapped out Victorian trickle down we have now.
Only a form of capitalism can grow this country but it has to be more inclusive and more fair. Protect the profit motive is you only imperative. The rest can be negotiated. Just like the ban in cigarette sales and alcohol under lockdown now.
Profit is the thing in the new economy. Lockdown is the thing under Covid-19. The rest is politics. For myself and not for the first time, I'm not going to underestimate Cyril Ramaphosa's determination to get his way, one way or another.
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