So, when you don’t like the advice you’re getting you just change the adviser. That’s what health minister Zweli Mkhize did late last month to the Ministerial Advisory Committee (MAC), the body of experts, almost exclusively scientists and doctors, set up at the end of March to advise the cabinet on how to deal with the coronavirus.
Mkhize had every right to change people around and there is serious debate abroad about the preponderance of medical advice ruling the lockdown roost in countries like Britain, at the expense of economics and sociological expertise. Nonetheless, the local MAC has more than 50 members but as FM editor Rob Rose pointed out last week the three he chose to remove were also the most critical of the ultra-cautious way he has handled the pandemic in this country.
The three were Wits professor Glenda Grey, celebrated HIV/Aids scientist and president of the Medical Research Council; Prof Shabir Madhi, arguably SA’s best epidemiologist and a top vaccinologist; and Prof François Venter, a virologist with vast experience. They had all at some stage been publicly critical of the severity of the South African lockdown. Even Prof Salim Karim, head of the MAC, was saying six weeks into lockdown that it had served its purpose.
Not for Mkhize, whom I suspect President Cyril Ramaphosa defers to in this crisis, not only as health minister but as a medical doctor too. The grinding, destructive, lockdown Mkhize and his cabinet colleagues constructed has driven us to the very brink of economic collapse. Studies show 2-million people have permanently lost their jobs.
When you read social media notes like this from solid health journalists like Katharine Child, you have to wonder whether we have not all been well and truly conned. “Six — the number of state patients treated by Netcare,” she wrote last week, “during corona epidemic. 49.3% — hospital occupancy during the peak of the epidemic in July at all Netcare hospitals. 50% — how much surgery dropped in Netcare hospitals from April to August to prepare for Covid-19.”
What that tells you is just how easily even the public health service has handled this crisis. Yes there were some examples of filthy facilities being overrun. But, basically, we have seriously overreacted and citizens with other illnesses have suffered as a result.
Is it safe to say that yet? There’s an army of finger-wagging puritans out there saying we eased lockdown too easily but their time, I’m afraid, has passed. I should know. I was scared as hell for the country when the virus hit us. But the fact staring us in the face is that we have come out of at least the first wave pretty well. Even if the official death toll is an underestimate, we have still done well.
And, yes, there probably will be a second wave. Some people say January, after the holidays. Some say earlier. It doesn’t matter. A second wave, in all probability, will not be as severe as the first and people who test positive in January are far less likely to die than if they had been infected last April.
None of which is of the slightest concern to the ministers handling the crisis — chiefly Mkhize and Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. You can tell that by the absolutely ridiculous rules they have imposed on the tourism and air travel business since our move to lockdown level 1 last week.
So stupid are the rules, and so confused are the very ministers implementing them about what they have done that they are now undoing them. I don’t know if Ramaphosa is involved in the detailed discussions about these things but he should at least have a sharp mind sitting on the wall when the ministers gather.
So last Wednesday we hear that yes, people can now fly to SA but only if you have a negative anti-body test at least 72 hours before your departure (you can explain your flight’s three-hour delay to the understanding lady at OR Tambo passport control), only if you are coming to SA to invest (you have to laugh ...), only if you are here for business. Under no circumstances can you come here to relax, spend money and have fun.
Oh, and not if you are from America, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Brazil or India. We will gratefully receive investors from the rest of Africa and China. Except that, when the flights started, the ministers realised they had forgotten one tiny detail. The aircrews! Yes, what about them? They also need an anti-body test and face quarantine if they test positive here.
Inevitably, one day after its joyful return, Emirates announced it would immediately stop flying to Durban, sending ministers into a panic. Sorry they wailed. Something will be done immediately. Oh and while he was about it, home affairs minister Aaron Motsoaledi took another look at all those countries he had two days earlier declared “high risk” and without so much as a by your leave declared them “no risk”. TimesLIVE captured his genius here.
God help us all. Prof Madhi was saying before he was removed from the MAC that it made no difference how many visitors — “investors”, business people or tourists — come into the country now. The point is that community infection is already widespread in SA and a few tourists aren’t going to make any difference. Not for the first time, the ministers have ignored him and the peril into which they have placed the country. In the Eastern Cape, people are close to starvation according Gift of the Givers.
What is the difference between allowing in a British businessman and a British tourist if both are required to arrive with a negative Covid test? Epidemiologically there can’t be any difference. Economically, the tourist is likely to spend more money and save more jobs more quickly.
The thing though is that ministers don’t care about that. They care about not being blamed for people dying. They worry about the political effect of the pandemic, not its economic effect — that’s up to the president, the finance minister and the minister of trade, industry & competition. They have a plan and while it has some good points there’s a lot of really value destroying rubbish in it too. Another time perhaps …
As for Mkhize, the hero of this story, he has, so far, had a good pandemic. He looks like the voice of reason, consistent in reporting statistics and he works hard. But getting rid of the people around you who only tell you the truth is a sign of weakness and a really wobbly ego. The omens are not good.
He nonetheless will see himself as a contender for the ANC leadership when it comes up at the end of 2022. He was bitterly disappointed not to make the party’s top six in December 2017 when Ramaphosa was elected leader. And he must be hoping that the current crackdown on corruption does not touch him more than it already has — as treasurer of the ANC when the Guptas were at their most powerful he took money for the party from some very dodgy characters. I hope he passed it all on but the only way to put the matter to rest now is for investigators to check his accounts — if they have not done so already.
He put out a statement the other day to clear things up and it was astonishing how easily he declared that he had indeed taken (a lot of) money from a man now facing serious corruption charges, but on behalf of the party. That’s throwing the ANC under the bus a bit. All that aside, receiving stolen goods is still a crime in this country and Mkhize must surely have known with whom he was dealing.
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