JUSTICE MALALA: Let’s be kind to ourselves and our leaders

Forgive me if I’ve said this before during this pandemic: we know very little about the coronavirus and it will continue to confound us for a good while to come.

Cast your mind back to March. When SA went into hard lockdown at the end of that month very few of us were wearing masks. Today, just 3½ months later, masks are mandatory virtually everywhere in the world.

If you are pregnant today what can you say about the impact of Covid-19 on yourself and your unborn baby? Can Covid-19 be passed from parent to baby in utero, and what are the implications? What does it mean when the baby is eventually born if the mother contracts the virus at the hospital, for example?

We do not know the answers to most of these questions. There isn’t a full-term baby that’s been both conceived and born since we went into this surreal, mad, devastating and treacherous pandemic, because it’s only been seven months. That’s how limited our knowledge of the virus and its spread is.

Every government in the world has had to grapple with circumstances that no-one has previously had to face. In the US, government health leaders have to struggle with entitled citizens who refuse to wear masks. In the UK the prime minister walked around as if the virus didn’t exist — until it felled him. In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro said this was just a flu. He has contracted it now and is in quarantine.

Gomba has been a scandal machine of note. She has blamed apartheid for scooters she bought herself

Dealing with Covid-19 is not easy. Last week Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases, said: "When you compare us to other countries, I don’t think you can say we’re doing great; I mean, we’re just not."

The SA government is also not doing great. Its response to the pandemic has been hugely frustrating and at times infuriating. It could do so much better in virtually every sphere. Take Eastern Cape health MEC Sindiswa Gomba. She is an absolute disaster. No, I take that back. It is an insult to the word disaster to describe her as such. She is something worse. The word "omnishambles" springs to mind.

Last week Gomba defended the province’s disgraceful R10m ambulance scooter project by blaming apartheid. Yes. It is 26 years after apartheid was defeated and she is still blaming the democratic government’s clearly corruption-driven failures on that vile system.

Her colleague, health minister Zweli Mkhize (I wish I could say he is her boss, but in fact she reports to the provincial premier, Oscar Mabuyane, a man who is a fan of this ignoramus), said the medical scooters did not meet the basic criteria for "patient transport as an ambulance".

In just the past four months Gomba has been a scandal machine of note. Four months ago she blurted out on a national Zoom call that she was tired, or had had enough of the minister; hospitals in her province are so bad she has hogged international headlines; she has blamed apartheid for scooters she bought herself, and she broke wind rather loudly while on camera with a national television broadcaster. That last bit is, of course, not really a scandal in politics.

She has not been fired. In fact, Mabuyane often cites her as a person he fully supports.

You have to wonder: what do you need to do in the ANC to be reprimanded or fired? Those of us who’ve been wandering around on the periphery of the party trying to understand it for decades know the answer to that. You have to die. Otherwise "deployments" will come your way whatever it is you do.

I’ve digressed. My point is simple. Have some sympathy for the devil that is the ANC. Everyone, including the inspirational Chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany or Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand, has had it tough dealing with the coronavirus.

So let’s be kind to ourselves and our leaders. It’s hard. It’s very hard. And SA is not alone. What SA should not do, however, is let up on the pressure to force these leaders to do better.