COVID-19 • OPINION
The article (Part 1 of 2) aims to stress how essential it is for South Africa to implement comprehensive measures to achieve speedy, equitably shared, sustainable economic recovery as the Covid-19 pandemic eases, and to give an overview of the approach needed to ensure successful recovery. By Derek G Hazelton
South Africa: before, during and after Covid-19
D
uring April 1994, South Africans were full of hope for the future as we cast our first votes as a free people. There was amazing unity of purpose, stability and, in some sectors such as water supply, there was real progress towards serving the poor.
But by 1996, our government began to abandon its RDP (Reconstruction and Development Programme) socio-economic policy framework, and introduced GEAR (Growth, Employment and Redistribution). As a result, our expectations of reduced poverty and inequality, and the needed gradual
Derek G Hazelton, Pr Eng., FWISA, founder and manager of TSE Water Services
transformation of our whole society were dashed. De-industrialisation began and unemployment levels increased. But worse was still to come through Aids denialism and, later, shameless indiscriminate corruption. By January 2020, poor service delivery, record levels of unemployment, especially among the youth, failed state enterprises and municipalities, and poor economic forecasts all competed for our attention. Our unity was destroyed. In relation to our achievable expectations, and our youths’ assessment, it had been a failed 26 years.
March to July 2020
FIGURE 1 Institutional arrangements set up in terms of the disaster response directions
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JULY /AUG UST 2020
Such was the situation in South Africa when the first Covid-19 case was confirmed on 5 March 2020. Twenty days later, the initial ‘hard lockdown’ was declared. The lockdown severely restricted the movement of people and goods to buy us time to get our health services in order. Simultaneously, government issued a set of disaster response directions. These had four aims: 1. T o set up the institutional arrangements for the development
