It is only day three of the 21 days in lockdown for our country and already it feels like a very long time.
As a colleague remarked a few days after President Cyril Ramaphosa made the announcement of the shutdown in the bid to arrest the spread of Covid-19, we have entered a dark tunnel. What matters, he continued, is that we come out on the other side still breathing.
As doors of businesses and public institutions prepared to close down, the country's second-largest clothing retailer, Edcon Holdings (which own Edgars and Jet), announced that it may not be able to reopen at the end of the three weeks.
Although the retail group has been struggling for a while, there was still hope at the beginning of this year that most of its clothing stores would survive. But the 21-day lockdown has shattered those hopes, with Edcon management saying the group stands to lose R800m in sales during the period.
"What we are experiencing at Edcon is an early indicator of the challenge that both government and many other businesses will have to face after the lockdown," said Edcon CEO Grant Pattison in a statement.
Within hours of this statement, Khadija Patel, the editor of one of the country's most respected newspapers, the Mail & Guardian, tweeted the heartbreaking news that the weekly may not be able to pay salaries next month due to "advertising going up in smoke and events cancelled" as a result of the coronavirus outbreak.
There are many other companies in a variety of sectors who are going through the same pain. In the midst of all this, Moody's finally announced the news we have all been dreading for a while: it has downgraded SA to junk status.
We are in a long and very dark tunnel indeed.
As finance minister Tito Mboweni put it in his reaction to Moody's: ". to say we are not concerned and trembling in our boots about what might be in the coming weeks and months is an understatement".
However, as Mboweni pointed out in the statement, every crisis presents an opportunity. What the Covid-19 crisis has reminded us of is that we are intimately connected to each other, that our individual health and wealth are also dependent on the wellbeing of others.
Therefore it is important that we find ways of working together if we are going to pull through this crisis.
Already there are wonderful examples of human solidarity that have been displayed by South Africans since the virus reached our shores.
We have individuals, rich and poor, contributing to the Solidarity Fund that has been created to cushion the negative economic impact of the outbreak on the poor. We have seen cash-strapped NGOs working tirelessly to provide accommodation for the homeless in this period of lockdown.
Business, the government, organised labour in the clothing sector, for instance, worked together on a scheme aimed at ensuring that workers continue to get a percentage of their salaries even though they are forced to stay at home.
We will come out of this dark tunnel as a nation. Sadly, some businesses, especially in the small and medium sectors, have been forced to close down and jobs will have been lost.
But we should not lose the opportunity presented to us by the present crisis.
That is the opportunity to reboot and to enter into a new social compact that involves deep structural reforms of the economy. All partners in this new social compact will have to make some sacrifices for the greater good.
Ramaphosa is currently getting all the praise for the manner in which he has led from the front ever since Covid-19 hit SA. It should not end there. He should seize the initiative to get everybody thinking about the kind of SA we want to become after the crisis. Certainly, we will be a different country.
Whether good or bad depends entirely on our willingness to work together and the president's ability to lead us.
