By now President Cyril Ramaphosa must be regretting appointing Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma minister for co-operative governance & traditional affairs (Cogta). Given that he beat her for the leadership of the ANC, he had to give her something. International relations would have been good, with generous dollar subsistence allowances like she once enjoyed before the Guptas stepped in to help.
If you declare a state of disaster, the Cogta minister gets to run the show. He may not have thought of that when he formed a government early in 2018, but as the country waits now for what he promised would be a move from coronavirus lockdown level 4 to level 3 on June 1 - not least to discover what that looks like - it turns out there's a fight on (again) inside the cabinet.
It's the same old things - tobacco and alcohol. She wants the sale of both banned until level 2 or 1. In fact, she'd prefer to ban both forever but everyone already knows that and it is incredible that this is even an issue. She has a personal hatred of smoking. As does home affairs minister Aaron Motsoaledi. We can be generous and presume childhood trauma. But life lessons have no place in public policy. That we do not already know what level 3 looks like is appalling.
What will happen when the level 3 rules are announced will be some sort of compromise. My optimistic guess is that Dlamini-Zuma will get her tobacco ban extended one last time and the sale of alcohol will be allowed in some form.
Two cheers for democracy. Dlamini-Zuma gets way too much respect, especially after her dalliance with the Guptas. How quickly people forget. She has nothing to offer this country.
And while she frets about people smoking, she's done little to ensure the state is ready to cope with the projections of its own scientific advisers. The whole point of the lockdown was to buy time to prepare the health system for a surge of Covid-19 patients. Now, it turns out, the state is nowhere near ready for said surge. What has it been doing? We're told up to 50,000 people could die, that ICU beds will be overwhelmed by the end of June (and already are in several Cape Town hospitals).
Shock! Horror! This is what pandemics do, it turns out. Interesting how no-one in the government is doing anything to counter the delirious view that the surge of infections in the Western Cape is the direct result of it being run by the opposition. There'll be time to regret this in a few weeks.
But what really concerns me, still, is where to stand. My opinions are my living so I have to settle on the facts that move me most. And I'm allowed to change my mind.
Yet I feel the virus tugging at what few principles I have left. Do I stand with the Covid victims in ICU, struggling to breathe, far from family? It is an unbearable prospect.
But video after video of kilometre-long queues standing patiently for food and some sustenance tell me that although the current medical disaster is really bad, the coming humanitarian catastrophe will make it seem trifling in comparison. Hundreds of employers are going to the wall. Thousands, eventually millions, of South Africans will soon have no way of feeding themselves and the state is not nearly capable of helping them.
Without a full opening of the economy, with as much safety (and personal responsibility) as possible built in, we face devastation on a grand scale. We are not prepared for the disaster now but we are nowhere close to ready for what is to come.
The government, believe it or not, has a plan to reshape the economy after the virus leaves us in the next few years. It should be so lucky. What it will inherit, partly thanks to its kak-handed handling of the lockdown since the initial three weeks, is a burnt-out, heavily indebted, uncompetitive shipwreck.
If finance minister Tito Mboweni resigns in frustration there's always his clever deputy, David Masondo, to replace him. He flirts with the Nomvula Mokonyane school of fiscal policy - "let the rand fall, we'll pick it up again" - arguing that the Reserve Bank should buy bonds directly from the National Treasury to fund the state through the coming depression. Really?
Requiring the central bank to buy government bonds means forcing it literally to print money, which would render our currency worthless eventually and send the prices of everything soaring. Young and thrusting, Masondo was a teenager when inflation here last breached 15%, so he can be forgiven for not appreciating what worthless money can do to a family. Let alone a country.
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