As Jacob Zuma taunts our democracy and our constitution ahead of his inevitable arrest for contempt of court, you wonder what the actual moment of seizure will look like. All eyes should be on Bheki Cele, the police minister. Will he push through a protective mob to get his man?
I doubt it. Cele is a bully and bullies are only tough when the people they’re hurting can’t fight back.
More than 465,000 citizens have been arrested during Covid-19 lockdowns for contravening the Disaster Management Act, the authoritarian legislation the government currently uses to tackle the virus. The virus, of course, doesn’t give a flying f**k about the Disaster Management Act but Cele revels in it, last week again threatening to arrest and jail “offenders” in adjusted level 4 lockdown.
When he arrests you for carrying a bottle of wine over to a friend for dinner, you get put in a cell for the weekend where you have a million percent more chance of being infected with Covid than you would have had at your friend’s house.
Bheki Cele may have done more to spread Covid in SA than any other single individual
And then, before you figure out you’re sick, you get released into the arms of your anxious family and infect them too. Cele may have done more to spread Covid in SA than any other single individual.
He takes his cue from his boss, President Cyril Ramaphosa, literally. Introducing lockdowns last year, Ramaphosa, like many other political leaders around the world, struck a militaristic chord as he explained that he had been “forced to take aggressive action against an invisible enemy that threatened our lives and the lives of our loved ones”. It was war.
Former Constitutional Court justice Edwin Cameron, now the inspecting judge for the Judicial Inspectorate for Correctional Services, wrote an article for News24 recently warning that lockdown rules are “creating more criminals, triggering more arrests, more overcrowding in correctional centres, and more stigma in vulnerable communities”.
“Do we keep anyone safe by treating Covid-19 as a security issue?” asked Cameron, not unreasonably. “By clamping down on the public with an iron fist, when what they seek is reassurance … ?”
Cele would not know what Cameron is talking about. The virus is the enemy and it travels on people, so if you tell people not to gather and they do then gather them all in jail.
I support the need for lockdowns, wearing masks and social distancing and I get that beaches are open this time, but I have lost all respect for the stupid “command council” that makes the rules and the puzzling advice it gets. It is always late and often wrong, or twisted by personal bias.
Take yet another job- and livelihood-destroying alcohol ban. The advice is that people buy alcohol to get blind drunk and then fight or drive and need hospitalisation when Covid patients need more attention.
Dealing with a drunk can be difficult, but there are a thousand undrunk reasons to go to an ER. Try a kidney stone, a panic attack or a stroke. After curfew. But the advice that alcohol causes trauma is now simply accepted as fact by the people who run the country. Yes, drunk people can do terrible things, but so do sober people.
Research published in April this year, financed by the alcohol industry but peer-reviewed by a highly regarded scientist, suggests that the 60% fall in trauma cases in SA under lockdown was broadly in line with that in countries that also locked down but did not ban the sale or transport of alcohol — in the UK the trauma drop was 57%, in Italy 56.6%, in the US 54%.
According to the South African Police Service 2019-20 annual crime report, alcohol drives only about 5.4% of sexual offences and less than 7% of murders. Fewer than 6% of road accidents involve drunk drivers. And if you look at the trajectory of diseases driven by alcohol like cirrhosis of the liver, we are improving, not failing.
Little wonder Mediclinic, the hospital group, said last week they “confirm that we have not experienced a significant change in alcohol-related admissions to our emergency centres when alcohol bans have been implemented or removed during previous surges. We do not foresee the recent ban impacting on our current emergency centre admissions.”
But the National Coronavirus Command Council knows better. It’ll take jobs and economic activity away for something that isn’t even real and then promise to “build a new South Africa together”. Don’t hold your breath.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.