Lockdown is riling black and white South Africans: could this be a reset moment?

A police officer at a 24-hour roadblock in Cape Town, South Africa after the country went into lockdown. Photo by Roger Sedrus/Gallo Images via Getty Images

The South African government seems to have gone from an absence of data coupled to a firm but sensible strategy of lockdown to delay the pain of COVID-19, to a multitude of inputs and a seemingly cavalier attitude to the restrictions.

Statistics South Africa has submitted data on how the pandemic has devastated the country’s economy. Data from the Human Sciences Research Council points to overwhelming compliance with the restrictions by citizens, while regular updates by the National Institute for Communicable Diseases show the rates of infection continue to grow unabated.

Academics and NGOs have done the same, focusing primarily on the economy and poor people in particular. Many others have followed, with data or models or both.

In response, government developed a five-stage, evidence-informed strategy. This approach is meant to ease the lockdown, in place since 27 March, by assessing levels and sites of risk and adjusting accordingly. Government, and President Cyril Ramaphosa in particular, initially won global praise for their response to COVID-19 and apparent reliance on science to guide them. That was then.

Something has changed – the government or citizens?

Capriciousness

It is remarkable how quickly South Africans have lost the sense of camaraderie and support for a strong leader, and begun to complain rather about crypto-fascist authoritarianism. This was exacerbated by government as it introduced a “Stage 4” that was meant to be lighter than “Stage 5”.

It came with 73,000 more soldiers to help the police manage the new 8pm-5am curfew. So far, they have beaten up, threatened and intimidated innocent people, even killing a man. Citizens were permitted a “bonus” of three hours of exercise between 6am and 9am, making social distancing rather challenging.

On 1 May, when the relaxed restrictions kicked in, the roads were full of runners, walkers, shufflers, cyclists in their spandex, and dogs of every type. As he faced a sea of (mainly) white faces jogging on Cape Town’s Promenade, Police Minister Bheki Cele threatened:

I saw this thing of running, I think we will be making some form of recommendation to the National Command Council about it.

He added:

I saw … people running in clubs, walking with their dogs and they were even swimming – something that is [criminalised] in the regulations…

And in case anyone was in doubt about who had power, he added: “we can forget about Level 3” because such terrible behaviour meant citizens did not “deserve” it.

It is that final throw-away line that grates. This is not for citizens to “earn” or “deserve” because they behave well, it is meant to be a science-driven risk-based analysis that determines stages 1-5. But now it smacks of capriciousness, with more than a hint of pay-back.

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South Africans – regardless of race or class – picked this up as they watched Cooperative Governance Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma announce the reversal of a promise of tobacco sales being allowed under “Stage 4”, made earlier by President Ramaphosa. Similar to Cele telling them whether they “deserve” stage 3 or not.

Virtually all research into racial attitudes in South Africa has shown racial differentiation growing. This was most easily shown in the 2019 elections. These differences seem increasingly to be replaced by a shared hostility towards an ANC government that appears to be making rules up as they feel like it, and whose own ministers clearly feel above COVID-19 – and above citizens.

Throwback to an inglorious past

Are citizens protected by evidence-based interventions, or are they being jerked around by mean-spirited politicians?

If the country steps back, is there not something worth learning now, particularly for white South Africans?

Think about it. You can’t go to work or school or to the park unless government says you can. Your freedom of movement is severely limited. You’re told when you’re allowed out, and you are supposed to have a permit akin to a dompas (dumb pass), to prove you’re legally out. (The dompas was the demeaning identity document all black people were required to carry during apartheid rule, which controlled their movements.)

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And the troops and police are there to ensure you obey, or beat the hell out of you. Your behaviours are deemed foreign, not normal. You can only enter certain shops, and only after you are sanitised (because you may be dirty or a vector of disease) and you can’t buy alcohol or cigarettes. And other than a small handful, your work is not essential and government will decide for you if you can work or not.

A South African military Police officer enforces the nationwide COVID-19 lockdown. Emmanuel Croset / AFP) via Getty Images

White South Africans right now have a rather comfortable, tiny insight into what life under apartheid was like. It can be a powerful moment to empathise with what it was like to be black under apartheid – and this time, blacks and whites are all being treated the same.

They are all irritated by a government that seems bent on exercising power in small, nasty ways. That’s why this can be a great moment, because black and white South Africans really are all in this together, and they all increasingly dislike their government together.

If white people can stop acting as if they are individually and personally being attacked, and understand the shared nature of both unhappiness and anger, there is real potential for some (much delayed) healing.

As the global economy tanks, whites with retirement policies and shares and businesses are being hit in the pocket. Society and the economy, they are told, are never going back to normal – they have to reset in different, as yet unknown ways.

Can they?

Never waste a good crisis

If South Africa has to reset, can its people – consciously and together – treat this as the real “miracle” moment? A lot of good work has been done since apartheid, which advantaged the white minority to the detriment of the black majority, ended in 1994. Millions of people now have clean water, water-borne sewerage, electricity, tarred roads, street lights and the like. Quite a few more have tertiary education, and some have wealth.

According to most studies, reconciliation has not fared well. Racism, racial redress and patronage have made short work of the noble goals of the early 1990s.

We should see the last 26 years as South Africans’ infrastructural investment for the real “new South Africa” to be able to emerge.

If we assume that the society matters more than simply repeating “it’s the economy, stupid!”, now is the chance to be different, and to reset to a new social reality. Wealth has been destroyed by COVID-19, and it has laid bare the lines of inequality for all to see. So, talk of a wealth tax sounds rational, not punitive, in the post-COVID-19 context.

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South Africans can come out of lockdown as a more empathetic and united people – even if united in irritation or anger at a capricious government that seems to regard evidence-based decision-making as meaning regulations chop and change according to ministerial whim.

Can they use this moment to look beyond “race” and see a shared humanity?

It is rare that any post-authoritarian society gets two chances to reconcile. This may be just that, for white South Africans in particular.

David Everatt, Professor, University of the Witwatersrand

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Shipwrecked! How social isolation can enrich our spiritual lives – like Robinson Crusoe

Nearly lost at sea, Robinson Crusoe lands on an island only to reckon with isolation, solitude and his own life. Culture Club/Hulton Archive via Getty Images

He survived the last great plague in London and the city’s Great Fire. He was imprisoned and persecuted for his religious and political views. There was no happy ending for the journalist Daniel Defoe, author of “A Journal of a Plague Year.” When he died in 1731, he was mired in debt and hiding from his creditors.

Yet Defoe, born in 1660, left behind a work of fiction that is one of the most widely published books in history and – other than the Bible – the most translated book in the world. Like many great works of fiction, it speaks across centuries, especially now as we face the COVID-19 pandemic.

The book is “Robinson Crusoe,” written by Defoe and first published in 1719. Crusoe is an Englishman who leaves his comfortable life, goes to sea, gets captured by pirates and sold into slavery. Later, he emerges from a shipwreck the sole survivor. He sustains himself alone on a tropical island for 28 years, relying on grit, imagination and the few things he salvaged from the ship. His tale offers lessons for us all.

As a physician and scholar, I have taught Defoe’s novel many times to my students at Indiana University. I believe it is one of the best books to read as we endure the uncertainty and isolation due to COVID-19, because it invites us to reflect on existential issues at the core of a pandemic.

Title page of the first edition (1719) of Robinson Crusoe. Culture Club/Hulton Archive via Getty Images

What matters in our lives?

For those hunkered down in the midst of a pandemic, one of Robinson Crusoe’s lessons is understanding the folly of worldly goods. Crusoe finds gold but realizes it is of no value to him, not even worth “taking off of the ground.” In his former life, money had become a “drug.” Now, marooned on an island, he learns what is truly necessary and rewarding in life.

Like Crusoe’s shipwreck, sheltering in place during COVID-19 interrupts long-established habits and rhythms of life. With this interruption comes a chance to examine our lives. What is genuinely necessary in life? And what things turn out to be little more than distractions? For example, where on such a spectrum would we situate the pursuit of wealth or caring well for loved ones?

Making do with very little

Crusoe quickly learns to be open to discovery. When he first arrives on the island, he finds it barren, inhospitable and threatening, like a prison. Over time, he comes to recognize it as home. As he explores the island and learns to live in harmony with it, it protects and sustains him. The island emerges as an unending source of wonder that at first he couldn’t see.

As my family and I have sheltered in place, we have shared a similar experience. We are taking more walks and lingering longer at the dinner table. Now that we are not rushing as much from one thing to another, we’ve discovered what it means to be in one place and simply savor being together.

Necessity, the mother of invention

Alone on an island, Crusoe can’t rely on anyone but himself to provide the things he needs. On the day of his shipwreck, he is naked, hungry and homeless. He laments that, “considered by his own nature,” man is “one of the most miserable creatures of the world.” Out of necessity, he figures out how to make the things he needs.

A 1900 lithograph of Robinson Crusoe building his first dwelling. Leemage/Corbis Historical via Getty Images

A pandemic renews opportunities for necessity to give birth to invention. Just as Crusoe finds within himself a resourcefulness he didn’t know he had, confinement can reveal new ways of living and creating. Even simple things such as cooking, reading, handcraft, writing and conversation may turn out to have more to offer than we supposed.

A wasted life and forgiveness

One of the greatest challenges Crusoe faces is unburdening himself of the guilt he bears for his misspent life. It had been devoted to getting rich and dominating other people – at the time of his shipwreck, he had been on a voyage to secure slaves for his plantation. But on the island, he begins to see the beauty in simple things. For example, he finds trees indescribably beautiful, a beauty so profound that it is “scarce credible.”

Something similar can transpire in the lives of the homebound. Frustration and disappointment can fade, to be replaced by new and unexpected sources of fulfillment. It may be something that we experience, such as a bird singing in the morning, but it can also be of our own doing. The tools lie at our fingertips – mail, phone and social media provide all we need to reach out to others with a kind word or helping hand.

Gratitude for what we have

One of the most profound transformations that Crusoe experiences is spiritual. Alone, he begins to meditate on the Bible he recovered from the shipwreck, reading Scripture three times per day. He attributes his newfound ability to “look on the bright side of my condition” to this habit, which gives him “such secret comforts that I cannot express them.”

By the time Crusoe is rescued after nearly three decades, he is a new man. He has formed the deepest friendship of his life with Friday, a man he rescued from death. He has learned the most profound lesson that “all our discontents about what we want spring from the want of thankfulness for what we have.”

Crusoe’s social isolation changed him for the better. Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

A life of isolation

Enforced quiet and separation because of coronavirus can reacquaint some of us with the value of peace, while solitude can whet our appetites for the joys of true fellowship. Just as the shipwrecked Crusoe is reborn, so trying times can clarify for us the true bounties of our lives.

A pandemic can seem like the end, but it can also serve as a beginning. We are, in a way, cut adrift. Yet a new and ultimately more fertile landfall lies ahead, at least for those of us who are not sick, broke or homeless. If we heed Defoe’s inspiration, these unprecedented challenges can transform us into wiser and more caring human beings.

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Richard Gunderman, Chancellor's Professor of Medicine, Liberal Arts, and Philanthropy, Indiana University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

As states weigh human lives versus the economy, history suggests the economy often wins

A 1620 engraving depicts tobacco being prepared for export from Jamestown, Virginia. Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Policymakers are beginning to decide how to reopen the American economy. Until now, they’ve largely prioritized human health: Restrictions in all but a handful of states remain in effect, and trillions have been committed to help shuttered businesses and those who have been furloughed or laid off.

The right time to start opening up sectors of the economy has been up for debate. But history shows that in the wake of calamities, human life often loses out to economic imperatives.

As a historian of early America who has written about tobacco and the aftermath of an epidemic in New England, I’ve seen similar considerations made in the face of disease outbreaks. And I believe that there are crucial lessons to be drawn from two 17th-century outbreaks during which economic interests of a select few won out over moral concerns.

Tobacco, a love story

During the 16th century, Europeans fell in love with tobacco, an American plant. Many enjoyed the sensations, like increased energy and decreased appetite, that it produced, and most who wrote about it emphasized its medicinal benefits, seeing it as a wonder drug that could cure a variety of human ailments. (Not everyone celebrated the plant; King James I of England warned that it was habit-forming and dangerous.)

By the early 17th century, the English grew increasingly eager to establish a permanent colony in North America after failing to do so in places like Roanoke and Nunavut. They saw their next opportunity along the James River, a tributary of Chesapeake Bay. Following the establishment of Jamestown in 1607, the English soon realized that the region was perfect for cultivating tobacco.

The newcomers, however, didn’t know they had settled in an ideal breeding ground for the bacteria that cause typhoid fever and dysentery. From 1607 to 1624, approximately 7,300 migrants, most of them young, traveled to Virginia. By 1625 there were only about 1,200 survivors. A 1622 uprising by local Powhatans and drought-induced shortages of food contributed to the death toll, but most perished from disease. The situation was so dire that some colonists, too weak to produce food, resorted to cannibalism.

Aware that such stories might dissuade possible migrants, the Virginia Company of London circulated a pamphlet that acknowledged the problems but stressed that the future would be brighter.
And so English migrants continued to arrive, recruited from the armies of young people who had moved to London looking for work, only to find scant opportunities. Jobless and desperate, many agreed to become indentured servants, meaning they would work for a planter in Virginia for a set period of time in exchange for passage across the ocean and compensation at the end of the contract.

Tobacco production soared, and despite a drop in the price due to the overproduction of the crop, planters were able to amass substantial wealth.

From servants to slaves

Another disease shaped early America, even though its victims were thousands of miles away. In 1665, the bubonic plague struck London. The next year, the Great Fire consumed much of the city’s infrastructure. Bills of mortality and other sources reveal that the city’s population may have dropped by as much as 15% to 20% during this period.

The timing of the twinned catastrophes couldn’t have been worse for English planters in Virginia and Maryland. Though demand for tobacco had only grown, many indentured servants from the first wave of recruits had decided to start their own families and farms. Planters desperately needed labor for their tobacco fields, but English workers who might have otherwise emigrated instead found work at home rebuilding London.

With fewer laborers coming from England, an alternative started to seem increasingly attractive to planters: the slave trade. While the first enslaved Africans had arrived in Virginia in 1619, their numbers grew significantly after the 1660s. In the 1680s, the first anti-slavery movement appeared in the Colonies; by then, planters had come to rely on imported slave labor.

Yet planters didn’t need to prioritize labor-intensive tobacco. For years, Colonial leaders had been trying to convince planters to grow less labor-intensive crops, like corn. But enamored by the allure of profits, they stuck with their cash crop – and welcomed ship after ship of bound laborers. The demand for tobacco outweighed any sort of moral consideration.

Legalized slavery and indentured servitude are no longer familiar parts of the American economy, but economic exploitation persists.

Despite the heated anti-immigration rhetoric that has come from the Oval Office in recent years, the United States continues to rely heavily on immigrant workers, which includes farm workers. Their importance has become even more apparent during the pandemic, and the government has even declared them “essential.” After Trump announced his immigration ban on April 20, the executive order exempted farm workers and crop pickers, whose numbers have actually grown under his administration.

So even before states were weighing whether to reopen nonessential businesses, these laborers were on the frontlines, working and sleeping in close proximity, immunocompromised due to chemical exposure, with little access to proper medical care.

And yet rather than reward them for performing this essential work, some in the government are reportedly trying to slash their low wages even further, while giving farm owners a multi-billion-dollar bailout.

Whether it’s a plague or pandemic, the story tends to remain the same, with the quest for profits eventually prevailing over concerns for human health.

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Peter C. Mancall, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

What's lost when we're too afraid to touch the world around us?

We touch, therefore we know. Jupiterimages/Getty Images

During one of my daily walks with my toddler, when we passed his favorite playground, I noticed a new sign warning that the coronavirus survives on all kinds of surfaces and that we should no longer use the playground. Since then, I’ve taken great pains to prevent him from touching things.

This hasn’t been easy. He loves to squeeze bike racks and graze tree trunks, jostle bushes and knock on picnic tables. He likes to run his fingers against bars around a swimming pool and pet the chickens at the neighborhood coop.

Whenever I bat his hand away or try to distract him from potentially absorbing these dreaded, invisible germs, I wonder: What’s being lost? How can he possibly indulge his curiosity and learn about the world without his sense of touch?

I find myself thinking about Johann Gottfried Herder, an 18th-century German philosopher who published a treatise on the sense of touch in 1778.

“Go into a nursery and see how the young child who is constantly gathering experience reaches out, grasping, lifting, weighing, touching and measuring things,” he wrote. In doing so, the child acquires “the most primary and necessary concepts, such as body, shape, size, space and distance.”

During the European Enlightenment, sight was considered by many to be the most important sense because it could perceive light, and light also symbolized scientific fact and philosophical truth. However, some thinkers, such as Herder and Denis Diderot, questioned sight’s predominance. Herder writes that “sight reveals merely shapes, but touch alone reveals bodies: that everything that has form is known only through the sense of touch and that sight reveals only … surfaces exposed to light.”

To Herder, our knowledge of the world – our relentless curiosity – is fundamentally transmitted and satiated through our skin. Herder argues that blind people are, in fact, privileged; they’re able to explore via touch without distraction and are “able to develop concepts of the properties of bodies that are far more complete than those acquired by the sighted.”

For Herder, touch was the only way to understand the form of things and grasp the shape of bodies. Herder changes René Descartes’ statement “I think, therefore I am” and claims: We touch, therefore we know. We touch, therefore we are.

Herder was onto something. Centuries later, neuroscientists like David Linden have been able to map out the power of touch – the first sense, he notes in his book “Touch: The Science of Hand, Heart, and Mind,” to develop in utero.

Linden writes that our skin is a social organ that cultivates cooperation, improves health and enhances development. He points to research showing that celebratory hugging among professional basketball players improves team performance, that premature babies are more likely to survive if they’re regularly held by their parents instead of being kept solely in incubators and that children severely deprived of touch end up with more developmental problems.

During this period of social distancing, what sort of void has been created? In our social lives, touches are often subtle and brief – a quick handshake or hug. Yet it seems as though these brief encounters contribute mightily to our emotional well-being.

As a professor, I know it’s been a huge advantage to have digital technology that enables remote learning. But my students are missing out on the little touches, intentional or accidental, from their friends and classmates, whether it’s in the classroom, in dining halls or in their dorms.

Perhaps not surprisingly, touch plays a bigger role in some cultures than in others. Psychologist Sidney Jourard observed the behavior of Puerto Ricans in a San Juan coffee shop and found that they touched one another an average of 180 times per hour. I wonder how they’re handling social distancing. Residents of Gainesville, Florida, are probably having an easier time; Jourard found they only touched twice per hour in a coffee shop.

Social distancing is crucial. But I’m already pining for the day when we can all engage with the world unimpeded, touching without anxiety or hesitation.

We’re more impoverished without it.

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Chunjie Zhang, Associate Professor of German, University of California, Davis
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Ancient texts encouraged hope and endurance when they spoke of end times

A 14th-century Last Judgment relief from a facade of Orvieto cathedral in Umbria. Italy. De Agostini via Getty Images

With streets deserted, hospitals full and morgues struggling to cope with the number of bodies, it isn’t surprising that some people are making comparisons with the apocalypse.

The idea of an apocalypse, a time of catastrophic suffering, has existed for thousands of years.
Although things seemed bleak during ancient times of crisis, my research on ancient apocalypticism and its long history suggests that cultivating hope during times of chaos was essential.

Ancient apocalypticism

The word apocalypticism comes from the ancient Greek word “apokalypsis,” meaning a “revealing” or a “revelation.” Scholars define apocalypticism as a social and religious movement that sees the world in stark terms, such as dramatic visions that reveal a battle between good and evil and a coming judgment day.

In more general terms, apocalypticism explained the cause of a crisis and how people should respond to it. The future, in most forms of apocalyptic thinking, meant imminent cataclysmic change: a new kingdom, a new world order.

Image of woman sitting on the scarlet beast. Phillip Medhurst / Wikimedia, CC BY-SA

Apocalyptic ideas are an important theme in the Bible. The biblical Book of Revelation, for example, was written during a time of political upheaval when Christians were being persecuted.

Its dramatic visions included the “woman sitting on a scarlet beast…with seven heads and ten horns.” This vision, which probably alluded to the tyranny of imperial political authorities, was paradoxically a source of inspiration for early Christians, because it gave voice to their suffering.

But long before Revelation was written, apocalyptic thinking took root in ancient Judaism during times of significant political unrest, violent oppression and social devastation.

The Book of Daniel reflects one such crisis: Parts of this book were written in response to the conquests of Jerusalem by a Seleucid king named Antiochus Epiphanes. Antiochus desecrated the Jewish sacred temple in Jerusalem in the second century B.C. by setting up an altar to the God Zeus within the temple’s precincts.

The book addresses the suffering of the people, it recalls the history of violence and portrays this history with terrifying visions. But it also speaks of a coming judgment day that will be followed by a new kingdom – a kingdom that is everlasting and stands in contrast to the oppression of earlier times.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, dating to the period just after the apocalyptic writings in the Book of Daniel, spoke of impending terrible battles between good and evil.

Much of what scholars know about the Jewish community that wrote and preserved the Dead Sea Scrolls, speaks to a people in the throes of what appeared to be the end times.

The origins of Christianity lie in early Jewish apocalyptic worldviews: John the Baptist, Jesus, and the apostle Paul all seemed to have apocalyptic worldviews and preached messages about the imminent end times.

With its emphasis on a coming judgment day, one often accompanied by dramatic and destructive transformations, apocalypticism seems pessimistic. It certainly speaks to dire circumstances, as well as to fear and suffering.

Apocalyptic hope

But there is an important feature of apocalypticism that is often overlooked and it helps to explain why it continues to resurface throughout history and in our own times.

St. John the theologian writing the Book of Revelation. Theodoros Poulakis/Byzantine and Christian Virtual Museum

In powerful and important ways, apocalypticism was about hope. The ancient Greek word for hope – elpis – illuminates just how closely associated fear and hope were in the ancient world: Elpis referred to the anticipation or expectation of a good and safe future, but it could also refer to the fear of the unknown.

Apocalypticism cultivated a sense of meaning and encouragement through dire circumstances. It sought to make sense of suffering, and it predicted an end to suffering. In doing so, it gave people hope. Above all, apocalyptic thinking bonded people together in uncertain and challenging times.

Paul wrote that the judgment day will come “like a thief in the night” and he encouraged his followers to have “steadfastness of hope” in the midst of crisis. The Book of Revelation speaks repeatedly about “patient endurance” and it calls for love and faith during times of persecution and oppression.

The Book of Daniel writes poetically of those who “will shine like the brightness of the sky” in the time after the apocalypse. Other apocalyptic texts, such as the Sibylline Oracles, describe poetically a coming light, a “life without care,” and a time when the “earth will belong equally to all.”

It is this quality of hope and endurance that might be most important for our own time.

People watch a firefighter play his trumpet from the top of a ladder for residents cooped up at home, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, offering a sign of hope. AP Photo/Leo Correa

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Kim Haines-Eitzen, Professor of Early Christianity, Cornell University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Why South Africa needs to ensure income security beyond the pandemic

Job seekers wait on the side of a road in South Africa. Joblessness stands at a record high. Mujahid Safodien/AFP via Getty Images

A slew of countries ranging from the US to Brazil to Singapore to South Africa have decided to give people money in response to the economic crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

While the amounts and details of the grants have varied, these governments have all made it clear that such payments are a short-term emergency response to an exceptional situation. But is the economic uncertainty caused by COVID-19 as exceptional as it seems? Might the reasons for guaranteeing economic security be valid even without a global pandemic?

Take the case of South Africa.

The government has decided to substantially bolster the social security net, directing R50 billion to those most acutely affected by the crisis over the next six months. This will be distributed in the form of increasing the current child support grant. In addition, pensions and disability grants will go up.

But the biggest change is the introduction of a special “COVID-19 Social Relief of Distress grant” to be paid to people who are currently unemployed and do not receive any social grant or unemployment insurance for the next six months.

The new COVID-19 grant is the first time unemployed working-age adults are being included in the social grant system. Since 1994, the African National Congress government has resisted including them. And the resistance remains.

South Africa’s treasury has been busy making it clear that the new direct cash transfers are exceptional and temporary. At a recent media briefing, finance minister Tito Mboweni repeated again and again that the additional grants were temporary. His anxiety that people will expect the additional grants to remain in place – and that they will become “agitated” when the grants are taken away – is palpable.

Economic distress – before the pandemic

The name of the new grant shows exactly what it’s meant for. Calling it the COVID-19 Social Relief of Distress grant makes it clear that this is an emergency measure, here only to relieve the distress of COVID-19.

But economic distress was the norm for many before the coronavirus outbreak. Illness, ill-fortune and economic precarity existed long before this pandemic. The outbreak only makes the economic crisis broader, deeper and more visible.

An accident, a family death, or a delayed train can happen to anyone. But for the large number of people in South Africa who work for low wages without a proper contract, or who simply cannot find work at all, one of these events can be the tipping point into destitution.

They don’t need a pandemic to experience economic distress.

We would argue that South Africa needs more than emergency provisions such as a short-term new social grant or an emergency basic income. Rather, it needs a permanent form of economic security, be it in the form of a universal basic income that is given to all and then taxed back from those that don’t need it, or some other form of income guarantee for all.

Work does not provide economic security for all

Politicians are now willing to guarantee citizens some measure of economic security through the state because they cannot ask them to leave their homes and find economic security through work. But in a place like South Africa, finding economic security through wage labour was never the solution. It is just wishful thinking.

The statistics are stark: South Africa has an unemployment rate of nearly 40%. And of those lucky enough to have work, about 54% of full-time employees earn below the working-poor line of R4,125 a month.

The current economic distress brought on by the pandemic is not a brand new crisis. It’s an amplification of what was already reality for many South Africans. Indeed, it deepens economic insecurity around the world: globally, over 60% of workers are in “non-standard” employment – that means it’s precarious, short-term or informal.

The link between wage labour and economic security has long been a mirage in South Africa. Mass unemployment and precarity are neither new nor temporary. They are structural and enduring features of South Africa, further compounded as companies collapse and invest in labour-saving technologies.

 The need to provide economic security beyond the labour market has long been political reality.

Guaranteeing economic security

The idea that economic security should be a universal right – much like universal access to health care – has been around for centuries. At its core, it’s simply the argument that no matter who they are or what they do, every human being should be guaranteed enough resources to stay alive.

Ray van Heerden, a car guard, from the poverty-stricken shantytown of Munsieville, cannot work due to the lockdown. EFE-EPA/Kim Ludbrook

There are many ways to provide this kind of economic security. It could be via a social grant given to everyone who needs it. Or a negative income tax, a payment through the tax system that tops up the income of the poor to a basic level. Or it could be via a universal basic income – a regular payment to every resident, with no conditions or targeting.

Universal basic income has the advantage of simplicity. There’s no need for a bureaucracy to decide who should get it and who should not. And while many people critique it for being expensive and going to people who already have money, this is not the case. It goes to everyone, but is taxed back from the wealthy who don’t need it – meaning it both costs less than you might think, and ends up helping only those who really need it.

The biggest source of resistance to providing economic security to all, be it through universal basic income or other forms of guaranteed income, is the idea that people have to work for money – that “you can’t get money for nothing”. This is why, despite a big push for basic income in the early 2000s, the South African state has always resisted the idea. But work has never been able to provide economic security for all in South Africa. Why keep expecting the poor to receive money through work only, when work is unavailable, or unstable and badly paid?

The fact that many countries are now giving citizens emergency cash could be a step in the right direction. Finally, anyone who needs it can access some form of economic support from the state. But this should not be a temporary measure. It does not address a new problem, but rather a very old one that is suddenly worse. What the country needs is not an emergency basic income, but a permanent income guarantee. In fact the Spanish government plans to maintain the basic income it is implementing beyond the pandemic.

No longer business as usual

The circumstances that necessitate an income guarantee have long existed in South Africa. It is time for the government to acknowledge this. There can be no return to business as usual, because business as usual means poverty, suffering and ongoing economic distress.

The poor and most vulnerable understand that the economic insecurity they face is not a state of exception. It is the default. It will not end after the easing of the lockdown.

This international Workers’ Day, the COVID-19 pandemic provides an opportunity to see things as they are – that work cannot be assumed to shelter everyone from economic distress. It also provides an opportunity to delink basic livelihood from wage labour, and begin to develop policies that deliver an economically secure future for all.


Hannah J. Dawson, Post-doctoral fellow at the Society, Work and Politics Institute (SWOP) , University of the Witwatersrand and Elizaveta Fouksman, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, University of Oxford
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.