Don’t extend lockdown ‘even for another’ day and FW de Klerk’s legacy – Theuns Eloff

Dr Theuns Eloff, who has just left the FW de Klerk Foundation, has launched a strong appeal that the government should not extend the current lockdown for 'even another day'. Dr Eloff said he believed that the lockdown has achieved what it set out to do. He also comments on the furore around former President FW de Klerk's recent statement on whether apartheid was a crime against humanity and what that has done to the Nobel peace prize winner's legacy. – Linda van Tilburg

Even the medical statistics show that we've had all the benefits we could from a slower track of the disease infection rates and now we must weigh it up against the enormous damage that's being done to the economy. My problem is (and I specifically quoted the minister responsible – Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma – last Thursday); the whole approach is about human lives – which is fine. But then, they think that human lives can only be lost through Covid-19 and they don't realise that human lives can also be lost through the economy imploding. And I looked far and wide and I got something from Dawie Roodt (on his blog) where he said that we can be compared with Greece; in the last 10 years when their economy really went down, their GNP per person (gross national product) came down with 20 percent and that meant that they lost one person per thousand more to deaths. So actually, the argument that Dawie makes is to slow down your economy ; if you lose GNP (10 percent or whatever) – which we will surely do – it will cause more deaths because people will die from hunger and a lack of jobs etc. So, that's the point I was trying to make – that we cannot afford to (after the 1st of May) have an extension of the lockdown as it is (in the state that we have).

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