🔒 ‘Community isolation’ a better lockdown solution for poorer communities – Dr Jakkie Cilliers

For many people who live in townships; self-isolation is not really a viable option as people live so close together. It is very difficult for 10 people who live in a tin shack; to stay inside and to avoid their neighbours. Added to this is the fact that they can’t earn any money and fear of food shortages and anger about restrictions on alcohol and cigarettes has led to looting and protests on the Cape Flats and in Alexandra. Dr Jakkie Cilliers from the Institute for Security Studies told Biznews that community isolation might be a better idea for poorer communities and that government needs to work with the leadership of communities to try to persuade them to police themselves. – Linda van Tilburg

There are a number of huge unknowns. Africa is largely an informal economy. So up to 80% of employment in Africa is in the informal sector. People live on the margins of survival. Therefore;  if they don’t have the opportunity to undertake economic activity even in the informal sector, selling sweets on the side of the road or other items; they literally can’t survive. Now there are some countries, South Africa would be one, where you have an extensive social grants programme. But most African countries do not have that.
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So if you prohibit economic activity and people lose their very marginal livelihoods; it does become an issue of how can you survive in this environment. There are huge challenges that face the continent. But having said that; Africa has a very different population age structure, a much younger population. The median age in sub-Saharan Africa is about 19 compared to about 44-45 in the United Kingdom. We expect that the mortality burden is going to be significantly lower and that the people will get sick but maybe they will not get as sick as elderly people. But there are huge uncertainties with regard to those forecasts.

If people have to make a choice between ‘I might get the disease or I am not able to look after my family’; they would obviously choose to feed their families.

Yes, it is literally not possible for governments in Africa to enforce the kind of individual distancing and social clampdown that we’ve seen in high income countries in Europe and elsewhere. So, if you’re living in an informal settlement; you have no choice but to undertake whatever activity is required to feed you and your family. Of course, Africa is also much more rural; large components of our economies are subsistence farming. It could be that large amounts of Africans living in rural area farming for themselves may provide a degree of survival ability as well as a degree of protection from the rapid spread of the disease.Whether we have sufficient public awareness raising and public leadership is of course an entirely separate matter.

As you pointed out, South Africa has a bigger safety net than other African countries, but there are riots in several poorer areas of the country like the Cape Flats and Alexandra. Is it happening because many people have been robbed of their livelihood by the Covid-19 lockdown?

South Africa has very high crime rates and we have very robust engagement and people take their rights very seriously. We have a tradition of riots in South Africa that come from, in recent memory the anti-Zuma protests that then became protests against foreigners, the xenophobic protests. And now you see, particularly in the Cape Flats which has a long history of this, you see a significant degree of violence and xenophobic riots. They are attacking food shops and that is what is going to happen if the government does not enter into a real social compact with civic and religious and local leadership.

So, while Ramaphosa has been doing exceptionally well in South Africa and the South African government have provided exemplary leadership and communication, as time moves on people’s reserves run out. There is  the threat of increased social turbulence and violence and mass protests and attacks on food shops. So, I think the government is very concerned about that and for that reason; they’ve started to ease the regulations to try and see to what extent they can get some economic activity going, to provide a way of feeding economic activity and money into society. But as I said, 18 million South Africans are on social grants program and the government is going to increase social grants. We expect an announcement is coming this week which is probably the most effective mechanism for distribution because we have an established system for the distribution of cash grants in South Africa.

You’ve called for a more unique solution to the way that Africa deals with Covid-19 and that we shouldn’t follow the rest of the world. What would be the right way to tackle it for Africa?

I’ve mentioned some of the elements but the most important perhaps is that we need to look to community isolation, if that’s not a contrast in terms; where leadership work with communities and try to make sure that communities police themselves and try and make sure that they stay safe and and are isolated from external persons that may lead to infection. Simply imagine 10 to 12 people staying  in a small little shack in a crowded informal slum area. It’s much better if the community somehow in that block or area can get together and that would require significant leadership and engagement.

But I think it is the only realistic way forward. The idea of individual distance and isolation is simply not possible in much of informal urban areas and slums that often dominated Africa. Critical to this, is the issue of community engagement and leadership because the other component of that, is that even with the best will in the world, most African governments do not have the police, military and security force agencies to be able to really enforce this or if they do; they can only do that through the use of extreme violence. They are not trained and they don’t have sufficient man or woman power.

If community isolation or a collective approach is the way forward; has South Africa not been experimenting with that by putting homeless people together in shelters?

I think South Africa has more resources than most other African countries and as I’ve indicated because of our extensive social grants program as well as our experiences with HIV/AIDS; we are probably a little bit ahead of the curve in terms of how to respond and deal with these issues. And government has rolled out the provision of water in an unparalleled session. It is quite amazing to see how the ANC has been spurred into action by the Covid crisis. But I think that the choices with regard to homeless people; there is no other way than to try and provide tents or temporary accommodation and to put them together and the same argument of course holds that community to a degree can be isolated. But even then the individual isolation of those people remains a challenge. So once infection gets into that little community; of course it creates a very aggressive increase in the levels of infection.

One issue that people are worried about, is the curb on human rights and especially the way the security forces in South Africa have been going about. Isn’t there the risk that you lose the perception of the government that is actually doing well but the actions of the security forces undermine that?

I think South Africans are very concerned about exactly that. There is a huge outcry kicking around about the military and to a lesser extent the police and unfortunately we have a Minister of Safety and Security that is quite gung-ho. But I think that the pressure on government to deal with these is intense and there has been wide publicity. I’m not concerned about the Constitution law and human rights implications; I am much more concerned about the impact that this will have on the image of the police and the military but in that sense the government is perhaps a victim of its own success.  Right from the beginning it said it is going to adopt a very aggressive, no excuses, no holds barred in its campaign to try and deal with and keep the national lockdown tight. And I think that in some instances particularly the military has taken this a little bit too literally. I think they will step back from that. It is a concern but I don’t think it is really something that is systemic across the security agencies.

Finance minister Tito Mboweni seems to want an IMF loan but he does not want any of the conditionality that often goes with a loan? Do you think South Africa would eventually have to go to the IMF because the economy is in such a deep hole?

The problem is that the IMF terms of loan are much better than that of anybody else and the world has moved on from the 1990s and 2000 when the World Bank and the IMF came with very stringent conditionality’s. That really was to clamp down on the state to reduce the size of the state and to make the argument that it is the private sector that is responsible for growth. Now that may be true for all high and upper middle income countries, but it is not true for Africa. In actual fact; the IMF and World Bank today have a much more positive and balanced approach. So yes; they are still vilified and they are viewed with huge suspicion in Africa and in South Africa given the history and the ideological orientation of the ANC, Cosatu and the Communist Party; the IMF and the World Bank are seen as the high priests, of course, of new liberal economic policies.

But when the cupboard is bare, then you have few choices. Now South Africa will first turn to the New Development Bank which is the BRICS Bank and it will look at those options but as I’ve said; the problem with that is that the IMF has got a deep pocket; it’s got $1 trillion that is prepared to lend and the terms are very different; they are much more concessional than we would get from the Chinese or from any other bank.

If you were looking at short-term emergency funding; then I think that the IMF and the World Bank remains a possibility for South Africa, not as a long term structural adjustment type of intervention, but in the short-term. But because of the negative associations with the World Bank and the IMF; I think it is a move any South African Minister of Finance will think of very carefully because he may set himself up for real significant attacks within the tripartite alliance if he decides to go that route despite the favourable terms of those loans.