50 minutes with John Steenhuisen – A moment of truth looms for Cyril Ramaphosa: Growth or pandered destruction.

A moment of clarity from John Steenhuisen who describes Covid-19 as a small hill before the massively steep mountain awaiting SA to get the economy right. The leader of the Democratic Alliance reckons the real battle is still to come, and that if President Cyril Ramaphosa chooses policies promoting economic growth over pandering to the forces of state intervention and destruction, he can count on the support of the DA and its 85 MPs on the opposition benches. – Stanley Karombo.___STEADY_PAYWALL___.L.ovely to see you John.. We've got a very large audience, we're sitting at 726 people right now who are listening to you which for a webinar is quite sizeable. It's what we've become used to. .You've been been boxing a lot lately. But I guess your constituency would be pretty happy to see that you are standing up for what you and the DA believe in..Boxing for the right reason. We've been very constructive since the beginning of this process. We support the president in the hard lockdown. But the divergence started when we realised that extending the hard lockdown was going to have dire economic consequences and that there was actually a twin threat to lives in South Africa: one, the spread of the virus, but two, the effect of a grinding economic depression on many South Africans and that we warned at the time and it was very unpopular thing to do. If you remember that the collective outrage that made the statement when we said, it's going to destroy the economy. If you battled to open a newspaper or any publications is not talking about the dual threat to lives in South Africa of the virus and an economic collapse..The thing that I think confuses most of us here on the outside not not on the inner portals of power is that some of the strange decisions that have been taken, for instance, you're only allowed to exercise from 6 to 9. For instance, we've seen the numbers, in fact, we had it in our flash briefing this morning that, 9 out of 10 smokers are getting their cigarettes they're just buying it illegally. So the state's losing on excise duty and criminals are being given an opportunity to get a foothold in this market. How do you perhaps get some sense into a government which according to the Nobel Prize winner that we've been talking to Professor Michael Levitt, the South African, says that they are doing these kind of crazy things just because they can, in other words, they're showing you that the regime is powerful. How do you as the leader of the opposition like this?.What we did is from the beginning, we made a number of suggestions. First, we put forward a Blue Book which is ministry by ministry approach to what needed to be done to fight the virus. Then obviously when we released our smart lockdown model which we thought was the right way to go and certainly our next level had a much wider opening up of the economy..The analysis was probably right. There's a lot of autocratic, technocratic and bureaucratic behaviour that has seeped in – that has actually has nothing to do with fighting the virus. But any regulation should be measured against its efficacy in fighting the virus. Many of these regulations, the military curfew, the limited exercise is in effect counterproductive because you're basically getting every South African out onto the streets at the same time, forcing people to congregate and then Bheki Cele moans that the Sea Point promenade or other areas are too congested. But what do you do? You get three hours where everybody is out on the streets.. The ridiculous dictate that came up last week about what clothes you can buy and how you must wear them. The ban on cooked food, the ban on e-commerce – we've made submissions to the government, they haven't listened. As you probably know we are now going to court. Our papers were lodged last week. We're going to challenge – the e-commerce has fallen away not because the government did a U-turn on it – but the military curfew and the exercise. We've got a direct approach to the Constitutional Court on the constitutionality of the Disaster Management Act which is allowing the NCC to basically make laws, make regulations with absolutely no oversight from any elected public representative in South Africa. .We have an executive arm in South Africa and we've got a legislative arm – the executive is the Cabinet and the legislative Parliament, so Parliament has just been left completely out of these processes and that's why you've seen these ministers behaving like tin pot dictators in a totalitarian society. We're a democracy and our democratic processes must be allowed to continue..John just unpack that for us because that really goes to the heart of what's aggravating many South Africans. There is a lockdown which has been imposed on the country by this, as you say the executive branch. Are you wanting to prove that it's illegal or you wanting to prove that the process of the lockdown was illegal?.No. What we want to do is to fix the loophole that currently exists with absolutely no oversight of what the NCC is allowed to do. The National Command Council that was established, that's where all these rules and regulations are coming from. They are using the Disaster Management Act to argue that they're empowered to make laws and regulations. We believe there's a massive gap in this because even in the State of Emergency Act there is a provision there for parliamentary oversight. You have to go back to Parliament when you want to extend, it has to be a process that Parliament exercises oversight. In the Disaster Management Act there's no provision whatsoever for oversight. And we saw in the letter that Dr. Cassius Lubisi wrote back to that group of advocates where he argued that there is oversight – the NCC is over-sighted by the Cabinet, you can't have an executive organ of state exercising oversight over itself. It's fundamentally unconstitutional, it goes to the heart of the separation of powers debate. I still maintain that if many of these regulations had the opportunity for Parliament to have a say, we could have stop some of the lunacy that's going on. .The cigarette and alcohol ban, the government is losing billions of rands every month in revenue at a time when we need that money to help pay for the medical response, but also to help us try and keep our economy afloat which looks increasingly unlikely. An here you are essentially saying to the mafia, 'here we go, it's all your money' and to try and get legal compliance again afterwards. After you've left this network run amok for months it is just simply not going to happen..I have many questions, but the purpose of this webinar is that our community get to ask the questions. The first one for you comes from a Gerhard van den Dool who says the lockdown should have been in three phases not five. Do you agree?.We had a four-phase smart lockdown model. I stepped down from the hard lockdown and was basically allowing you any business in the country that could practice PPE, social distancing and screening testing of employees, should be allowed to open. This is a ridiculous argument where the government is now decides what business is important for the economy. Every business is important to the economy. Every business is a lifeline for families to be able to provide for themselves. The smart lockdown model at that time was the right way to go. But what the government did was essentially extend the hard lockdown into level 4. It's now, exactly the same as the hard lockdown except there's a military curfew and three hours of yard time for citizens in the morning when most people actually can't get out at that particular time. So they basically extended the hard lockdown.. Next week, we will go into being the longest in hard lockdown of any other country, including Wuhan province and Italy in terms of the timeframe that we would have been in a hard lockdown and it's come as a massive cost. We had a four-phased approach, but less restrictive and draconian. We've got to recognise the system, it's gonna be about managing the virus, that's what a lot of people don't get. I had a Twitter spat with Richard Calland last week and he said it's irresponsible to call for the opening up of the economy..The problem is, hard lockdown is a strategy used to buy you time to prepare yourself. You're never going to chase the virus away. It's waiting for us behind the door. We've been very good at hiding from it, but we've got to open the door some time and confront it. It's gonna be with us for 24 months, so we have a management strategy, not a hard lockdown and this hard lockdown has come at a terrible cost to the South African economy – billions of lost. It's going to take us many years to recover from the damage that has been done by the extension of the hard lockdown. .Have you been able – I know you've got a big team of researchers there – to quantify what this lockdown is costing every week, everyday?.Around R13bn per day was the estimate that was given to us. It mirrored the figures that came out of the National Treasury, figures that they gave to Parliament. It's a significant cost. This is what government's response is about, making trade-offs and decisions. But what this government has done is, hard lockdown the economy to the extent now where it is virtually suffocating. And there are businesses that are closing every day, that are never going to reopen. What a lot of people don't understand is that this is the small hill, Covid is the small hill, we'll get over it, there'll be a vaccine eventually down the line, there'll be a treatment but now what's waiting for South Africa on the other side of the hill is a massively steep mountain to climb to get the economy right. We are already low in the water going into it, Covid has now broken over the bow and we are really in a very bad state. .There's going to be some big questions that get asked at the end of this: why were we so low in the water going in and we've been six years of technical recession? And also why when the country went to open the larder to get the stored food, it's been eaten away by the rats and mice through state capture. There's been very little money for government to match with other governments around the world in terms of keeping the economy floating and getting money into the system. The response in South Africa has mainly been driven by the corporate and private money. .Linda Horsefield wants to know does anyone else think that the government is deliberately trying to collapse the economy because it is white controlled? They can then eradicate the Western Cape and achieve radical economic transformation in one fell swoop. I know it's conspiracy-ish, but what do you think?.Dr. Dlamini-Zuma gave us insight in one of the publications where she wrote about class suicide and sometimes it's needed, but it's very foolish and a very silly way to go, because government is not going to have any revenue if this wide-scale business collapse. And if you suddenly think that if a white business fails then it's going to be picked up and run successfully by a black person in a very difficult economic time, they've been quite silly, which is why we've taken a very hard line against the racialisation of the relief funding – you know not providing sectoral relief to white-owned businesses that are not BEE compliant. Many of them employ black employees and by collapsing the business you're actually creating a very difficult time for many employees, the majority of whom are black South Africans so it just simply doesn't make sense. We're going to keep on fighting to make sure that does not happen and that we're able to plot a way forward for South Africa. There is an opportunity for us to jettison some of the terrible policies that led to us being so low in the water going into this crisis. If the government doesn't have a strong look at itself is gonna find itself in a very difficult position, because if you carry on doing what you did going into the crisis and you just simply double down on the paradigm of state control, state monopoly and the state above all else, you're trying to get that in a depressed economic environment, it's a recipe for disaster..Loretta Tunnicliffe asks question which follows on from that I guess, why does the panel think, panel which is you John, that the government is seemingly stubbornly not listening? And also for the legal fraternity why did they not use the International Health Regulations Act as opposed to the Disaster Management Act?.I think government panicked in the beginning and maybe it wasn't such a bad thing. We didn't know what was happening. That's why I supported the hard lockdown early. But what that does is give you time to plan your response. I think government doesn't know what to do going forward, and I think they lack the courage to take the next step of opening up the economy and trying to get business moving again so that you don't end up with people dying of starvation. .I think many, many more people are going to die from malnutrition, starvation, exposure, depression due to the loss of their livelihoods and their homes than the virus would ever have reflected. That's a terrifying thought. But I also think that they're making a mistake that in times like this – and let's be fair we haven't been through something like this before and it's a lot of unknowns – but when the science starts moving and it starts telling you new things, you've got to adapt to that. And the science is telling us now and all the panel advisers are saying hard lockdown cannot continue. We need to start opening up the economy and there's just this dogged determination of government not to do it. I think they're worried because there is going to be a spike and we must all accept that, there's gonna be a spike. You know ours are still coming. Other countries have been through this. So, the virus is going to grow and spread. But by now, we should have used this hard lockdown to massively roll up testing and our preparation for what is to come down the road.. That's why in the Western Cape, we've converted the ICC into an 800-bed hospital preparing for that to take place. But, we haven't sadly tested at nearly the levels we should have been testing. We just went over the 400,000 mark last week, not nearly enough. The turnaround time on testing is still way too long. So by the time you test them positive to go and track them and everyone they've come into contact with is way too late. We've actually squandered the hard lockdown by not using it to prepare adequately and not to rollout a massive testing, tracing and tracking campaign..You talk about the spike. What are your numbers in the DA? What are the mortality figures that you believe are likely through Covid-19? The initial ones were somewhere – well there was some crazy ones to begin with – but the more sensible ones were around 80 odd thousand people would die in this country. Is that in line with what you're thinking?.What has been consistent with all the models is that they've overestimated the number of deaths. It's because the science is moving and they've been able to lower those. We are doing some more modelling now in consultation with some of the immunologists and virologists who are helping us with our smart lockdown model. But certainly, the consensus is that it's going to be way less than what we originally thought that the death rate was going to be. That's why it's important to listen to the science when it's changing..One of the biggest mistakes Thabo Mbeki made was not listening to the changing science around HIV/AIDS and antiretrovirals and millions of people died as a result of that unnecessarily. That's what happens if you don't keep up with the science and adapt your position and not dig your heels and just to make a political point, rather than actually looking at what the experts and the scientists are actually saying. .Sizwe Velu says – it's a political question, but I think it's relevant – how are you, John going to convince black people who voted for the DA because of the centre right policies, but ditched it in the last election, specifically because of their support for BEE and affirmative action policies versus an empowerment policy at an organisation like the Institute of Race Relations?.We had a terrible election the last election and part of the reason for that is that people looked at the DA and didn't know who we were, what we were about and what we were fighting for. The party drifted ideologically and that we stopped doing the job that we should have been doing in South Africa which is, putting on the table alternatives and being solutions-orientated and certainly that's been the orientation of the party since I took over as interim leader. We've had that internal review panel report which took a good, hard look at the DA and made some recommendations about what we should do and how we need to fix it. Political parties have to be signposts and not weather vanes. Signposts stand rigidly pointing the way into direction. Everybody knows where you're pointing and why you're pointing that way, weather vanes just spin in the political wind and end up being nothing to anybody.. And the two parties that did well in the last election on both the left and right of the spectrum were parties that were able to set out unambiguously and clearly who they were and what they were about and what they were fighting for. The DA is gonna do that and we've got to do it by putting on our own ideas and I think during this crisis you've seen that come to the fore. We're the only political party in the spectrum that's been putting on the table ideas, solutions, evidence-backed research, models etcetera, not responding to what the ANC are doing, but this is are our own stall. When we set out our own stall and we get our opponents to play on our frames, that's when we're going to win. I don't want us to be a party that bangs on about how bad the ANC is. I want us to be the party that's saying this is the way forward for South Africa. This is a way out of the mess. And these are the tools which we are going to use to do it and then to paint that in spectacular technicolour for the voters. .Many of the people who are unsure about the DA in the last election, we broke trust with, will come back and we'll win the trust of many people who never even thought about voting for the DA before. I'm reminded of what happened to Winston Churchill, after leading Great Britain through its darkest hour in World War II, within three or four months of the end of the war in Europe, he was turfed out of office by opponents who were better able to own the recovery and own the future. That's the space that DA's got a plan. We've got to set out the blueprint for how we get South Africa out of the mess in and onto a path of growth and prosperity again through our own ideas and our own solutions..I'm sure we're going to have a chance to talk about towards the end, because the mess we're in is going to get -from the economists perspective – is going to get worse and worse. But we've got many questions for you John. Martin Ari wants to know does the Covid Command Council include any DA members?.No, not at all. I think the president missed a big trick here. In a time of crisis, what I think he should have done is try and get as many political parties on board particularly given the pain that's to come… There is a lot of pain still to come from this and that's going to be economic pain. It's going to cut very deep into the country and for the very first time, the middle class are going to start to feel pain. The president would have been better advised to spread that pain out and almost create a National Command Council of national unity. .The last time I heard from the president was 20 days ago in a Zoom, where I'd advised him not to release 19,000 prisoners onto the streets and said to him we've got to open the economy up in a broader way. None of that advice was heeded, and we are where we are. There are certainly no opposition members and to make matters worse there is no opposition oversight for it, because they've cut Parliament out completely. So, it's impossible to be able to bring your thoughts and ideas to bear in a meaningful way. You have to make submissions and hope that they read them and certainly in Minister Patel's case, doesn't look like he did..Guy Hamlin asks a question which I think you've already answered. Does the President consult with you John on anything? .The president does consult. We've had two Zoom meetings and one face to face meeting. But I get the sense certainly from the last one that it's more of a tick box exercise, because we've made detailed proposals and detailed positions when the level 4 regulations were advertised. We made a comprehensive, 17-page contribution into how it could be made to work better and why those regulations were the wrong ones for the time. And we didn't even get a formal response to it. But, it doesn't matter. We're going to carry on doing it, keep putting solutions on the table, putting out our own stall. And you know they take the advice it's great. If they don't, that's their own peril. If they had just listened to us on this e-commerce then right from the beginning, they would not have had to make an embarrassing U-turn that was done last week, on e-commerce and thank goodness, they did. .I haven't had a chance to look at it – how many people in South Africa, what percentage of the eligible voters actually vote in a national election?.Last election was quite high. It was over 60%, which is pretty good in terms of international averages. But the big worry is that young people are the largest group of voters who are not coming out to vote. And I think for many of them, they just don't see politics as a means to resolving their issues or as a means to finding solutions. And that's on us as political parties. I think what younger people are looking for are parties that are able to define better how they're going to make life better for them, and make parties relevant to them. So certainly, we've got a much bigger focus now on trying to interact with younger voters where they are: on university campuses, on social media. We've moved our entire messaging platform almost away from the traditional forms of media to platforms like this. I do it twice weekly on Coronacast which is broadcast on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and on YouTube, connecting with hundreds of thousands of voters who would never have gone to a political meeting or logged in. It's a wave of the future for us, direct communication. We are able to get a message directly into people's living rooms without being filtered by the SABC or eNCA or others. We can communicate directly with people far more effective..Bernard Rose asks a question which relates to that. He says, John you seriously lost your cool with that journalist last week when she asked you who you were talking for. You didn't do yourself or the DA any favours. My question for you is how does a DA plan to be a significant player in South African politics when the perception is that the DA just doesn't understand the ethos of the people and not just 20% of the people?.I'll be the first to admit, I had a bad day. Sportsmen have them, radio DJs have them, presenters have them and you know you have a bad day, you don't get a right all the time. I was just frustrated at what was very clearly a journalist driving an agenda and who was trying to play a political game rather than to give a fair shot at being able to share my views and opinions with them. I lost my cool and I probably shouldn't have, but you know these things are a learning curve. What I've certainly been very heartened with the social media response, #JohnSpeaksForMe was trending at No 1 for most of the weekend, over 30,000 to 40,000 tweets of people saying, I'm unemployed, John speaks for me. What was most heartening was that the majority of them are black South Africans that were saying finally somebody is actually getting it and understands. So yes, he speaks for me. Sometimes bad interviews can have good results and in this case it certainly looks like that. Mr Rose is probably upset me, but certainly the publicity and the overwhelming support I've received this weekend has been wonderful..Understanding the ethos of the people, I don't understand what that means because we see people as individuals and to say that every citizen got the same ethos or if you belong to a certain race group you have ethos X and we belong to another race group you've got ethos Y, we must just set out our stall in a positive-solutions focused way. South Africans are looking for that alternative vision and looking for a way out of the terrible situation they're in are going to naturally gravitate to parties that offer a solution to how they can get out of it. .So, the old lazy days of politics, Zuma is bad, ANC corrupt etc, everybody knows that. Everybody knows why the economy is sitting where it is at the moment, everybody knows why they're living in a shack, people know why their children in a school where they've got 50 other learners in a class getting substandard education. What people want to know is how you're going to fix it. The DA that plays in those spaces is DA it's going to find natural traction with South Africans across all race groups and economic classes and say well you know these people are actually speaking for me and I like the idea about how they're going to fix my problems and to try and get that through. That's the frame the DA's gonna play in going forward. The days of just bashing on how bad the ANC are are over, those are lazy politics and it was a lot easier when Zuma was there. It's a different match now with Cyril Ramaphosa and the presidency and we've got to adapt and hopefully you would have noticed it already, but certainly going into the next election you'd see it a lot more. .A businessman, an entrepreneur actually, who dealt a lot with the bottom end of the pyramid said the mistake that many people make, is because people are poor they think they done. Anything but, he says. You want to test the product and you want to find out who are the sharpest consumers and the smartest people around, just try at the bottom end of the pyramid. Interesting. How do we mobilise ourselves, says Hayden Hamlet, online or offline to support foster opening up of the economy. Almost all the people I know have stopped supporting the extended lockdown in light of available data locally and internationally. We can wait for the DA to run its processes in the courts, but it feels like we should mobilise the public. Any suggestions?.Of course, the government's got websites, the presidency's got email addresses… we've got a number of petitions running online which we will be serving on both the president and Parliament. We are hoping that our Constitutional Court case is going to be heard quickly. That's why we've applied for direct access. So we're trying to get the quickest way there. But of course, the easiest way is to keep pressure up on government. So write to the newspapers, share on your social media, mobilise that way because government will get the message. They've got it loud and clear on e-commerce and we need to just keep the pressure up on all the other aspects. They are all politicians at the end of the day and voter sentiment does matter to them. So, the more South Africans we can get you know raising these issues the better it's going to be..John McMurray asks did anyone else get the impression from the President's last address that he did not have the Cabinet behind him. He seemed vague to me. You're an insider John, what do you think?.I know from our own sources within the ANC that there is a monumental battle going on and it's manifesting itself in many, many ways. You've seen the tweets of Tito Mboweni and others who're clearly frustrated with the whole issue around the economy and government. They're not willing because you know when your finance minister puts on Twitter that he's got to swallow rocks, you've got to know that there's some heavy stuff going on there. The internal fractions within the governing party have not gone away. The president is under pressure. I've said to him so many times, do the right thing, you've got our 85 votes in your corner, bring the reforms to Parliament, table them, let's vote on them. You know you've got the opposition on your side. You can survive a backbench rebellion. .The thing is that, if Cyril Ramaphosa does not act and act now, by the time he does start to act, it's going to be way too late and the economy is going to be too far gone for it to be rescued. I think he's already given far too much ground to the RET faction within the ANC. .Chris asks, John are you able to get insight into how the NCC is making decisions and what data they are using?.My view is that they've got a big dart board up and they all throw darts at the dart board and the policy is made up on wherever it lands because some of the stuff just does not make sense from an economic or epidemiological way. So, there's the clothing regulations last week, it was like something out of 1984, George Orwell. You can't buy a T-shirt unless you're going to wear it as an undergarment for warmth. I feel sorry for the cashiers around the country, are they're expecting customers to fill out a form promising not to wear it as a normal T-shirt. It's just bizarre. .And the military curfew was not necessary. The thing that really makes me quite cross is that South Africans across the board by and large, complied with the hard lockdown. There was a high 90% poll done by the HSRC, which have shown that over 90% of South Africans had complied with the lockdown where they could. So, it wasn't necessary to deploy 75,000 army personnel onto the streets to try and enforce a lockdown. It doesn't make sense. .The president has also squandered a lot of the goodwill by allowing these ministers to ride roughshod. A lot of people now have said this is ridiculous, I'm not prepared to be put through this anymore. When you lose the buy-in and the compact with citizens, in a situation like this, it's a very dangerous place to be, because as I said the other day when I made my address that if you don't end the hard lockdown, the people are going to end it, and it wasn't a revolutionary incitement. It's just the reality, people do not believe you're doing things for the right reasons and in good faith, they're simply going to disregard it and do what they want anyway. You're starting to see that across all parts of South Africa..Certainly the smokers are not abiding by the law at all. We've got so many questions. I'm gonna ask you just to indulge us for a little bit beyond 1 o'clock if you don't mind, John. Wallace Isaac says, what is John's take on the going back to schools?.What has been very obvious is that, the science is also moving and there's a good indication now that children are not as susceptible to Covid and are not necessarily the carriers that they were originally thought to be. We've got to try and save the academic year for a number of reasons: 1) You're going to end up with a major jam in the schooling system where you're not going to have space for the grade next year. That's the intake because you're not going to have the matric class leaving. And universities are going to have a terrible time, they're not going to have any first year students… so we've got to try and save the academic year. But we've got to do it in a safe way. So, schools are going to have to ensure that mask wearing, PPE and screening becomes an everyday occurrence and the new normal in the schooling environment. It's going to have to be enforced in that learning environment. It's easier said than done, but we've got some good people already looking at a plan to get schools back as quickly as possible to save the academic year. Also the knock-on effect on the economy in terms of workers that are going to be entering the economy is another huge huge problem..We've got to try and do what we can to save the academic year even if it means scrapping holidays near the end of the year. But certainly the science that's coming out shows that children are not nearly as susceptible as previously thought and can relatively safely go back to school provided the safety mechanisms are in place. .The science as you say, the numbers are very clear. Again Professor Levitt sent through his analysis of Europe with 250m people there. And the numbers show very clearly that 8% of the excess deaths, 8% of people under the age of 65, 50% of the excess deaths of people over the age of 80. So it's pretty clear now who this virus kills. There's a question here from Jao Filizardo, which is one that many are wanting to know, if it is a Disaster Management Act ruling the measures, why was Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma allowed to overrule the president who's supposedly the Commander-in-Chief on cigarettes?.I don't I don't think he was overruled. He's come out and said it was a collective decision. I don't know why he announced that there was going to be tobacco ban and then did a U-turn on it because it certainly made him look weak in the eyes of of the nation because he was essentially countermanded. But as Tito Mboweni let the cat out the bag through his Twitter account again. There was a vote and they lost the vote in the NCC. It was a very silly thing to do from an economic perspective. Certainly with tobacco, there's no argument that tobacco has an impact whatsoever on Covid-19 and the spreading thereof. .One needs to look very carefully at who stood to benefit from the cigarette ban and the extension of it. Once one starts to join those dots, a picture starts to emerge of why this has been done and who's benefiting. I can tell you, people are making billions of rand. And those people are very well connected to various politicians and political parties in this country and they must be smiling all the way to the bank. .Last Thursday we had Paul O'Sullivan on ou Noontime Thursday webinar where he named names onexactly that point. So it's easy to go and look through but I think it's partly a secret. Dina Chetty asks, notwithstanding when the lockdown is lifting it has caused a lot of businesses to be in financial distress. What more can be done for these businesses or entrepreneurs?.If you look at the response from governments around the rest of the world, they've been able to pump huge amounts of money into the economy to keep those businesses going. What you need to do is to try and provide funding and a bridge so that people can survive this so they can get back to normal. The government has not been able to come to the party, in any majorly significant way, certainly not to the scale of many of those other countries, because our economy was in such a terrible state. We can spend a whole another show about why that was the case. .There are some things government can do in the meantime particularly local government. They need to look at rates holidays, making sure that you can reduce the overheads. The banks need to come to the party in a bigger way as well, extending loan repayment periods and just giving businesses a three or four-month breather to be able to just overcome… their biggest expenses – which are rentals and their business loans. And of course, the employee costs. If we can just help them bridge those over the next three to four months, we'll be able to save many, many more businesses. .The problem is that the TERS and the UIF are not getting into the system nearly quick enough. The stimulus packages, the money is not, many companies say they've applied, they've heard nothing back from government, so it's not happening quick enough. I think many, many businesses that were hanging on by their fingernails, if this lockdown carries until the end of May as the president intimated, many of them are going to go over the edge. They're not going to be able to keep their doors open or keep their employees on the payroll and then we're going to have a major crisis on our hands of joblessness. The Treasury's figures of 3m unemployed is hopelessly underestimated. We could have between 7m to 10m unemployed South Africans at the end of Covid on top of the 10m who already lost their jobs prior to that because of the dire state of the economy. And that's going to be a socio-economic crisis which is going to be of epic proportions. That's why it's just foolhardy not to do what you can to save as many businesses as possible now rather than trying to resuscitate the economy afterwards..Stuart Pennington, the last of our question, we've got 65 unanswered questions I'm afraid, but we're gonna have to put those on hold. Stuart asks if you were in charge what would you do this week?.What would I do this week? I would immediately put out a proclamation withdrawing the exercise regulation, the ban on tobacco and alcohol and I'd allow any business in the country that could fill out the self-assessment form, that we provided the government with, that can open and open safely should be allowed to do so. I would immediately set about making sure that I put a R1,000 into every single grant recipient in the country's account, because what that will do that food parcels don't do, is stimulate both the demand and supply side of the economy. They'll be able to buy food they want and they'll be going to shopkeepers and buy that food in shops where they'll be able to spend that money. The shopkeepers is going to have income. Government will get VAT in and you'll keep the economy moving. Those things would make a critical difference within a week. .You have a lot of small businesses as part of your constituency. What are they telling you?.They say, Help, we can't carry on anymore. I've had a number of small business people on my Coronacast show just saying, you know, we're hanging by a thread. If the UIF doesn't come through, if the TERS doesn't come through, I can't keep my doors open anymore. My landlord is breathing down my neck, I've got my bank manager on the phone. It's tough. Many of them say, if they close now they will never be able to reopen again. It just won't be possible. That's why we've got to try and save small business. Small business is the engine room of job creation in the country. So many households and livelihoods are intrinsically linked to small businesses in this country, so if small business fails, the country is going to fail, and that's a terrible, terrible prospect..We've noticed in many parts of the economy that it's almost like the world has accelerated due to Covid-19. Some people put it at three years, others say even five years. What was going to happen at that point in time has just gone that quickly. What about politics? Politics is still an interesting anachronism in many ways. You've mentioned earlier that 60% of the population voted at the last election which is very high. Which would say roughly 40% of South Africans voted for the ANC which is now ruling as though it's ruling for 100%. So it doesn't even have half of the people in the country on its ballot box, if you like. Yet it's ruling for 100%, which seems real crazy, that the whole system where young people are being sacrificed, or their futures are being sacrificed, whereas smart lockdown would not be need to look after them but look after older people. All of this must be keeping your mind occupied. How can you see the imagination of politics into the future as a consequence?.I'm really excited about it to be honest with you. And you know there hasn't been all negative here. I mean it's forced us into doing direct communication with voters. We can't have town hall meetings anymore and have big rallies and fill stadiums that simply for the next 18 months to 24 months is unlikely. We've had to adapt and parties that don't adapt die. We've gone into this thing swimmingly. We are now running our shadow cabinet meeting every second day via Zoom. We actually meeting more now via Zoom than we ever met in person and it's board efficiency to me being able to run the party. In one day last week, I was able to address our caucus in Mangaung, in Nelson Mandela Bay and in Buffalo City without having to book a single plane ticket, hire a single car or book one night's accommodation. It's going to do wonders for being able to, and far more consensus and transparency in how political parties run. And last week, we piloted our first virtual Town Hall with the residents of Tshwane to unpack our court case and it was really well attended on Zoom. It's gonna be the new normal and we're looking forward to that. .The sad part for me is, just to see how poorly Parliament has handled this whole situation. The Brazilian parliament had their first virtual sitting on the 26th of March. The House of Commons is doing Prime Minister's questions via technology. Our Parliament essentially sat on its hands for the first five weeks of the crisis and closed up when you're when, you know, the maximum number of vigilance was required when government had its strongest powers. And then when it did open up, it's been a complete dog show. They've not been able to get to grips with technology. MPs are very generously provided with IT equipment and data and the like and this is a time when we could have been putting that to good use. Just to see some MPs unable to log into Zoom and keep up with the modern world, it's been very disappointing. For me, it stands out as one of the biggest disappointments, as a parliamentarian, as to see just how poorly our parliament has performed at this time. It's really let the people of South Africa down. And I think that the Speaker and the presiding officers are going to have a lot of answering to do when Parliament does get up and running properly, whenever that may be, because they have not done right by the constitutional… by the people who've elected us as Parliament to exercise oversight of the executive, to make laws, and to ensure accountability. We've done very, very poorly at it and it's a shame because it could have been very different. .John, just to close off with and it is getting back to the economy, how are you reading this? Where are we going to from here? Because already there's been enormous damage. Business for South Africa says the economy will contract 17% this year. If you take our recent growth rates that's going to take a decade to just get back to where we were before Covid-19. How are you seeing things move out or play out from here?.The consensus is that the real battle is still to come. As I said earlier, the virus is the hill, the economy is the mountain. It's going to be a very, very steep mountain and it's going to be a lot of pain. We've been in a technical recession for the last six years. GDP growth has been surpassed by population growth but that recession has been by and large borne by the poor in South Africa..This depression that we're going to go into is going to wash very deeply into the middle class and people you and I know, are going to lose their jobs, they're going to lose their businesses, their homes and their cars. And so it's going to wash very deeply into the middle class. And I think that's going to have an absolute impact on South Africa going forward. There's a lot of pain to come and that's why we need to reorientate the party towards owning the recovery and putting on the table a blueprint..My worry is and it's certainly the sound that you're hearing from government, is let's just let double down on the policies that got us into this mess in the first place. So you're talking now about Covid dealt finally with your SAA problem, but now we're talking about starting up a new state-owned airline out of the ashes of SAA. We're not going to solve the problem that got us into this mess and get us out of this with the very same paradigm of state control that got us into this mess. And so the more the state tries to own and direct the economy, the more it's actually going to wreck it. That's what worries me the most about what's going to happen when we stop dealing with the economic crisis. That government's going to say the answer to the problem is, just a little bit more state control, a little bit more monopoly for the state, a few more Eskoms and the like. And it is the wrong medicine for the crisis that we're in.. This is an opportunity for us to reset and to start adopting pro-growth policies that are able to get us off this low growth trajectory and high unemployment trajectory and on to one where we can actually get the economy growing again. I think the president, if he grasps the moment, we'll be able to make this the turning point for South Africa. He's got a date with destiny and he's going to have to think very carefully about does he continue to pander to the RET faction or is he going to do what needs to be done and bring those reforms to Parliament, table them and let's get the country back on track and working again. And he'll have no bigger cheerleader or partner in growth than us on the opposition benches. We will help him ram through that agenda if it needs to be through Parliament. But he's now got to have the courage to bring it to the table and to stop pandering to the forces that have brought the country to its knees..It's not as far fetched as it sounds but unfortunately the high priestess of economic thinking in the ANC right now is a lady from London University called Mariana Mazzucato who believes in the developmental entrepreneurial state. So a developmental state with a little twist. In a recent webinar that I was involved with Martin Wolf from the Financial Times of London said we agree on most things but I do not agree with you that the state is able to be as efficient as you think it has to be for your policies to work. So I guess there's many ideological battles still to come?.That's exactly the problem. Just a little bit more state control, and we'll fix the problem. It's not realising it's the overweening state control that's got us into the problem in the first place. And I'm sorry, there is no capable state in South Africa and I think that this crisis has shown that – when you can't even get your UIF payments made on time when you need them, when you can't get basic systems, your Sassa systems paying people on time and the correct amount, that points to an incapable state. And when you start putting that incapable state in charge of the levers in the economy, you've got a recipe for disaster. Which is why we were in the terrible situation going into this virus in the first place, that exact paradigm that pushed our boat very, very low in the water. This is a chance for us to have a reset. It's going to be up to the president to grasp that moment and date with destiny because if he misses it, he's going to be presiding over a catastrophic depression and voters, particularly middle class voters, don't generally tend to favour governments that drive into depression at the ballot box. There could be some problems ahead for him and his party..David Shapiro has been very kindly waiting on the sidelines. David would you like to pose a final question to the leader of the opposition? (David Shapiro was one of the panelists on the webinar). .It's more from an international situation. I've been multitasking. I've been looking at the side, I've reading at Bloomberg screen, Xi Jinping has come out and said we need international cooperation in vaccine development, and he's actually mentioned aid to Africa. I think the question to John is, why have global governments performed so badly? Why were they caught with their pants down without any kind of plan, that includes ourselves as well, and they've been grasping for answers? Not one leader has covered himself or herself. I think the women have done better than the men have covered themselves in glory. Why do we find politics so poor in handling a crisis – I'm talking global politics? Why has there been no cooperation?.The problem is a) people haven't really prepared for this type of thing in the past. But also politicians like to make decisions that look good in the public eye instead of actually making the necessary unpopular decisions. As unpopular as I was a few weeks ago to say, let's open up the economy, we can't go on like this. You know I got junked on by the Twitteraties, the newspaper journalist, how can you be talking about livelihoods in a health crisis. Many leaders have spectacularly got the balance wrong, there's been too much talking and not enough listening. When you bring in experts you must listen. That's why politicians are very bad. So for instance, Professor Karim has been telling us for the last three weeks the lockdown has done its job. But you haven't been able to achieve now in a hard lockdown you're not going to achieve anyway. And yet here we are, put into another interminable week of hard lockdown, it's killing the economy. It's a lack of listening and wanting to talk rather than understanding the science and making decisions around that. It's been a sanity lesson for politicians both globally and locally to make sure that you actually listen to what's being said and look at the advice and if you move, you know it's all right to move your position if the science changes. You don't have to doggedly stick to a decision when science tells you otherwise – we look across the pond – we had President Trump going on about chloroquine for months when science was telling him otherwise, but doggedly stuck to that position. That's where politicians are bad. They want to be right. They don't want to be proved wrong. The greater aspect of leadership is being able to be brave enough to listen to the advice and to change your position if a better argument is made..If you can imagine that we were in a hall and there were 625 people sitting still waiting – there had been over 800 – a couple of people have left. It would seem a little strange to say that we're going to bid you adieu. But I am going to because I know you've got other fish to fry. But there's just one more question from Anna Forseman that I'd love to put to you and this is in the context of what we are getting back, the feedback we're getting from people who are in the offshore investment field. They are saying never before have they seen so much demand by South Africans to take money and themselves away as soon as they're able to. As soon as they can get on a flight, according to the immigration experts in that field, they're saying that many people that they know are going to do that. And Anna says for those of us who are still here, and I see on your card you say that you're passionate and optimistic about our future in South Africa, she says what is the best action each individual South African can take right now to avoid being controlled by what she calls a power hungry government?.Make sure you're registered and vote. A lot of those people are leaving because they've witnessed the incapable state first hand and they've seen what the government is capable of doing. Helen Zille famously used to say, power doesn't make you, it reveals who you are. The little bit of power that's been given to some of these ministers like Cele, Mbalula, Mapisa-Nqakula and Dlamini-Zuma, we've started to see who they really are are. They're authoritarian despots, who love to be able to rule by decree and who don't like parliamentary oversight or the citizens to have a say, saying we know what's best for you and we are going to do it whether you like it or not. It scared a lot of people – I mean seeing the military on the streets and the like – this is not scenes that you see in a democracy. It rightly unsettled a lot of people who feel that they are being given the mushroom treatment by their own government at this time – fed rubbish and kept in the dark by the government's dogged determination not to share the data and say we don't want you to be scared. It's madness in a democracy that you're not prepared to do that. A lot of people have seen government over this time and they've not liked what they've seen. Is this what awaits us in the future? The big thing that people have to do is to make sure that they don't remain passive observers in the country, join hands with political parties, get involved in citizen action groups, civic bodies, get involved and make sure that we entrench freedom in South Africa and that we don't diminish it. It is the new frontier that we all have to stand on to protect freedom, not only for ourselves but for future generations of South Africans. .You can't adopt a position anymore and say, I'm not interested in politics because what the last few weeks have shown is that, you may not be into the politics but politics is very interested in you and how you live your life. Get involved and vote. Make sure you vote at the very least, but also become an active citizen, actively fighting to keep the democratic space open. Because if you don't it soon gets filled with the despots of the world. .John Steenhuisen is the leader of the opposition Democratic Alliance in South Africa. As you can see from his card, he's a young achiever aged 22. He was elected to the Durban City Council and relatively young to be in leading a major political party. Thank you for giving us so much time today John and for answering as forthrightly as you have and for not losing your cool. But as you say it's all a learning curve. It's been good being with you today. We do appreciate all the efforts that you're making on our behalf. Thank you..Thank you for the opportunity and long may platforms like this last. It's really great to be able to speak to you and to interview all the people in your webinar. We need to get more politicians being held accountable like this. It's always a good thing.

50 minutes with John Steenhuisen – A moment of truth looms for Cyril Ramaphosa: Growth or pandered destruction.

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