Richard Calland: Ramaphosa has done well on Covid-19; Cabinet has weak links

Richard Calland is a legal and political expert, with a special focus on South Africa. In this interview with BizNews founder Alec Hogg, Calland – who was a barrister in London before changing career focus – shares his score-card on how President Cyril Ramaphosa and his Cabinet have dealt with the Covid-19 pandemic. He highlights that Covid-19 is putting the spotlight on structural inequalities between the private and state healthcare systems and he gives his carefully considered view on the anti-tobacco and anti-alcohol rules and related court cases. Calland notes that saving lives and minimising damage to the economy has been an extremely difficult balancing act. – Editor.Richard Calland is well known in South Africa as the author of three books. He's an associate professor at UCT and also runs the Paternoster Group, which advises some big corporations on exactly what's going on in our country. No doubt Richard, you've been following everything closely for the past four months. The hot debate right now is: did the lockdown actually work or did it have to go for as long as it has? .We're answering that question or attempting to answer that, or at least with the partial benefit of hindsight. In due course, with even more hindsight, we'll probably get a clearer picture. .___STEADY_PAYWALL___.Right now on balance, I think the government's decision was still the right one. Bearing in mind their own strategic priority, which was to save lives. They've been very clear about that throughout that their concern was that without time on their hands, without the opportunity to build up the capability of the healthcare system, the chances were that this virus and we're talking now back in March where what one was seen around the world was this thing running rampant. .Raging through countries, causing mayhem in 20 countries like Italy. You can well imagine how the South African government was very fearful of what would happen, particularly in townships, if there was no capability to absorb the surge when it came. The strategy, therefore, was to delay, not contain. .Not try and avoid, but simply to delay the surge and to give themselves time to build that capability up. Did they use that time wisely? Is the question, that's rightly being put now. It's clear that in some parts of the country, such as the Eastern Cape, maybe no amount of time would have been sufficient to build up the capability, that what we're seeing now is the impact of 20 and more years of neglect or failure to build up public services. .What we're seeing, therefore, is a very sharp searchlight being put on the inequalities that exist, structural inequalities in South Africa between the private healthcare system and the public sector. .The economic damage that has been wrought brings another line or another avenue of enquiry into the whole debate. .Governments throughout the world have grappled with this really exquisitely difficult conundrum of how to find the right balance between, to put it simply, lives on the one hand and livelihoods on the other. .It is an extremely difficult balance to be found. .With hindsight now, one might say or begin to start to say that perhaps the lockdown was too hard for too long, but maybe it could have been eased a little bit earlier before the full negative impact on businesses had been felt. .Clearly, a lot of South African businesses weren't able to cope with that amount of period, that long period without doing business. Certainly for individuals South Africa it's well known, does not have a saving culture, partly because people don't have the income to be able to save. .People don't have savings to pull and draw on at a time of crisis such as this. What it's done, therefore, is driving a lot more people into poverty. It's driven a lot of businesses out of business. The impact is very severe, but on the other hand, it's also very clear that a lot more lives would have been lost had there been no lockdown. What we're seeing now is the effect of Covid, as it runs rampant through very congested working-class areas. .What's your take on the argument that the actuaries at PANDA give where they say that the longer-term impact of poverty is far worse than the lives that will be saved through the lockdown via Covid? .Pandemics are highly political events, crises are a highly political event. everybody has a political interest often or in ideological interest. The longer a crisis goes on the more those ideological or interests tend to start to emerge. I think that's what we've seen during this pandemic. .One has to approach the statistics and the science with great care. Every week there are new peer-reviewed reports appearing around the world. Every couple of weeks, greater knowledge is acquired about this particular virus. It is a little dangerous to say that one set of modelling is better than another. .I would approach the PANDA analysis with a good deal of caution. They were putting a particular interest and they were putting it very hard and they were obviously very much in favour of a policy position, which was to open up the economy quicker. They were using the concern around effects on people's livelihoods and lives through greater poverty as the justification for that argument. .One must approach that with a great deal of caution. .The other hot topic for South Africans is the sins we get a lot of sin taxes from, but right now, the tobacco and liquor trades are being driven underground. They can be very little doubt about that. On the one hand, the country is losing taxes, but on the other hand, by banning the sale of liquor and tobacco, we do know that people are still getting their hands on the products, but at inflated prices. Has it been a misstep? .So far, the government has had, by its standard, a rare winning streak in the courts in the sense that it's been able to defend its position legally, at least. That doesn't mean that these were the right policy decisions. It doesn't mean that they necessarily passed the sort of common sense test that most people would apply. Often the regulations have appeared either contradictory or inconsistent or just downright unreasonable from a common sense point of view. I certainly think that the cigarette ban is much harder to explain or justify, despite the victory of the government in court on that than the alcohol ban. It's obvious that alcohol is a causes a great deal of harm to life in South Africa. The governance, a legal problem is this, that you're not allowed or you shouldn't be making normal policy through the back door of the Disaster Management Act. The Disaster Management Act, merely gives the government authority to pass regulations that have one specific objective, which is coping with the pandemic. .That's really the area that you've spent so much of your career, focussing on democracy, promoting democracy. Now we have a command council, which decides that it will do what it wants to do. Is this something that we as citizens should be concerned about. .What do we want from the government at a time of great crisis? What we want are three things, we want them to be clear about their policy, we want them to be decisive and to take action and we also want them to be open and transparent so that we can trust them. Those are the basic criterion which we should be assessing the performance of President Ramaphosa and his cabinet. .He's done well on most scores, but his cabinet less so. Part of the style of Ramaphosa is to lead through the collective. Now, the problem with that is you're only as strong as the weakest link in your collective and his cabinet, unfortunately, has one or two very weak links indeed. .Certain ministers have been able to drive a particular policy or ideological agenda which has created inconsistencies and I think has confused the public at times. From a democratic point of view, I don't have major problems. The public would expect the government to put in place the mechanisms necessary to make speedy, quick, consultative decisions. and the command council is the mechanism they chose. .Provided, the cabinet is keeping a sharp eye on things and bearing in mind at least half of the cabinet serves on that command council, I don't have many problems. What they mustn't do, and this is where I would have a big problem is if they use the authority granted to them under the state of national disaster, under the DMA as a backdoor way of making policy. .In the case of Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, that may be the case with smoking and to some extent alcohol. She has a bug to bear on those fronts. She, I think, is using the opportunity presented by the crisis and by the DMA to drive her Long-Standing agenda, which is anti-tobacco and anti-alcohol. .She thinks they're bad for people and she thinks governments should be stopping things that are bad for people. Now, that's a view of the world, that's an ideological worldview that says the government's job is turn elastically, look after its people. Others, of course, particularly on the right and libertarians would say hands-off, we have every right to drink or smoke ourselves to death. .What about this lockdown getting out of it, the exit? It has been an issue all over the world and here in South Africa with this command council now giving politicians so much power. It might be even more difficult to prise their hands off it and get back to a functioning economy when the pandemic is less of a risk. .I've referred to some of the weaker links in cabinet, but there are also some very strong links in cabinet. For example, the minister of trade industry Ebrahim Patel. If you read his affidavit in the Western Cape High Court case brought by a group of students…if you read his affidavit in that case, you'll see the very great care that he and his officials and advisers have gone to in order to exit in an effective, carefully balanced way, balancing the competing risks, on the one hand, trying not to expose workers to unnecessary risks on the way to work or at work. .On the other hand, trying to open up those bits of the economy that will be most useful in terms of generating energy in the economy and getting people back to work and revenue moving. What you have there is one example of a serious-minded attempt by the government through that ministry to do the right thing and to do it effectively. .I would add is that this is very, very difficult stuff. There is no perfect, governments around the world are struggling with this. Some have got it more right than others, some have made more mistakes than others. On balance, we've done it pretty well. .The economy is moving back and you can see things starting to open up and yes, great damage has been done, but what we're also seeing around the world and northern Italy is a great example of that, is how economies can and will bounce back. .Very resilient. Your view on the two parts back to economic health. One given by the ANC and a somewhat different one by the Business for South Africa group. .Yes, this is going to be highly, and interestingly contested over the coming months. Whenever there's a major social crisis such as a pandemic or war. In a sense, the peace that follows the war is even more important and will also be even more contested because people see it as an opportunity to rebuild and to build something very new and very different. What we're seeing now is the opening salvos in that contestation. .We're seeing different positions being put forward. I don't think they're a million miles apart. There will be lots of debate as there should be. What I hope is that South Africa will arrive at a consensus that is cross sexual government, business, unions largely behind it. .That they can identify the big strategic levers that can be pulled, which will not only get the economy moving again in the short term and get people back to work, but which will also give effect to the structural changes in the economy, which I think have held South Africa back for so long. .Those structural changes, by the way, I think spanned the whole ideological spectrum. On the one hand, you want to get government out of the energy sector. You want private investment into the energy sector so that we can have a green revolution and we can do the things that the president promised in his State of the Nation address in February, but which for inexplicable reasons, have not been delivered. .Minister Mantashe is a major obstacle there that has to get moving. On the other hand, you want Social Democrat policies such as a basic income grant. A basic income grant would be a game-changer and there been moves in the last few days to suggest that that might now become a reality. Notwithstanding the very harsh fiscal circumstances that South Africa finds itself in. .It's a fascinating country to live in and highly complex. To close off with, the one disappointment that I personally have as I was privileged to sit in a room in January 2018 where Cyril Ramaphosa was not yet the president. He was telling us the kind of country that he was going to run, top of the list was a listening government. During this pandemic that seems to have been forgotten to people like me, but maybe I'm missing something. .It is never easy at a time of crisis. You're making decisions under extraordinary pressure. We shouldn't forget that you can't waste too much time listening, you cant over listen, otherwise, you will never reach a decision. Decisions have to be made quickly, promptly, in response to the exigencies of the moment. .Again, if I refer you back to Minister Patel's affidavit in the Western Cape High Court case, you'll see there is a catalogue of consultations with key interest bearers in the various sectors that he was dealing with, in industry. .He repeatedly went to asked for their views on the whole so-called fiasco around the open-toed shoes and that whole question of what appeared to be irrational regulations for winter clothing and all of that. That came from industry, not from government, interestingly. It was an attempt to be precise about the regulations and to create a level playing field so that there wouldn't be arbitrage in relation to the regulations, what lay behind that particular bout of regulations. .We need to be fair to the government. We need to recognise the context, it's extreme conditions. Very, very hard to govern in these circumstances and give them credit where they have listened. They haven't listened to everybody at times. Clearly, they don't to listen to the tobacco lobby or even perhaps now the liquor lobby, but they have listened to other important parts of the economy. .I suppose for perspective if you were to have had a different result at the elective conference in 2017 and the Zuma dynasty had continued, maybe we would be looking at different reactions from the government. .Well, a very different group of people would be in power. Although the reforms that Ramaphosa promised when he came into office in February 2018 haven't all materialised yet, many or least the start of significant reforms, for example, in the Revenue Service, in the leadership of important state-owned enterprises and the National Director of Public Prosecutions, those sorts of bodies. .It may not have trickled down yet, I don't think we've seen the full effects of those reforms. In some cases, Eskom and so on, the government's moved too slowly and the president hasn't been brave enough and decisive enough. Yes, you're actually right we're in, I'm sure much better, safer, more considered hands than if Ramaphosa had lost at Nasrec at the end of December 2017.

Richard Calland: Ramaphosa has done well on Covid-19; Cabinet has weak links

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