As South Africa stumbles into a harder lockdown and the Delta variant gets stuck in, there is a bitter symmetry in the fact that suspended health minister Zweli Mkhize hasn’t resigned, while the rest of us have.
Certainly, in the enervating despair that has settled over this country like a cold fog, I doubt many people are going to pay much attention to Wednesday being the day by which, the state promised us in May, five million South Africans would be vaccinated.
If it shoots the lights out it might get close to three million.
Of course, by the standard of the ANC, reaching about 60% of your target is a spectacular success. But the existence of Covid-19 vaccines, with fast, efficient programmes to administer them, has split humanity into two radically different camps — those living in the Covid-19-stalked world and those who will have to keep hiding from it — and three million vaccines out of a planned 40 million means we are firmly in the latter group. President Cyril Ramaphosa can pretend to be in charge, but until we’re vaccinating a million people a week, the life form running this country is a coronavirus and we will dance to its tune for many months to come.
To be fair, you could argue that the lethally slow pace of the vaccine rollout isn’t entirely the state’s fault.
Some of the larger vaccine manufacturers, for example, have reportedly driven unconscionably hard bargains. The hoarding of vaccines by the global north will not be forgotten.
There also seems to be widespread reluctance on the part of SA’s older citizens to show up for their jabs. Last week Dis-Chem revealed that 70% of over-60s weren’t arriving for their appointments, while on Monday DA politician Ricardo Mackenzie tweeted pictures of empty chairs at the Lentegeur Hospital in Cape Town, begging eligible citizens to roll up.
I imagine there are logical reasons for the stayaway. For those without cars, or for grandparents acting as child minders, getting to vaccination centres can be extremely time-consuming and prohibitively expensive.
Yes, vaccines are expensive and Big Pharma plays dirty. But how many of those closed doors would have been flung open if we still had an extra, oh, I don’t know, R500bn to put on the table?
There will also be less logical reasons at play. Torrents of disinformation and conspiracy theory have saturated social media and WhatsApp groups, turning even-minded pragmatists into superstitious rumour-mongers or simply planting a seed of doubt that makes it feel sensible to wait and see.
Yes, there are arguments to be made that the state isn’t entirely responsible for our current mess.
I’m just not sure anybody wants to hear them right now, at least none of the people battling to see any hope in this hollowed-out little country where the corpse of the ANC wraps itself around every aspect of our lives; its arms and legs locked around us in apparently inescapable economic, political and societal rigor mortis.
Besides, each of those arguments raise their own obvious rebuttals.
Yes, vaccines are expensive and Big Pharma plays dirty. But how many of those closed doors would have been flung open if we still had an extra, oh, I don’t know, R500bn to put on the table?
Yes, it’s difficult for poor people to get to vaccination centres. So where are the busses, even busses festooned in ANC regalia, if you want to do some electioneering while you’re at it? Why is the only story about the ANC providing transport coming out of the Zondo commission, where state security deputy minister Zizi Kodwa has admitted to buying himself an R800,000 Jeep using money he was supposed to pass on to the party?
And yes, people are easily influenced by fake news. So where is the massive programme of information and education about vaccines?
Where are the celebrities, popping up on every SABC channel in every commercial break, to wax lyrical about getting the jab?
Why does communication from the state still consist of turgid press releases, interspersed, every so often, with the president going on TV to tell us that we have a few hours until we lurch into the next phase of the crisis?
And why, in the name of all that’s holy, do they always do it on a Sunday night, as if the broadcast has been designed be a team of sadists to inflict the maximum amount of psychological damage on business owners and staff?
Yes, you can argue that the ANC government shouldn’t take all the blame. But hearing those arguments takes substantially more goodwill than I have left towards a president who goes on TV to tell me how to be a responsible citizen while he’s still paying Mkhize’s salary with my taxes.
Ramaphosa says the ANC has changed. He’s right.
Under Thabo Mbeki, the party let sick people die out of intellectual arrogance.
Under Ramaphosa, they’re doing it so the likes of Kodwa can drive a Jeep.
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