EDITORIAL: Government ill-suited to properly preside over a disaster

The government is considering declaring a national state of disaster to deal with SA’s electricity crisis. Citizens are rightfully suspicious.

The scars are still fresh from the stringent lockdown regulations the government imposed in response to the coronavirus pandemic, under a state of disaster declaration that lasted more than two years.

Those regulations ranged from the eminently sensible to the absurd and arbitrary, and at one famous point stipulated which items of clothing could be purchased, banned the sale of rotisserie-cooked chickens in supermarkets, and prohibited tobacco and alcohol sales. Personal freedoms were curtailed, businesses shuttered and education institutions closed. All of this was done under a veil of secrecy, without the oversight of the judiciary or parliament.

To this day, the nation still doesn’t know exactly how and why the government reached all the decisions that informed the Covid-19 lockdown regulations, which were tightened and eased as subsequent waves of infection rose and fell. In a vacuum of secrecy, this has left citizens wondering whether we were subjected to these privations on the mere whims of cabinet ministers, or worse.  

SA is a deeply corrupt society, with little sign of improvement, despite President Cyril Ramaphosa’s regular assurances that he is moving to clean up government. This week’s release of Transparency International’s corruption perceptions index said it all: SA has slipped in the rankings and scored a measly 43 points on a 100-point scale, where 100 is squeaky clean and 0 is entirely corrupt.

Against that backdrop, the opacity obscuring the reasons, methodology and data that informed lockdown regulations raises unsettling questions about which interest groups might have had the ear of cabinet ministers, and what benefits might have accrued to pliant ministers as they navigated the pandemic by decree.

Business association Sakeliga is to be applauded for taking legal action to compel the government to come clean. It initially tried to use the provisions in the Promotion of Access to Information Act (Paia) to obtain the government’s decision-making records from Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, who as minister of co-operative governance & traditional affairs was charged with implementing the lockdown regulations in terms of the Disaster Management Act.

Its efforts were rebuffed, and last November the high court handed down an order instructing the minister to comply with Sakeliga’s Paia request for all records and documents she relied on to declare the national state of disaster almost three years ago, and the slew of lockdown regulations that followed. But she hasn’t provided Sakeliga with everything it asked for, and the two parties are still locked in legal conflict.

While not new, this contempt for the electorate remains unacceptable. Civil society should not have to turn to the courts to compel the state to release information that is vital for holding elected representatives to account. Citizens have a right to know why the government ignored scientific advice and delayed the opening of primary schools in 2021, and whether this disruption to the education of the nation’s children was due to pressure from unions or other lobby groups.

The retail, leisure and hospitality sectors, hard hit by the intermittent alcohol bans, have a right to know whether the government over-rode scientific counsel and imposed a five-week ban on alcohol sales instead of a limit on trading hours in December 2021 because half the cabinet are quietly teetotal or because they just figured it was easier to implement.

The ANC-led government is now flirting with declaring a state of disaster to deal with the fallout from its failure to manage the country’s electricity requirements. With an eye on an increasingly restive electorate, it claims doing so will cut through red tape and enable the swift procurement of additional power. It is certainly true that the government’s own rules and regulations get in the way of doing things efficiently. But the fallout from the pandemic secrecy and the extensive corruption that was enabled by the relaxation of procurement rules — and its ongoing attempts to keep its reasoning secret — means the government has shredded its credibility in this regard.

Declaring the electricity crisis a state of disaster is not going to end load-shedding, but it will shield the government from scrutiny. Who benefits from that?