I appreciate the efforts by government so far in fighting the pandemic and I have said that we have done fairly well. It is with the effort to link the relative success to the SoE that I take issue. I always believed the Public Health Act could be amended to enable the Health Ministry to confront the challenge. I further believed the resources question could be answered in the like manner. A SoE is not necessary for the outlay of resources to answer this emergency. We are just playing politics with a disaster. Besides, we have been grappling with this challenge for about seven months. Granted that we were not well capacitated to deal with the problem, we should be far down the road in our understanding and responses. Certainly, we should be advanced far enough to let the health practitioners take the lead role and for the politicians to go back to kgotla meetings. Assuming, without conceding that it was an emergency in the first instance, it is surely not an emergency anymore. It is absolutely unnecessary. It is simply a distraction from socio economic realities.
I think Gender Based Violence (GBV), amongst others, is the true state of emergency. Maybe it does not have the draw that COVID-19 has in keeping the population fixated on political effort. I would readily concede that same doesn’t make good television, but it should never be about that. The situation has become unbearable and a section of the population lives in fear in arguably the most peaceful and politically stable country in Africa. To be sure, COVID-19, will never catch up with GBV on the number of deaths it has or will cause. In fact, it will be over soon after a vaccine is found. However the GBV problem is abiding. If the effort is about saving lives, then we have our priorities wrong. I would rather give more money to GBV. I would rather allocate more resources, specifically, to the ministerial GBV strategy and to a wholesome national campaign effort against GBV.
