As we will be seeing off 2020, we recognise that it has been an almost unprecedented moment in history, one that will be spoken about for generations to come. It is both a time to reflect on what we did well and what we got horribly wrong both as individuals and as a collective, at the international, national as well as local levels.
If there’s one lesson we should take from 2020, it’s that the most meaningful New Year’s resolution to make is to take every day as it comes; to make the most of every moment and to be grateful for every breath that we have the privilege to take.
It’s to not trust our lives and well-being solely to politicians and to understand that it is important to exercise our agency to advocate for the greater good of society as well as for the weakest and most vulnerable among us, as allies.
If there’s anything that living through the Covid-19 pandemic should have taught us, it is that things can change overnight. Economies can stop. Jobs that were secure become insecure. Livelihoods that were certain disappear. And then those who enjoyed the privilege of every necessity on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs find themselves at the bottom with nothing, and numbered among the poor and vulnerable.
This was the year that the paucity of leadership across the world was on full display, where the world's most powerful countries, China and then the US, allowed a health crisis to engulf the globe with dire consequences for life and livelihoods. And the world will definitely never be the same again.
Time and thoroughgoing investigative journalism have revealed that China could have and should have done more to warn the world and prevent the Covid-19 virus from spreading beyond its own borders.
While the leadership of that country has boasted about how it handled the outbreak within its own country more efficiently and effectively than the West, it wilfully allowed its own citizens to carry it into the different corners of the world with insufficient warning.
The US’s handling of the pandemic has been disappointing, again the function of inconsistent leadership that has led to the botching of efforts to combat the spread of the virus within that country.
At home, the pandemic has only confirmed the dearth of quality leadership which has allowed the sores of inequality to fester well beyond the many decades of apartheid; disparities which have only been amplified and worsened by the spread of the virus.
Most of us have become more conscious of where we go, what and where we eat and with whom we associate. Many of us have taken to working from home, thus avoiding contact with others beyond our close circle of relatives and friends.
While we have relished the restoration of the freedoms that were taken away from us at level 5 of lockdown, the modifications to regulations as announced by President Cyril Ramaphosa on Monday evening, demonstrate how tenuous our liberty is under this national state of disaster.
As we wait for scientists to finally announce a breakthrough in terms of testing and confirming a viable vaccine, measures such as social distancing, mask wearing, sanitising our hands at every turn and the probability of lockdowns, are things we have to make peace with. This means that the abnormal has become our new normal with consequences for the different areas of our lives.
It also means the poor will continue to bear the biggest brunt of the crisis as the measures required to combat the pandemic disproportionately affect them and their livelihoods.
How has this reality and experience left us? Better or worse? And what are we taking forward with us into 2021? What will we do differently? What will we change? These are the questions that we need to consider as we prepare to enter the new year, a year that we are hoping will help us heal from the trauma of 2020.
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