As the global North’s economy is gradually reopening and returning to stability, our government is also beginning to consider ending its lockdown strategy in the South after 670 days. But these decisions in two separate hemispheres are driven by different reasons.
In the North, vaccination programmes have covered more than 70% of the population. Levels of infection, hospitalisation, and death have declined drastically over the past six months. As a result, the focus in this region is to reactivate trade and put people back to work as soon as possible.
For the South, the permanent state of underdevelopment is pushing governments to reopen their economies to address hunger and social desperation – even though vaccination rates are still below 30%.
As things stand, a global reopening of the economy will not deliver the necessary dividends that the South needs to recover – especially when a new variant emerges in the middle of this year, as some reports are already suggesting. The ripple effect of this problem though is that it will begin to hit the South’s economy and its people’s lives before it spreads to the rest of the world. That’s what pandemics do.
Of course, the redistribution of vaccines to developing countries to provide therapy on equal terms would be the best strategy to end the inconvenience of this virus. We are unfortunately nowhere near establishing that global solidarity at the moment.
In other words, we are going to have endless conversations about this virus until the South gets to develop its own geo-medical relations and expertise to address this crisis.
But, even if it would do that, it still won’t be out of the woods; and here’s why:
- The politicisation of the South’s scientific discourse has generated an unbelievable amount of vaccine hesitancy and denialism across all races and classes of this society;
- Its religious encumbrance is not making this situation any easier;
- The breakdown in its public health systems and the general commodification of this human right does not generate the communal solidarity that the society needs to recover as a collective;
- The plunder of public funds during hard lockdown by political elites has accelerated the illegitimacy of public authority over communities;
- The lack of a single paradigm in the articulation of vaccination solutions by the social and hard science communities undermines the experience the continent has had in addressing previous pandemics in a collaborative manner;
- The failure of the executive authorities to listen to the best available advice to address the pandemic keeps the countries of the South trapped in the crisis.
The solution to this crisis is leadership – something that SA demonstrated at the beginning of the pandemic until it dropped the ball last year.
The whole world admired SA’s decisiveness in the fight against the virus since March 2020. The country moved quickly to implement hard lockdown with the necessary social measures such as the basic income grant to assist the most vulnerable. SA was the first country in Africa to craft its own capacity to trace and test the virus, and it was able to detect new variants that could have threatened humanity.
This track record, however, could be threatened as a result of the country’s decision-making patterns when it comes to vaccine intervention. Its current achievements on this score are incredibly disappointing and it is beginning to be overtaken by less privileged countries who failed at the start of the crisis but are now making commendable progress.
At the core of this problem is SA’s indecisiveness in making the vaccinations mandatory in order to reopen the economy, save lives, and restore the society back to stability. The truth that the South African leadership cannot run away from is that there has never been a recovery from any pandemic in history without the adoption of mandatory vaccination: only bold leadership will take us in the right direction
• Dr Mzileni is a research associate in the faculty of humanities at Nelson Mandela University
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