We have not yet seen the scale of damage the pandemic and lockdown has had on our businesses and jobs.
John Steenhuisen, leader of the DA, delivered his “true state of the nation address” today and said that the last two years of lockdown restrictions have seen poverty and inequality accelerating through joblessness and widening disparities in education.
Riots played out unchecked
“The riots in July last year – allowed to play out unchecked by the state and rooted in the same epidemic of corruption – took poverty and hardship to another level. Indeed, the epidemic of corruption remains largely unchecked.
“The result? By the third quarter of last year, only 36 percent of the working-age population was in employment.
“As time passes, we’ll get a clearer picture of just how much these pandemic restrictions have worsened our situation, but it’s not likely to be a good one. And so we are going to have to make a conscious effort to reverse all of those things as best we can.”
Damage to children
He stated that the hard done to children, by keeping them out of schools, far outweighed the health benefits to them.
“The harm done to the hospitality and tourism sectors by imposing alcohol bans along with curfews far outweighed the benefit.”
He spoke how you find the heartbreaking scenes, repeated in every city and town, of thousands and thousands of men and women without work and with very little hope of changing this.
Scale of decay
“Take a drive through the towns and villages of provinces like the Eastern Cape, the Free State, Mpumalanga, Limpopo or KZN, and even some of our largest cities in Gauteng. The scale of the decay you’ll encounter is just staggering.
“Potholes, cracked pavements, litter, uncollected refuse, sewage spills, broken streetlights, broken traffic lights, dry taps, electricity substations stripped bare, train stations carried off piece by piece, schools vandalised, hospitals only partly operational and long queues at clinics, police vehicles sitting unused and unusable at police stations.
“Outside of the Western Cape and DA-run towns, very little in our country is working and large parts of it resemble a war zone.”
In Western Cape feeding schemes continued
He added that, over the past two years, in every wave of the pandemic, only the DA-run Western Cape made sure there were always enough hospital beds and there was always enough oxygen, while the DA-run City of Cape Town delivered chronic TB and HIV medication to people at home.
“Only in the Western Cape did school feeding schemes continue to feed children during hard lockdown and school closures. Only in the Western Cape did crèches continue getting subsidies. This is what governments should do in a pandemic – retain and ramp up services, not cut services, destroy jobs and restrict people’s freedoms.
“We now have two years to make our case and convincingly demonstrate the DA difference in the places where we govern. Two years to show people that there are two distinct parties of government in South Africa that have two very different approaches to almost every aspect of governance and the state.
“One that still believes that people should live at the mercy of government and depend on an all-powerful state, and the other that believes in the ingenuity and creativity of people to realise their dreams, given the chance.
‘Dependence and control vs freedom and dignity’
“One that still believes in centralised control under an all-powerful president, while the other believes in decentralisation and nurtures diverse and principled leaders from all walks of life.
“One that believes the only way to create jobs is by making government and the state even bigger, while the other believes that government needs to get out of the way so that businesses big and small can flourish and employ people.
Dependence and control versus freedom and dignity. Those are the choices.”
Listen here to the full speech:
*Press statement
