Eusebius McKaiser: We should stress-test the lockdown
We seem divided as citizens about how much lockdown leeway to grant the state for it to contain the spread of Covid-19 successfully. It doesn’t help that dramatic false dichotomies are set up between various forms of “total lockdown” and “opening up the economy”.
The singular solemn press commentary from Minister of Defence Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula is not good enough. It lacked the appropriate level of unqualified condemnation of the behaviour of some SANDF members across the country, including in Alexandra. There has also been no detail provided about what shape and form an inquiry into the torture allegations would take.
Later, while comforting her partner after the SANDF members had left, she was holding his hand as he was lying on their bed, before she noticed that “he was not moving”. The emergency services were dispatched and declared him, sadly, dead upon their arrival. It is absurd and embarrassing that citizens need to launch urgent and direct action in the Constitutional Court to have the SANDF and SAPS directed to develop and publish a code of conduct and operational procedures that regulate the members of the SANDF, SAPS and metro police departments.
It is hard, when we are worried about contracting Covid-19, to know how much of this normativity to insist on. But here is the danger of choosing silence or feeling guilty about stress-testing government action during this time: if you are not careful, you may inadvertently permit the state to develop a culture of not answering to the demand for reasons. That is undesirable.
We have the historical burden, I am afraid, of simultaneously fighting the public-health battle that has exhausted us existentially, while not ruining the most intrinsic elements of our democratic edifice. One aspect of that edifice is to make sure state power is reason-bound, always.
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