Locking down New Year’s Eve: Are we biting off more than we can chew?

The thing with regulations is that when they are made, you can’t exactly auto-assume that everybody will follow them.

So what you need to do is see regulations as merely one tool among a variety of tools to compliment a broader plan to achieve a result.

The obvious desired result here is curbing the spread of Covid-19. The obvious problem here is that we don’t exactly have a good track record of obeying instructions, especially the kids.

From the very beginning, we saw University of Cape Town students chanting “corona” during celebrations that the university was closing down, to hearing a story about some dude trying to smuggle his lady to Mpumalanga from Gauteng. Lest we forget, there were also a bunch of stories of nightclubs staying open beyond curfew and those matrics in Cape Town which caused a bit of a stir.

From street parties in Bloemfontein and to fake liquor licences in KwaZulu-Natal, the list goes on and it doesn’t seem like it is going to stop.

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Just this weekend, some eager youths simply stopped all traffic in a tunnel in Pretoria to throw an impromptu street party with no personal protective equipment. Of course, we can’t forget the religious gatherings of 2000 or so people.

All this happened, of course, in contravention of the regulations issued. What does that tell us? It tells us that no matter how strict the regulations are, people who feel like they don’t want to obey, won’t obey.

South Africans tend to love welcoming in the new year with a bang, so even if the official police to population ratio of 1:383 was a better statistic, the cops were always going to have a tough time managing the streets in case of more outbreaks of parties.

This is by no means an attempt to say we shouldn’t have regulations. They do perform a deterrent function and do enable the police to shut down events. Both of these things are vital.

It is just ridiculously silly if it is expected that they will curb the spread on their own. Those who want to party, will party. If it means they need to rent a home in some obscure town, do it in the backrooms of clubs, or just have a bunch of people over at their homes, it is going to happen and is going to spread the virus.

Those who wish to drink have already stocked up, and if you believe that people have all of a sudden stopped sharing their zols, you’re sorely mistaken.

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Yes, there will most certainly be arrests, and the police will likely do as much as they can but even then, they can only really act once the party has happened and the virus has been spread, and then what? Lock everybody up in the same cells?

Many people are really upset about these new regulations but I get that they are important. I’m more upset that on their own, they’re seemingly ineffective and nobody really seems to get that.

So here we are, losing out on our good time, keeping safe and doing what needs to be done, in the full knowledge that others aren’t. Maybe it will slow the spread but the spread will still be swifter than it otherwise could be if there was actual investment in change behaviour.

We gave up telling kids not to have sex because even with the risk of pregnancy and STDs, they were still doing it.

It took us years but we finally started investing in condom education. It seems we just haven’t learned from this and well, we’ll find out how badly we failed next week.

Richard Chemaly is an entertainment attorney, radio broadcaster and lecturer of communication ethics.

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