Mandla Mbokane, PAC provincial chairperson writes:
The Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) in Mpumalanga is totally opposed to a second hard lockdown.
South Africa now exceeds the UK in the number of Covid-19 cases; how did we get there after such a stringent lockdown?
A reimposition of Level 5 or 4 lockdown is bad: Poverty stricken people have not recovered from the first lockdown.
You cannot ask people to leave their jobs and stay home when you do not provide food parcels.
In other countries, they arrest food parcel thieves.
You cannot give government food parcels to councillors to distribute when you know councillors will give only to their card-carrying supporters.
A solution is to provide Basic Income Grant for the unemployed who do not receive an old-age pension and use food parcels as supplementary.
The Basic Income Grant could be plus minus the old-age pension, but certainly the R350 a month is nothing because there is rent to pay also.
You cannot force people to stay home and not work and then have the municipalities demand rent end of the month.
Yes, those working must pay and those with Basic Income Grant can also pay.
PAC says you must not collapse the economy so that more people be at work and fewer people dependent on the state.
There must be PPEs in the work place and let people work: workers wear their masks and keep social distancing, sanitize and wash hands and in some places temperature test regularly and workers not congest.
Police should not beat those who do not listen, who congest and hold parties: but arrest them for one night in isolation and release them and they will not repeat it.
But certainly no criminalization of these civil cases. We do not want a totalitarian state.
You cannot ask people to stay in the house when you know township and slum houses have just one room for the whole family: people will be outside ventilating.
In the townships people do not wear masks; they often congest and do not keep the social distance.
So children are safer at school because there they are always monitored; as long as they wear masks and keep social distance they will be fine.
Some schools that had to close after opening were because some teachers or students were already infected from the townships before opening.
