We must stop flirting with socialist tendencies that are confusing everyone, says the writer. (iStock)

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The smartest minds in our country are showing us that a continued lockdown will not save lives and if anyone thinks that unemployment and poverty are not killers - you are mistaken.

When the South African economy went into the Covid-19 lockdown, it did so on a stretcher on its way into the Intensive Care Unit.

Now after the continuation of the lockdown beyond the period envisaged to expand the capacity of our health system, our economy is on life support.

But, unlike the naysayers out there, I do believe that we will emerge from this too.

South Africans are strong people, we face adversity with humour and we do not give up. These are qualities we will certainly need in spades going forward.

In emerging from this crisis, we will face a moment not unlike that moment on 27 April 1994. It won’t be about overcoming Apartheid, or hundreds of years of oppression, but it will be of overcoming a virus the likes of which nobody living has faced before.

History has shown us that moments are fleeting; they have to be seized or they drift away from grasp unforgivingly only to leave us to a certain decline.

For South Africa, this moment is the opportunity to turn our economy around and create prosperity for the people of our country.

It is a shame that we have had to weather the last 12 years of hardship, especially given that it had been entirely of our own making until Covid-19.

In a time where the world economy is increasingly globalised, where more investment options exist and where South Africa is not the diamond of the African continent anymore, we made some very bad choices.

Successive governments have muddied a once clear economic policy. We have adopted one of the most stringent labour regimes in the world. We have soiled ourselves with the stains of unrepentant corruption and we have been driven to the precipice of a debt trap to fund political patronage.

Emerging from this Covid-19 lockdown has to be the strength of leadership that has been essential in times of great challenges, the kind that is unwavering in doing what is right rather than expedient.

Put bluntly it will require President Ramaphosa to declare war with the opposing factions of his own party. This is what this would look like:

On 24 June, the tabling of a new budget for the country would reveal wholesale reform. Before a single cent increase in tax is proposed, aggressive cuts in the public sector wage bill would be matched by a reduction in the cabinet.

Austerity measures, the likes of which we have never seen before, would need to stun us all and the end of failing state-owned entities would need to be the centre-piece.

My concern is that Minister Mboweni is isolated. His new budget will not follow a State of the Nation Address from which he would take his cue for such drastic policy changes.

We need to know as a country, and we need to project to the world, where we are heading as an economy. We can no longer speak out of the one side of our mouth to international investors and out of the other to people back home.

We have lost so much credibility in the eyes of the world, that now has to be regained.

We must spell out our economic policy, we must stop flirting with socialist tendencies that are confusing everyone and we must send one clear and unequivocal message to the world – we are open for business.

Our labour regime was specifically cited by the likes of Moodey’s in their decision to downgrade South Africa to junk status. The days of trade unions calling the shots, like some unelected shadow government, must end.

We need a new labour regime that makes hiring South Africans easier and is more inviting to investment. With 10 million South Africans unemployed before the lockdown, and National Treasury projected 3-7 million more joining their ranks, incentivising employment has never been so important. I dread the idea that I live in a country known globally as the most unequal, with what may well become over 60% unemployment

There has to be a raft of measures that makes it easier to establish and run small businesses in South Africa. It should just be easier, it should be incentivised with easy access to low interest funding, incubations services and tax rebates.

Every informal trader is a small business owner in the making. Every small business can grow into a medium-sized business. We need to create a nation of employers and not just employees because existing companies aren’t going to be able to hire enough people.

We need to see a revolution of education. There has to be investment in creating opportunity to feed a growing economy, with up-skilled teachers and quality principals and a new curriculum that prepares our children.

FET, TVET and Nursing Colleges need to sprout up across the country along with artisanal training and other vocational training facilities.

South Africa needs to have the courage to face the world of its own domestic humanitarian crisis. We need to immediately engage members of the international community for the repatriation of their citizens found to be in South Africa illegally.

We cannot, as a country, look after citizens of the world, when we are failing so fundamentally to provide the same care to our own.

Most of all, this lockdown needs to be phased out quickly alongside the phasing in of stringent measures to protect the health of all people.

The smartest minds in our country are showing us that a continued lockdown will not save lives and if anyone thinks that unemployment and poverty are not killers - you are mistaken.

I hope and pray that President Ramaphosa does not miss the chance to grab this moment to turn our country around. However, I have always believed that hopes and prayers are not enough and that my God requires me to take action myself.

This is why I am working to build the new alternative in South Africa, because I fear this moment will be allowed to pass us by for fear of internal factional considerations.

News24.com | Herman Mashaba: Moments don’t come around often\, so they have to be seized

Herman Mashaba: Moments don’t come around often, so they have to be seized