The strain test. The stress test.
Call it what you wish, technologists, doctors, accountants, psychologists, process engineers and tyrannical bosses all regularly apply some variant of the stressing principle. Does it bend or does it break?
While an absence of pressure is to be desired and embraced, it tells one nothing about resilience. Until one loads extreme pressure on to a steel bar, or a financial institution, or a human heart, or a government, one knows next to nothing about its real strength.
Not since 1939 has the world been put to such an extreme test as
Covid-19. There have been some unexpected failures, as well as surprising successes. France, Italy and Spain regularly feature in the top 10 of international health performance indices. Yet all three have coped poorly with the pandemic. Whereas Germany, ranking a sluggish 25 in the World Health Organisation’s health efficiency index, has done far better.
That’s probably because dealing with a national emergency is not the stuff of routine annual assessment for an index. A black-swan event, such as Covid-19, is when systemic flexibility, political agility and - dare one say it? - national character come into play.
China’s response of initial secrecy and punishing the bearer of ill tidings was entirely in accord with its government-induced authoritarian national character. So, too, the brutally clinical efficiency of its successful lockdown.
The Europeans, in contrast, are treating their citizens as fairly intelligent and responsible adults.
On the indices, South Africa is more a never-was than an also-ran, slotting in at 175 out of 191 on the WHO index. Despite this, Covid-19 has been, so far, a relatively pleasing stress test for the ANC government.
The ability of the state and private health sectors to co-operate fluently, as well as the state’s dependence on private finance, facilities and expertise, runs contrary to the National Health Insurance programme’s conceit that the state should, and can, control everything.
But the self-congratulations and back-patting are premature. The health system stress test has some way to run. And in the equally critical economic test, Covid-19 has already ground out a large assortment of cracked, snapped and shattered components.
Here, South Africa’s indexed in-
adequacies are proving to be only too accurate. An economy already under strain is about to break. Whether those key success factors mentioned earlier - systemic flexibility and political agility - can avoid the economic crankshaft throwing a rod through the national engine block, is not clear. The signals are mixed.
On the upside, the government appears to have at last come to terms with tossing overboard the maggot-
ridden carcass of the national airline.
Nor is there money, more surprisingly, for a loyal ANC constituency, that of the public servants, with the government reneging on the three-year pay deal.
On the downside, there’s still a
pervasive failure to face reality un-
fettered by antiquated beliefs.
Just the thought of accessing International Monetary Fund (IMF) assistance has sent many within the governing alliance into a mental meltdown. There has been a similarly irrational and emotional response to Moody’s downgrading South Africa to sub-
investment status.
There is a lot of self-inflicted economic ignorance at work here. Those raging at the IMF and the World Bank need a reality check. Whatever its political objectives, no government, including those that the ANC ideologically identifies with, will entirely ignore financial criteria when investing or giving loans.
Last year, Lin Songtian, the Chinese ambassador to South Africa, explained that China had no appetite for infrastructural projects in South Africa because those proposed by the government lacked basic feasibility studies “capable of reassuring the Chinese government and banks of their profitability and sustainability”.
One can hear the anguished cry from massed ANC ranks: “Viability? Sustainability? Profitability? You’re our comrades but you sound just like those heartless capitalists.”
Whether South Africa survives the stress test depends on the next weeks of lockdown and then, how efficiently the economic engine can be powered up again.
Ramaphosa acted with admirable decisiveness with the lockdown, the authoritarian part.
He has been dangerously hesitant about the second part - trusting South Africans to responsibly implement eased lockdown regulations.
To survive the stress test, South Africa has to pass both parts.