South Africa has now witnessed multiple days of deadly riots. More than 70 people have been killed, and whole city districts have been ransacked. Shocking videos posted on Twitter show looters pouring out of shops with stolen merchandise, vigilantes armed with rifles firing into crowds, and fleeing police vans being pelted with rocks.
The riots were triggered by last week’s 15-month jail sentence of Jacob Zuma, the country’s former president, on corruption charges. But many have suggested that poverty and unemployment helped fuel the lawlessness. Without wishing to excuse the wanton criminality on display, it’s worth considering whether lockdown is a factor here.
South Africa’s unemployment rate stands at 32.6% – the highest since the labour force survey began in 2008. Youth unemployment is almost 75%. Last year, the country’s GDP fell by 7% – the largest single drop since 1980 (when the IMF’s data series begins).
While unemployment has been rising for more than a decade in South Africa, the country’s dismal economic situation was exacerbated by months of lockdown.
How stringent has the lockdown been? We can check, using the Oxford Blavatnik School’s COVID-19 Government Response Tracker. Since the start of the pandemic, South Africa has had 228 days of mandatory workplace closures, and 421 days of mandatory stay-at-home orders in at least part of the country.
Lockdowns were damaging enough in countries like Britain that could afford to pay for lavish furlough schemes. But they must have been even more destructive in South Africa, where almost one in five people lives in extreme poverty. How these individuals were supposed to cope when the economy was put on standby is anyone’s guess.
I’m not trying to absolve the looters of responsibility here. There’s no excuse for what they’ve been doing. But we should ask: how responsible was it for the Government to impose months of sweeping restrictions in a country where many people are quite literally living hand to mouth?
And likewise: how responsible was it for Western governments to impose sweeping restrictions over their own economies, knowing what effect this would have in the developing world.
Martin Kulldorff – one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration – posted a Twitter thread last November titled “Twelve Forgotten Principles of Public Health”. His 4th principle was: “Pubic health is global. Public health scientists need to consider the global impact of their recommendations.” Perhaps we should have paid more attention to his advice.
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“Lockdowns were damaging enough in countries like Britain that could afford to pay for lavish furlough schemes”
South Africa can easily afford to pay for anything priced in Rand – including all the unemployed labour. They just choose not to. Lockdown is a problem of production and distribution and there is enough to go around in South Africa, just a lot of corruption between field and plate.
In the UK our production and distribution systems have held up really well, with furlough keeping that ticking over – although it would have been better handed out at a flat rate of the living wage so it was just enough. Too many have been given too much.
The problem in South Africa is the same as most countries with a monetary economy. They have a jet fighter available, but the people operating it really, really believe they are driving a bus.
That implies that inflation is not a tax on the living standards of ordinary people.Every country can pay anything it wants if it controls its own currency. However there is a price to pay in the FX markets and that feeds through as rampant inflation.
SA can easily become a Zimbabwe economy.
Universal Self Harm: Rejecting Nuclear Power Poses Real Extinction Threat
https://stopthesethings.com/2021/07/15/universal-self-harm-rejecting-nuclear-power-poses-real-extinction-threat/
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Furlough and lockdown are communist anti-economics.
Fully vaccinated Americans are SPREADING covid’s delta variant, health expert warns
https://www.naturalnews.com/2021-07-14-fully-vaccinated-americans-spreading-coronavirus-delta-variant.html
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Developing world? Poverty?
Wasn’t SA once a first world country? World’s first successful heart transplant performed in 1967.
Different managers now.
By a white man
Bit of a reach here. SA has been spiralling down towards collapse for decades now and truly horrible things have been happening there throughout that time. From a distance, this looks like just one of those upturns in vicious mob violence triggered by elite political infighting and fuelled by opportunism and desperation that corrupt third world countries tend to be subject to.
Did lockdown accelerate the growth in nastiness? Undoubtedly, how could it not have? But it’s an exacerbating factor, surely, rather than a driving one.
That said, alongside Kulldorf’s wise words, which I believe were aimed mostly at the catastrophic economic costs and consequences of lockdown, we should also bear in mind the words of the great epidemiologist Donald Henderson:
“Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted.”
You can’t expect to turn a society upside down overnight, and not face consequences for dong so.
Well I thought SA, now that it has majority rule, would be a beacon to tolerance and prosperity, but I understand that it isn’t and far from it. Also I understand that the average South African on the street is worse off now than under apartheid, but the good thing is they get the vote (and can vote for the ANC).
Massively humungous elephant in the room that most will studiously ignore, thereby perpetuating the problem, cos ‘racism’.
I think that lockdown was most definitely a contributing factor in the perpetual rioting in the United States. It started only a couple of months after lockdown and hasn’t completely stopped since.
There is an excuse for what they are doing. They have been utterly abandoned by their government and pushed into desperation. Law is simply a construct of society, once you are forced outside of that society its laws are no longer relevant. All power to the rioters I say – good to see people burning shit down. We could do with more of that.
The socialist government that they keep voting for.
Not that we’re any smarter in that regard, mind.
Surely the explanation is their lack of behavioural psychologists, the best probably creamed off to work in first world nudge units.
Universal suffrage and self determination is a bad idea that must be thrown on the ash heap of history. Native populations are simply not intelligent or educated enough to decide who governs them, and must be ruled by a class of self-appointing and unaccountable autocrats and technocrats who will dictate in a benign and enlightened manner to maximise the common good of the common people.
If this sounds objectionable, patronising and dehumanising when applied to Africans, it was, in essence, the argument to remain in the European Empire, and it’s the argument being used to justify rule by the SAGE Wizard-Priests now.
Interesting observation – what are the fundamental moral differences between technocracy and colonialism?
There aren’t any, as your rhetorical question infers.
Its interesting, from disagreeing with most of your comments two or three days ago Rogerborg , I know find myself agreeing with them all on several threads over the last two days.
What’s needed is a “a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occassional assassination.”
Voltaire.
Lockdowns (of which the ones in SA are some of the world’s most brutal) are definitely the straw that broke the camel’s back. Same with Cuba
All the predictions about what would happen when the ANC came to power have come true. These predictions were around long before then. The fact that scandalous corruption within the ANC has not been dealt with has impoverished everyone whatever their colour and is the main driver for the current situation, Such a shame and my heart bleeds for the country of my birth and all the decent people who live there.
Wait until furloughing ends in the UK in September. SA is a warning to us all…
But as long as the looters wear masks we will all be safe…
These people have been fed the same bullshit that we have but without the hush money. If you inflict lockdown restrictions on a volatile population with nothing to lose it is stupid not to expect a backlash. If it wasn’t triggered by Zumas’s sentence it would have been triggered by something else.
Cuba is definitely not protesting communism and South Africans are definitely not erupting over race. The BBC told me so. They just want to be fully vaccinated with the vaccines. As we all do. Because the virus is terrible. Worse than AIDS and cancer and death and Ed Sheeran combined.
Not many people know that the troubles in Northern Ireland were caused by a shortage of ‘vaccines’. Sharks were fully vaccinated and they survived the cataclysm that killed the unvaccinated dinosaurs. Only the Meglodon didn’t listen.
If covid vaccines had been around earlier Jeffrey Epstein and Princess Diana would still be with us. Remember what prophet Muhammad Jesus said ‘only the vaccinated and the elite can squeeze through the eye of the needle to get to god’.
I can’t wait to see all the fully vaccinated lorry drivers driving their electric lorries the government wants on the roads in less than 20 years time. They will bring our ‘food’ and ‘vaccines’ to our city centers. I can see myself living in a John Lewis broom cupboard with two African dinghy refugees and the former boss of RyanAir, eating insect sausages and drinking each others piss. We own nothing but we are so very very happy.
This was a party political broadcast on behalf of the CONservative party.
I just sent this to Desmond Swayne.
Could these be more like an organised agitation to destabilise SA. What we know about Soros and the Globalists tells me this is classic tactics.
“South Africa’s unemployment rate stands at 32.6% – the highest since the labour force survey began in 2008. Youth unemployment is almost 75%. Last year, the country’s GDP fell by 7% – the largest single drop since 1980 (when the IMF’s data series begins).”
Boris wonders if he can achieve this here
News from Israel — leader of the race to vaccinate
https://gilad.online/writings/2021/7/14/a-catastrophe-unveils-itselfnbsp
“People like to fiddle with statistics and draw the conclusions that suit them. If only 11 out of the 1271 vaccinated cases develop critical illness, we are dealing with slightly less than 1% of the vaccinated developing critical illness. At the same time more than 2% of the unvaccinated develop critical illness. Yet, since Delta cases are 5 times more common amongst the vaccinated as time passes by, I may suggest that we are facing a possible emerging disaster as far as the Pfizer-vaccinated are concerned.
I guess that Pfizer scientists understand all of this very well and this is why they asked for an immediate booster approval.
Update 14.7.2021 15:40. Minutes after publishing the this article this new data came in from Israel. It suggests that when it comes to Delta cases, the Vaccine has no impact whatsoever as the percentage of vaccinated Delta cases is pretty much identical with their representation in society. “
Official Israeli data from the Ministry of Health shows that the two-shot Pfizer vaccine efficacy is only 55% for the 35-44 year age group.
https://www.gov.il/BlobFolder/news/06072021-04/he/NEWS_Corona_vaccine-eficacy.pdf
Fully vaccinated Americans are SPREADING covid’s delta variant, health expert warns
https://www.naturalnews.com/2021-07-14-fully-vaccinated-americans-spreading-coronavirus-delta-variant.html
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Universal Self Harm: Rejecting Nuclear Power Poses Real Extinction Threat
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How do you work out that Britain can afford lockdown? You mean you can afford lockdown. I’ve seen prices in the shops go up 20 plus percent in the last year. Most of us won’t be able to afford post lockdown prices as they go up and up and up. I think my weekly shop has gone up by about 20 percent in the last year. My salary hasn’t moved.