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President Cyril Ramaphosa at SONA 2020. (Twitter, @PresidencyZA)
- President Cyril Ramaphosa said that all parties in Parliament agreed that the national lockdown was necessary to save lives at the start of the pandemic.
- Ramaphosa said that even countries that did not impose a strict blockade were in economic trouble.
- The president urged support for this Economic Recovery and Reconstruction Plan.
President Cyril Ramaphosa opposed members of Parliament from opposition parties who blamed South Africa’s economic woes on decades of leadership in the African National Congress rather than the Covid-19 outbreak.
Ramaphosa was responding to a debate on the Economic Recovery and Reconstruction Plan, which he presented in Parliament last week on Thursday. The plan seeks to guide South Africa’s recovery from the pandemic.
The pandemic and the subsequent national blockade aimed at slowing its spread across the country has caused the loss of more than 2 million jobs in the second quarter of this year and a 16.4% contraction in the economy.
During the debate, Democratic Alliance deputy and opposition leader John Steenhuisen said that the ANC and the “longest, toughest, and least scientific blockade” in the world’s Covid-19 era were to blame for the economic problems of South Africa.
‘Covid-19 did not destroy our economy’
“We are not trying to recover from the coronavirus pandemic. Covid-19 did not destroy our economy. We are trying to recover from decades of bad governance by the ANC. It is false to suggest otherwise,” Steenhuisen said.
Ramaphosa addressed Steenhuisen directly in his response to the debate, saying that the DA MP did not object to the shutdown when it was introduced in March, and everyone agreed that it was imposed to save lives. Ramaphosa said that even countries that were not blocked by the pandemic had economic problems.
“If we had not taken the measures that we did, which you supported, many more lives would have been lost, as you admitted then. The economic impact would have been worse, and we would not even have been in a position to talk about any kind of economic recovery,” he said Ramaphosa.
United Democratic Movement MP Bantu Holomisa said it was unacceptable and immoral for the Public Investment Corporation to continue to invest pension money while those investments fail to generate much-needed economic development and job creation.
