South Africa Has Yet to Reckon with What Lockdown Cost Us
It cannot be this easy to strip people of their civil liberties, to cause economic wreckage, to hurt the very humanity of people without ever having to answer for the consequences.
Written by: Jodie Chatterton
South Africa still has not had a reckoning with what happened during covid and the stripping down of our fundamental rights and the harm that was inflicted on so many. U.S Senator Rand Paul is one of few who has not stopped in his quest to challenge what Dr. Anthony Fauci’s advice inflicted on the people of America. There has been very little written about the galling information that has been revealed in his personal diaries, as most of the media in this country would prefer what happened then to be memory holed, since they were the biggest cheerleaders of lockdowns, masking, vaccine mandates and anything else in the name of the greater good. Let us not forget.
The Empty Road
The road was completely free of cars. I had the most glorious trip to town, no lorries or slow cars, no lunatics driving badly that put my life in peril; it was perfect. Except it was not. This was a day or two after the government enacted its draconian lockdown. As farmers, permits were issued quickly, as we were seen as essential workers, and therefore I was not restricted like most people.
As I drove into town to get some supplies for the farm, I just saw snaking queues of old people (the ones we had shut down to protect) tightly queued together at all the ATMs to draw money, and everywhere else was just completely dead! Hardly a car on the streets, other than at the supermarkets where we were permitted to buy some items that were deemed appropriate. Certain aisles were cordoned off because stopping to get a birthday card may kill you.
I recall driving back to the farm feeling a sense of dread. I may have had the freedom of the open road, but seeing the dead town was unsettling. It did not take a genius to realise how catastrophic this was going to be for the economy, or the subsequent chain reaction that it would have on the livelihoods of the people living in it.
Freedom and Fear
I hated lockdown from the beginning, and I was free in a way that most people were not. I lived on a farm, which meant I could run if I wanted to, I had a permit which meant I could go where I wanted, I didn’t smoke and I didn’t drink (so I did not have to learn how to use pineapples more effectively), and yet I was deeply uncomfortable with it. I did not like how easy it was to take our rights away with the stroke of a pen. It was concerning how many people, in the name of ‘keeping safe’ were so accepting of this, believing that our rights and freedom were privileges the government could remove at their pleasure.
Fear brought out the worst in people. It was amazing how quickly this turned nasty, splitting families and ruining friendships. We should be able to disagree, but healthy debate was replaced by social exile, often fuelled by social media platforms censoring ‘misinformation’ in favour of state approved ‘science’ that supported lockdowns. Doctors who had a different opinion were deplatformed, reported or in some cases even fired. Personal responsibility seemed to disappear from the conversation, as did the idea that individuals should be free to weigh their own risk. If someone wanted to isolate, that was their right. But demanding that others lose their livelihoods in the process was something else entirely.
Newfound Power
My freedom of the roads was not a completely enjoyable experience as the traffic police were out in force. They camped in our area because it was a safer place than some spots, and there was a garage on the one side of the road and a cash store on the other, so snacks were easily obtained. On one occasion a traffic policewoman signalled for me to pull over, which I duly did. I had not realised that she was signalling the car behind me, and so she accused me of trying to run her over. While I was being screamed at and threatened with jail for doing nothing wrong, not one of the other observing traffic officials thought to intervene. I was just screamed at for five minutes, with no idea if I was eventually going to be pulled out of the car and taken to jail. It was a very unpleasant experience, but it was an indication of how many of those in authority behaved with their newfound power during this time, and it was not nice.
People were beaten for being outside and not ‘complying’; some, like Collins Khosa were beaten to death by our own military. All in the name of keeping people safe. It was disgraceful. That fear people felt from our own security forces stopped people from going to the clinic to get their ARVs and TB medications; a clinic in a rural area had only 25% of people coming to get their chronic medication. How many of our most vulnerable and poorest suffered consequences they might otherwise have avoided because they were too scared to go to the clinic? But hey at least they did not die from covid.
Dying Alone
What we did to people was obscene and inhumane. Vulnerable people all alone, old people locked inside with no outside contact, people dying alone in hospital. I know of one case where a father was in hospital and had been for a while, deteriorating. The family could not see him, and it was devastating. Eventually the son said to his sister (who was a doctor at another hospital) put on your scrubs, pretend that you work there, and go and see dad. She did it, and that visit turned him around; he survived. Others were not so fortunate. How many lives were lost due to cruel bureaucratic rules?
Children Left Behind
The education of many of the children of this country was sacrificed. Those that went to good schools at least had online classes and got some work. The poor in this country were completely left behind, there were zero online classes, and those would have been a challenge anyway because of connectivity and data.
Irrational and Arbitrary Rules
The laws were draconian and irrational. You could not buy alcohol, cigarettes and Woolies chicken. You got arrested if you went surfing. We had curfews. You had to always wear a mask but could take it off when you sat down at a restaurant. I went to reunion day at my school. Watching the band was like being in an asylum; they played their flutes and clarinets, and then the music stopped and the masks went back on. It made little sense.
When the borders between the provinces were initially shut down, our local fuel station ran out of fuel as all the long-distance taxis passed through; transporting people from Johannesburg to the Eastern Cape. So, in the wisdom of keeping people safe, we had the biggest mass migration of people around the country. This was later repeated in the opposite direction.
The Taxi Test
The taxi industry used their power to challenge the government on the rules about taxi restrictions, and they won. Suddenly travelling in a taxi was scientifically safe while sitting in a classroom or restaurant remained dangerous. The corporates should have shown the same backbone as the taxi industry; instead, they helped government to implement some of the policies in the work force like mandatory vaccination. I am not sure anyone challenged the government on their science of it being safe to be in a taxi versus a restaurant in a court room.
Second and Third Order Consequences
Key decision makers either failed, or simply ignored, the second and third consequences of shutting down the economy. People lost their homes, savings and businesses built over years, pulling children out of schools they could no longer afford. The economy is an eco-system; nothing exists in isolation, and we just shut it down. And you cannot just flip the light switch back on and expect there to be no damage. Governments around the world took extraordinary fiscal and monetary measures during the pandemic, which included printing money and slashing interest rates to keep things moving.
Those consequences are still being felt today in the cost of living. You cannot flood the system with paper money when everything is stalled. When demand rebounded prices spiked (for farming seen in the prices of fertilizer) and inflation surged. When SARB inevitably raised interest rates to pull inflation back, those who took out cheap loans just to survive lock down were hit twice with higher repayments on top of higher input costs. This was exacerbated by reopening goal posts that kept moving, the use of the Disaster Management Act allowed the Minister with little oversight to keep extending it month by month for two years with no reasons given. Those who made the decisions still got paid, they were shielded from the consequences of their own decisions and often their connections benefited.
Obscene amounts of taxpayer money or international loans were squandered on sanitising, water tanks for schools, PPE, and the list goes on. Christmas came early for those who could get their hands on those juicy tenders. All those funds have still not been accounted for.
The View from the Corporate Office
Piet Mouton, CEO of PSG Group, wrote an open letter appearing in News24 on the 13 September 2021 arguing that the unvaccinated should have restricted access to parts of society. Suggesting that if they do not, they have failed their children, the economy, they are responsible for the demise of their business and possible future social unrest. “If there is more social unrest fuelled by poverty and unemployment exacerbated by further lockdowns, they should know that they have failed to play their part in preventing it”. I had a visceral anger at that, written from the comfort of his corporate office. This was after our own farm had already been burnt in the July riots (my brother had a rock just miss his head, I spent the day with a shotgun under my bed and our winter bales were set alight less than 100 meters from our house) but apparently that would be on us if it happened again, on the basis of whether or not people were vaccinated. He was wrong. Government policy closed the economy, and government policy made people poor. Corporate South Africa should have used its vast resources to challenge state overreach, not with letters asking the government nicely. They seemed to believe the government was acting in good faith every time they implied “it would not be much longer”.
The Legacy
Covid broke people in a myriad of ways: mentally, financially, physically. People committed suicide. People lost everything. People are still struggling due to the financial strain they took during this time. We now have a subset of people that believe nothing is what it seems, everything is something else. This is what happens when trust in institutions is fundamentally broken. That is the legacy of the Faucis of the world. When you read his diary, and the preening at his adulation, it is sickening. Knowing there was limited science supporting mask mandates and the six-foot distancing rule. Knowing the damage lockdowns would do and hiding the source of the virus from the public. Not much will be written about these revelations, because the biggest pushers of these devastating policies were those responsible for news we read daily.
The Disaster Management Act which kept us locked up for over two years on the whim of a Minister (with no parliamentary debate, approval or even published reasons) has not been amended, the one attempt to do this was voted down by parliament. The DA’s challenge to the constitutionality of the act was dismissed on the 27th of February 2026. Despite Sakeliga obtaining a court order to hand over the decision-making records of our own government during this period, COGTA has not complied.
There must be accountability. It cannot be this easy to strip people of their civil liberties, to cause economic wreckage, to hurt the very humanity of people without ever having to answer for the consequences. If there is no reckoning, it will be possible for it to happen again.
Jodie Chatterton is a dairy farmer in the KZN Midlands and Stellenbosch University graduate with degrees in Commerce and Law.
Jodie, getting away with what the government did in those years emboldened them for more excesses in the years that followed. 😩
Bastiat said good economics looks at what is seen and what is not seen. Now nutcases like the social authoritarian Rand Paul look at what is seen in regards to the epidemic that killed millions, including friends of mine. The cost was the horrible crime of wearing masks to reduce the spread of this deadly disease. Some restaurants went to take-out only. I stopped eating inside the enclosed spaces. What is not seen in this piece is the cost of millions dying. That inflicts severe economic costs as well.
Here in the US we had 1.2m people lose their lives. South Africa lost over 102,000 lives. Globally we lost 7.1m. For those people the cost of the disease spreading was 100% as they died. They also stopped working, buying goods, helping neighbors, providing services and products. But that is not seen. The bad economist looks at just the cost that is seen and not the heavy costs of what is not seen—all the millions who died and their economic contributions.
Ayn Rand made an important clarification that applies here:
“It is important to differentiate between the rules of conduct in an emergency situation and the rules of conduct in the normal conditions of human existence. This does not mean a double standard of morality: the standard and the basic principles remain the same, but their application to either case requires precise definitions.
An emergency is an unchosen, unexpected event, limited in time, that creates conditions under which human survival is impossible—such as a flood, an earthquake, a fire, a shipwreck. In an emergency situation, men’s primary goal is to combat the disaster, escape the danger and restore normal conditions (to reach dry land, to put out the fire, etc.).
By 'normal' conditions I mean metaphysically normal, normal in the nature of things, and appropriate to human existence. Men can live on land, but not in water or in a raging fire. Since men are not omnipotent, it is metaphysically possible for unforeseeable disasters to strike them, in which case their only task is to return to those conditions under which their lives can continue. By its nature, an emergency situation is temporary; if it were to last, men would perish."
The uninformed also ignore history and pretend the Covid response was new. It wasn't so they didn't have NEW powers. In the 1918 influenza pandemic mandatory masks requirements were used. The conspiracists can't blame that on Dr. Fauci. During the plague jurisdictions locked sick people in their homes, banned travel, no public gatherings, etc. So the mild measures were nothing compared to historic measures and you can't really say this is some sort of first step toward a medical dictatorship as previous measures were far worse. If anything this showed how milder measures worked.
In libertarian terms no one has the right to endanger the lives of non-consenting individuals. That includes people with an easily transmitted deadly disease. Masks did stop people with the virus—including those with no or minor symptoms—from endangering the lives of others. Once the threat was significantly reduced the scales of justice tip towards the removal of such measures, which is precisely what happened.