A glimmer on the horizon for SA’s economy

Source: Tim Cohen, Daily Maverick, 2 January 2022, photo credit: Federal Reserve Bank of New York

The Year of our Lord 2021 has been a grinding year. The startling impact of the Covid-19 crisis that was dominant in 2020 infected 2021 like – there is no other word for it – a virus. The crisis lasted longer and was more debilitating than almost anyone expected, mutating into successive waves that washed over us in 2021.

So here we stand at the end of 2021 at the end of yet another wave. It’s just exhausting. When will this all finally conclude? When will normality ever return? These questions pervade our sense of being like an icy wind; invading us, surrounding us.

During this whole period, the pounding, overriding theme can be summarised in a single word: vulnerability. Everything from our physical beings to our economic health has been under sustained attack. Yet our situation is not entirely as gloomy as it might seem because 2021 also brought one major change over 2020: vaccines.

Think of what the global vaccination effort implies: technological innovation, a sense of a global humanity, taking the initiative, moving from defence to offence. Beyond the national bickering, notwithstanding the dreadful vaccine inequality, the dawn of a new year coincides with a tantalising possibility: Covid-19 is now on the run. And unlike almost every other global calamity, the solution was a consequence of human endeavour rather than merely human perseverance.

In this contradiction between calamity and innovation is the key to what the future holds.

For South Africa, the coronavirus pandemic had consequences that, in many ways, were entirely foreseeable; it drew out and writ large SA’s economic and political weaknesses. Entering the crisis weak, SA’s decade of decline suddenly came home to roost with a rude bump.
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