Amuzweni Ngoma is a researcher at the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (Mistra).

The Covid-19 pandemic has massively altered South Africa’s societal landscape and steepened its reconstruction and development trajectory. It has been a wrecking ball for public and private organisations, families, and the psychosocial wellbeing of individuals and communities alike.

Some of these, of course, were already in dire straits before the pandemic.

South African society has experienced a generalised and palpable sense of shared social anxiety, observable through the ever-present WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter messages of #RIP or #Restinpeace, and other such variations. Indeed, this permeating sense of social anxiety has been particularly acute on the days of the “#familymeeting”, that being the colloquial social media catchphrase describing when President Cyril Ramaphosa addresses the nation on the Covid-19 responses and action.

As this has taken place, human resource experts have been thinking through creative solutions to support their employees affected by the pandemic. Psychologists and sociologists too have mused on how technology has intersected with and heightened dis-ease in social and personal interactions.

Individuals, families, businesses and organisations are steeped in making it through the myriad repercussions suffered as significant consequences of the pandemic. An upcoming annual lecture hosted by the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (Mistra), in partnership with the University of Johannesburg, and delivered by the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Jonathan D Ostry, will also review evidence from past pandemics and crises to analyse South Africa’s Covid-19 moment through the lens of inequality.

South Africans have lost more than two million jobs and there are about 90,000 Covid-19 orphans. Informal workers, the working and middle classes have all come under severe duress. Put differently, it is not better for anyone, as restaurateurs and their waiters, engineers and bank tellers have either lost their incomes or had them significantly reduced. Government employees too, face the prospect of salary freezes under an austere administration.

The country’s current and future skills base — contained within the labour market and in the education and training system — is facing the ongoing threat of the Covid-19 mortality rate, crudely calculated at about 3.2%. In addition, the healthcare system has lost many professionals who took decades to train and gather experience. Social anomie is a present threat given unrest and rising crime. Mistra’s recent paper and webinar on gender-based violence also points to fractured social cohesion.

But even so, since Covid-19 hit South Africa there remains a sense of optimism as government and domestic large corporations have crafted and made recommendations about how South Africa, as a cohesive whole, can make it through the pandemic with no one left behind.

International finance organisations such as the IMF have also made the much-needed finance necessary for economic reconstruction available to South Africa.

But even in the case where the profound consequences and repercussions of the pandemic have brought forth big ideas and finance for reconstruction and development, offering opportunity within a crisis, we might still pause to critically reflect on what might be missing. Or more directed, what, among the multiple (and sometimes contradictory) solutions or ways of doing the rebuilding work, might South Africa want to emphasise?

Zeroing in on emphasising specific issues instead of our typical shopping list of development wants might help us through what has undeniably become a decade of rebuilding with all hands on deck. Arguably, three issues suffice for this decade of development.

First, South Africa needs to be intentional about what it says about itself. This is about the way that South Africans are as a people. What do we like? What do we say to each other? How do we think about ourselves? What drives us?

Hitting rock-bottom, as it were, also gives us an opportunity to reinvent ourselves. Central to reinventing South Africa’s personality must be a concerted effort to kill the noise on the counterproductive hyper-narrative of a failed, corrupt and dysfunctional state, and a people prone to disagreement and violence. Essentially, we need to reframe our cultural personality to one of a people capable of building through and out of any crisis.

Second, and tied to the first, is that we must reassert the functionality and effectiveness of the country’s public and private institutions; more specifically, how they relate to each other. Rebuilding in the pandemic era must be about emphasising societal institutions that bond and build. At present, our social imagination is captured by institutions such as the judiciary, the police, security or military services, seen through the all-day televised State Capture Commission, for example.

Social institutions, such as civil society organisations (CSOs) are critical for rebuilding.

Before 1994, CSOs were antagonistic towards the apartheid (dis)order and its government. Under democracy, many CSOs changed their ideological stance, harnessing attitudes of collaboration and cooperation in building the new South Africa. Over time, there have been significant fissures, specifically in the way government and big business have interacted with CSOs. Within this narrow-based trio, civil society has been treated as a junior development partner, trivialised and under-funded.

As a result, many CSOs have collapsed, with some having their leaders and professionals absorbed into the government and business sectors. This is particularly the case for the youth development organisations, which are fractured, under-funded and ignored, an antithesis for a country where more than five million young people are unemployed and out of any formal education or training institution. At the very least, supporting youth development CSOs would contribute to building South Africa back through a thriving social compact.

The third and final point of how we build back South Africa through the pandemic must be about the professionals. Societies that cohere and prize their professionals and ethics, build. Societies modernise and indeed thrive under a good base of ethical professionals. These are professionals concerned with serving, rather than hyper-consumption.

Doctors and nurses who care for the sick; engineers who design and build railways and bridges that connect otherwise disparate economic nodes; scientists ahead of the curve who innovate technologies that revolutionise everyday lives; and clergy leaders that inspire, counsel and guide people, or influence action.

The way South Africa thinks and speaks about itself, a cooperative stance among different sectors with neither beggar nor pawn, and a critical mass of developmental professionals can build South Africa through and out of the pandemic era and crisis. DM