The Coronavirus and Covid-19 have inflicted great damage and loss in many areas of life throughout Botswana. Any efforts towards the management of this crisis, including vaccination programs, economic recovery strategies and resilience enhancing policies and projects must reflect this reality.
This ravaging blight has not been heterogeneous, and mitigation and recovery plans and polices must equally reflect this reality.
Botswana is midway to vaccinating more than half the national population and as we move into an uncertain future it is critical that we understand the magnitude of damage done to the nation, to the national economy, to public health, to social welfare and to our public finances; amongst many other concerns, including psychological impacts on those who survived infections, on frontline workers and on families and communities that lost loved ones to Covid-19. And let’s not forget employers who lost workers, some of them highly trained professionals, and thousands of workers who lost fellow colleagues.
The problems and challenges arising from this damage and loss are dire and may take years to mitigate. Across cities, villages, professions, markets and industries, not many have been spared pain and suffering.
The seriousness of these issues and concerns mean that government has, for almost two years, been acting in a context of great fear, uncertainty, resource scarcity and heavy economic, fiscal and social pressure.
New waves of infections are on the rise across much of the world as I write, the emergence of new, and perhaps more virulent, and more rapidly transmissible, variants cannot be ruled out. The pressure to act is bound to mount, and efforts to build up recovery infrastructure, and eventually exit pandemic menace and terror must be based on serious reassessments and evaluations of all the relevant policy frameworks on all fronts simultaneously and in synchrony.
We take it that Government interventions at all official levels, including the Covid-19 Task Force, have learnt useful lessons about these challenges, that they now have better information, better insights, and better resources, to trunk the reckless march of this pandemic in society and national life.
We are not yet past the dependency on masks, hand hygiene and social distancing measures for survival but the majority of experts are more or less agreed that the vaccination of national populations against Covid-19 is the only long-term strategy to contain the coronavirus and eventually deprive the virus hosts for infection.
As civil society we worry mostly about the impacts of this widespread devastation on the poor, the vulnerable and those living in the margins of modern society. The communities we serve may not have suffered disproportionate harm from Covid-19 in terms of infections and deaths as research shows the health crisis, including high levels of disruptive infections, were more pronounced in cities and big villages.
The economic crisis emerging from this pandemic however are most likely to drive the communities we serve into high levels of poverty, insecurity and worse risk exposures to vulnerability and hopelessness, and this is a democratic deficit we must strive to avoid through our prevention advocacy campaigns and social projects interventions.
The ride is still rough but we call upon government and development partners to work with us to adapt crisis responses to local-level needs, and more significantly, to try hard to limit the costs of national lockdowns should these become necessary again in the future. The coming of vaccines means that we now have better innovative ways to adapt lockdown interventions for specific localities and limit their economic impact on the poor and most vulnerable.
Turning to recovery and building resilience across key national sectors, it is important that government should prioritise vaccination alongside massive support to private industry and commerce, to households and to vulnerable populations. This we cannot emphasize enough.
Unfortunately, government recovery and resilience enhancement roadmap is taking a different course. Botswana needs new financing not only for crisis priorities but also for sustainable support to vulnerable populations, including chronic patients, the elderly, indigenous communities, the unemployed, single-headed households, women and children; it’s a heavy lift, but this must be done if government is committed to not leaving other Batswana behind as we start moving towards post-pandemic society.
We encourage recovery packages that focus on public investment but that is not the priority right now. Recovery packages must target priority areas. Social protection is just as critical as the strengthening of the health system. It is important that we all move together past this pandemic to more vigorous post-crisis resilience strategies that promote equitable sustainable development.
In conclusion let’s continue to vaccinate the nation. We have the infrastructure in place to succeed. Logistical problems are diminishing. Vaccine supplies are improving. We need more improvement in faster and better national coverage but we are getting there.
But we need to avoid a fragmented recovery response to the multidimensional ravages of this pandemic.
Let’s redefine, reorient and focus our response policy frameworks to better pathways of recovery and resilience that reflect an understanding of the crisis, its impact and demonstrate a willingness to strengthen inclusiveness in the whole pandemic transition national effort.
