OUR WORLD IS CHANGING : THINKING ABOUT POST COVID-19 RECONSTRUCTION

The advent of a post-COVID 19 world is an inevitability all of us should start dealing with. The management of the crises through the pandemic is a public affairs management project whose outcome will redefine life and its attendant faculties into posterity. The speed and reach of the virus to global destinations, its rapid human to human infection, and how it has made it difficult for international collaboration on its vaccination, makes it an unprecedented virus of seismic global proportions. As the COVID-19 wreaks havoc to national economies, the social fabric and creating worldwide fear and uncertainty, it is at the same time establishing a new order and disrupting global public health governance, and thus public affairs, as we know or knew them. Countries are experiencing convulsions out of which both a desire and compulsion for something new is an inevitability. The containment of humanity into its most basic domicile, home, in order to disrupt patterns that spread COVID-19, is in itself also an interruption.  As the social balance of power gets tilted by efforts to save humanity from the pandemic, the most consequential outcome of these efforts, will be a new world being born around us. The attendant public affairs dynamics will be consequential to almost all aspects of human governance.

 As this new world is being born around us, it also means there is a world or order that will have to either come to an end or adapt to the emergent post-COVID-19 conditions. Although the existing global order is getting bitterly divided on how responses to the pandemic will impact on the geopolitical power dynamics, there is an emerging consensus that post-COVID-19 reconstruction with spawn new global financing and governance architectures. Within states, this will recalibrate elite sectors, most notably the political economy directing elite. In countries like South Africa with a well-documented evidence of the inequality gap between the rich and the poor, the pandemic raffled policy failure feathers as government was grappling with socio-economic realities that would propel COVID-19 spread.

 As the pandemic spreads and generate various responses with social lockdowns being the most prudent of available public health solutions, institutions that have been holding and leading societies may fail to adapt to new conditions. The plummeting demand for goods and services as a result of client mobility being restricted will collapse some business models and new ones will have to rise. Society will have new and faltering wills with growing and difficult to mitigate ambitions and pessimisms. Since this new world is birthed out of crises, the timing of responses by humanity as both victim and survivor would procure the best of its resilient thinkers and actors. There will be little to no time for prolonged responses to what the crisis would have done to the old world  but a demand for thinking that recognizes, and very fast, that the pre-COVID-19 world is never coming back and efforts to resurrect it will be in vain.

 As governments curtail economic activity for public health causes, the debate on the extent to which state intervention should regulate economic activity may signal a resurgence of central planning, mainly because of its apparent success in the Chinese chapter of the pandemic. The incumbency of the pandemic as responses are meted will not only choke thinking about the long term implications of policy responses, but will also create a rapid coalescence of consensuses based on the public health exigencies. The determinants of health as codified by the World Health Organisation will during this period be foregrounded at the expense of the profit motive that had engulfed health care. The pandemic has actually stirred most of the determinants to a level where the political economy of health may be firmly ringfenced more into the political than in health care.   

 Like human birth, the new world will come through the most excruciating of pains, it will disrupt the routine of those that are giving birth, it will demand both maternity and paternity leaves whilst expecting the new born to be fed and catered for, it will reduce the buying power of the recipient household, and it will recalibrate the existing socials and establish new power hierarchies. In order to move on with the new world, we should first accept it is here. In accepting its arrival we should equally not accept the inevitable chaos and calamity that will precede its settling simply because COVID-19 repercussions are irreversible. The new world will have to be built using the ashes of what may have been burnt by or our responses or otherwise to COVID-19. The planning of our responses should be premised on the truism that convulsions tend to have in hibernation ingredients of what we would need to establish lasting templates to survive the post reconstruction phase. In fact out of wreckages, new renewables requiring lesser of our resources and energy always emerge.

 As COVID-19 unfolds itself further and disintegrates societies, as sense of disquiet about the future of humanity by the established individual-community-society-nation complex and its supporting institutional forms, the State and Government, will begin to colour all optimism characteristic of advanced civilizations. The worry and hesitancy of people which has already manifested itself in forms of panic buying, panic decision making and a somewhat  growing disbelief in the capacity of those in authority to contain the virus, will be defining to what the current society becomes beyond pandemic. Premonitions of an empty earth, with some calling it an apocalypse, have started to make rounds on pulpits of faith-based organizations, and many a religious discourse. In conditions such as the one COVID-19 has created, society behaves as though their way of life is or might be dying. These notions are mostly etched on the disposable character of humans as a result of death, rather than the continuum character of humanity as a firmament within which humans operate.

 It is indisputable that the impact of COVID-19 is unprecedented. Given that the unprecedented confounds understanding, it is expected that all societal lenses will, and as a default, illuminate the familiar which generally obscures the reality we are facing, thus turning the unprecedented into and extension of a threatened past instead of a promise of the future. Responses will in this context, and if we are not careful, be about normalization of the abnormal, which might make the fighting of COVID-19 including post-pandemic reconstruction tasks an uphill battle. Because every vaccine begins in careful knowledge of the enemy disease, the logic of vaccine development has in the process become a liability to society. The time frames required to ethically come with a vaccine all point to the reality of a global recession and thus constraining to the requisite resources for reconstruction. Containment measures will last for as long as the socio-economic determinants of health in South Africa are responding to the pandemic spread curve levelling inputs of government. Countries that will be first to get out of the ‘containment pit’ will attract investment and other international economic stimulus instruments. The response and impact of the pandemic on society will thus be vast and diverse.

 Convulsive as it is, COVID-19 has now assumed a status similar to a major innovation, and will thus result in established societal standards, norms and practices shifting to become new frontiers of contestation; interests speaking. The disruptions in society that will come with the pandemic, might result in command structures that came with interrupted hierarchies being treated not only with disdain but with a deliberate intent to usher in the new, or claim space for would be incumbents. The sheer number, and potentially that of the cognitive elite class, of people that would have died at the hands of COVID-19 will result in the need to reconstruct large systems not to be dependent on humans as the sole active agents to make the system work. As the dictates of power in how we organize social institutions dissipate with the dying, the efficiency of non-human systems will be on the rise.  Our world of work which we were dependent upon would have thus changed beyond COVID-19. We will be refugees in an economy that no longer require our skills in their current form. Unlearning what defines us, and relearning in order to define us anew will be a new learning pathway. As individuals we will be more the new product to sell and less the customer to buy. We will be on skill retail shelves with ‘best before’ and ‘dispose by’ dates; and fear of getting off the shelves will characterize work and thus recalibrate the established social decorum.

 A lot of people will be disposable in their chosen career paths. Teachers will be rationalized by online teaching as unemployed parents reclaim their otherwise obligatory responsibility of inculcating social values, and leaving the school system to technical content matters. The era of the virtual teacher would have been consolidated within the cognitive elite in society and the poor will be in a new race to the top of the otherwise bottom. The service industry will be constrained by renewed fears of international travel, borderless competitors who can reach their traditional clients without having to be physically there, even Pastors will reach their congregations on the basis on what makes sense to the individual at a time of spiritual hunger. Online retailing will emerge as the proven form of safe purchasing goods as a sequel of continued fear for airborne viruses that would have mutated out of the current pandemic. In the vortex of this generated fear, confusion, and death, surviving persons will be absorbed into the (health) safe economy.

 Containment measures will reincarnate the traditional family. As the traditional family unit is reincarnated, the established social will be shrinking. The traffic of physical contactless human interaction will redefine new basic human rights. At the level of water and shelter as a human right will be new entrants such as data access, cloud space ownership and security, uninterrupted energy to facilitate connectivity, and cyberspace citizen rights. Government as we know it will be more about the surveillance of citizens than service delivery. A new public will be defined in order to redefine what is public service and who are public servants. To illustrate this, our identities, as we will experience when we will be given barcoded identities that we were tested negative for COVID-19, will be more the barcode than the cards we hold. These barcodes will make us citizens in all the spaces we will be allowed as such. Our health report will give us access to public amenities designated according to a safety criteria coded into scanners. Our economic health will gentrify us into defined class groups, and as we improve our data becomes the commodity. International travel will be managed within algorithms whose ethics are determined by those writing them.

 Public policy will more and more be about monitoring algorithms that create conflict in society. The definition of conflicts to be mediated will have as a base the interests that need to be managed and protected. Our diversity as a keynote of social condition and opinion will be coded. The th!nc Foundation, a not-for-profit Public Policy Research, Analysis and Engagement Organization based in Tshwane, Republic of South Africa, is ideationalizing on several aspects of the post-COVID 19 reconstruction issues in Public Affairs. In this working paper, The th!nc Foundation interrogates at a high level a number of issues relating to the changing world around us. We will ask questions that will be instructional to the various opinion papers and roundtable discussions which will be organized as part of our inputs to post-COVID 19 reconstruction of South Africa. In tandem with the faculty structures of The th!nc Foundation our focus will be on the following Public Affairs issues; Fragility of Constitutional Rights; Civic Myths of the Nation State; Back to Basics Public Administration; Intergovernmental Relations; Post COVID-19 Reconstruction; Heritage Impacts

 

FM Lucky Mathebula

The th!nc Foundation Team

lucky@justthinc.co.za