Nostalgia and memory tend to combine to create unexpected ideals. Especially in times of crisis. In the contemporary, the Covid 19 pandemic is
probably doing the same. It sometimes would
seem like decades ago that we could go to work, send our children to school, go
to football matches, attend church or pay a visit to our relatives and friends. With full or partial lock-downs as advised by
the World Health Organisation (WHO) and executed by governments all of the
above appear distant ideal ways of urban and in part, rural living.
In all of this, there is talk of how things will never be
the same again after Covid-19. Or even how the same applies in the midst of the
pandemic. In real time.
These conversations get fortified by expert views on how the
world requires a ‘new normal’. While at
the same time definitions of the latter are varied and at times invariably
confusing.
From an African perspective discussion of any ‘new normals’
are for the time being highly elitist. They
are couched in the language of neoliberal solutions to what is a very public health
crisis. Private capital and its attendant philanthropists are lauded as being
integral to the new normal. Government
ministers act more or less as chaperones of private capital. Courting and
wooing in the times of corona.
And private capital knows exactly the sort of new normal
that it would want. One in which it gets
new and easier access to profiteering from social service delivery. A role that should democratically be done by
the state, social service delivery is being mortgaged in the name of fear of
Covid19. And assumptions of the
efficiency of those that straddle what we know as the ‘free market’.
Big and small business therefore look at the new normal as
the new profiteering opportunity. All on
the basis of trading on what will inevitably be a very real fear of a global
pandemic. Hence there will be limited
public protest at these neo-liberal solutions being preferred by our
governments at the behest of private capital.
Our individualism and again individualized assumptions of invincibility
because we think that so long we have
access to some sort of money to pay for health makes us extremely vulnerable to
a revamped ‘disaster capitalism’.
Whereas, for example, the British government reportedly approached
the Covid 19 pandemic with what’s referred to as a ‘herd immunity’ strategy, we
in turn are being herded into a ‘new normal’ that is undemocratic. Almost like
a throwback to desiring what would have obtained prior to the outbreak of the
pandemic because it would be assumed that it is all we know. Or all we would want. Even if we didn’t want
it, social media would be deployed to makes us desire that straightforward
neo-liberal consumerist past that obtained prior to the outbreak.
And already it is apparent that the debate of what would be
a new normal is remaining firmly entrenched in an actual desire for the past as
an ideal. Albeit one which can be shifted more to the right.
What is apparent is that as the Covid 19 pandemic becomes increasingly
existential, private capital fully intends to be ingrained in national/public
psyches as always having the best
possible solution(s).
One might ask, so what does it really matter? The reality of
the situation is that if we are not going to learn that the very fact of the
spread of Covid 19 to become a global pandemic should teach us to change our
approaches to our own existence, then we, regrettably, are in serious trouble.
In our African contexts, we need new social democratic frameworks
that envision people centered public health and a welfare state as integral to
a better future for all. We know that
this is something that global capital does not want to see. We know that instead it wants us to mimic the
demographics of the global north (city states and the like). Or for us to forever hold in awe, knowledge systems and approaches as they are disseminated
with clear and hidden hegemonic intention from global private capital.
This essentially means as Africans we would have no choice
but to be increasingly counter-hegemonic in an organic and progressive
way. This would entail thinking beyond
neoliberalism as an economic panacea and re-embracing the state as a primary
enabler of the democratic livelihood interests of all. All with an understanding that exclusion and
profiteering from a pandemic that knows no race, colour or class is never going
to be in our best democratic interest.
It may appear initially as not being pragmatic but we can at
least put minds together to frame the future better. The ‘new normal’ should never be a reversion
to a casual idealization of the past. It
should be about quite literally a new future.
One that takes into account lessons of the mistakes made in the past but
holds on to the collective hope that our lives are worth more than the money.
*Takura Zhangazha writes here in his personal capacity
(takura-zhangazha.blogspot.com)
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