Shoppingrestricted to food and other essentials
The sale of alcohol and cigarettes is prohibited
It is forbidden to walk on it for exercise.
Public gatherings are prohibited
Funerals for 50 people
Security forces patrol and barricade to enforce the rules.
However, the governments of other countries in the region have noted that they have the compatibility to impose such strict measures.
Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa declared a national state of disaster and vowed to mobilize government resources to combat the virus.
But two weeks ago, the country’s defense minister, Oppah Muchinguri-Kashiri, thought her country’s borders were impenetrable and said the virus was the enemy of tough Western states, not a failing African country under U. S. sanctions for its human rights record.
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Coronavirus: South Africa prepares for a three-week lockdown
“The coronavirus is the picture of God punishing the countries that have imposed sanctions on us. Now they’re staying home. Their economies are booming, just as they have been with ours. Trump knows he’s not God,” he said in a ruling party. rally. Zanu-PF Day on March 14. The minister ignored the fact that the virus was first detected in China, where it has killed more than 2,000 people.
Their hubris was short-lived: The virus swept through Zimbabwe and claimed its first victim, Zororo Makamba, a 30-year-old animator and filmmaker, earlier this week.
“Pandemics of this kind have a clinical explanation and know no borders and, like any other herbal phenomenon, can be blamed on anyone,” President Mnangagwa said, chiding his defence minister for trying to politicise the global fitness crisis.
It banned all gatherings, closed schools and set aside three hospitals as quarantine centers under now-familiar measures implemented in other parts of the world to prevent the spread of the virus.
With its economy in shambles and the government struggling to pay its bills, Zimbabwe is unable to cope with a primary outbreak, as many of its gyms lack basic equipment, medicines, or a stable source of electricity.
Fearing that Zimbabweans will flee to their territory for treatment, the South African government has to complete the framing of a fence along the main border between the two nations in the coming weeks.
“At the border post now, you’ve got health inspectors and you’ve got environmental professionals and they are doing the testing and screening at the border. But if somebody just walks over the border, there are no such facilities,” South Africa’s Public Works Minister Patricia de Lille said.
Reducing illegal immigration has been a long-standing goal of Mr. Ramaphosa.
He has now used the special powers he gave himself after calling the virus a national crisis to temporarily build a 1. 8 meter overhead fence.
Mr Ramaphosa clearly believes – like many other world leaders – that tough measures are needed to defeat the virus.
“Without decisive action, the number of angry people will temporarily go from a few hundred to tens of thousands, and in a matter of weeks to hundreds of thousands,” he warned in announcing the lockdown.
“This is incredibly harmful to a population like ours, with a gigantic number of people whose immunity is weakened due to HIV and tuberculosis, and with high levels of poverty and malnutrition,” he added.
Rwanda – with a population of about 12 million – is the only other sub-Sahara African state to impose a lockdown.
It came into force on Sunday, with police setting up checkpoints across the country to ensure that people comply – something that they have been mostly doing with streets in the capital, Kigali, deserted.
Police say he shot dead two men in the south of the country after he was in a fight with them, but have denied the incident is akin to the lockdown.
As for the economic fallout from the two-week restrictions, they have been devastating, especially for informal staff living paycheck to paycheck.
“We would die of viruses than of starvation,” one man said.
Ignoring the risk of spreading the virus in a country with one of Africa’s highest population densities, some poor people are said to have surreptitiously left the capital, walking long distances – sometimes more than 100km (62 miles) – to reach their home villages where they believe they will at least get food from the farms and vegetable patches of their families.
Although the government has promised to give financial help to people and has set fixed prices for basic food items, their plight highlights the dangers posed by a lockdown – that it could worsen hunger and poverty, especially if it is extended.
In South Africa, the continent’s most industrialized country, Ramaphosa announced a series of measures to mitigate the economic effects of the lockdown.
This is accompanied by the creation of a solidarity fund, to which two of the country’s richest families – the Oppenheimers and the Ruperts – have already pledged 1 billion rand ($58 million; £48 million). to help small businesses.
Ramaphosa also ordered the deployment of the army on the streets for police to ensure around 60 million people stay at home for the next three weeks.
Many analysts have welcomed Ramaphosa’s imposition of restrictions before the virus claimed lives.
Health Minister Zweli Mkhize said the restrictions could allow South Africa to reduce its infection rate just two to three weeks after the measures come into force, adding: “We will not be surprised by the numbers when we see them increase. But those measures, if “We all work together, we have to buck the trend. “
But, as a warning sign for those who would think of defying the order, police revealed on Wednesday that a businessman had been arrested for disobeying a doctor’s orders to quarantine for 14 days.
The 52-year-old was admitted to the hospital and charged with attempted murder for endangering the lives of nearly 30 other people with whom he had interacted on the doctor’s instructions, police said.
It is a reminder of the unprecedented powers that the government and security forces had granted themselves – without parliamentary approval – to combat the “invisible enemy”.
In this context, Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng asked judges to be alert to possible demanding legal situations that oppose the government in a country known to be litigious, suspicious and even defiant of authority.
An imaginable sign of the judges’ resolve came last week, when the Ministry of Health received a court order to forcibly quarantine a man after he had been discharged from hospital, refusing to be tested even though his wife and daughter had been diagnosed with Covid-19. respiratory illness caused by the virus.
This case has highlighted the fact that complacency and complacency are probably the biggest obstacles to efforts to combat the spread of the virus.
With the highest number of coronavirus cases and the arrival of some of the strictest measures to tackle them, South Africa has now become a check for the rest of the continent to know if it is the style to follow.
Update: This article has been amended to remove an inappropriate comparison with restrictions under apartheid.
South Africans prepare for three-week lockdown. Video, 00:02:54South Africans prepare for three-week lockdown
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