ast Wednesday, aerial photographs captured a snaking queue, 4km long, of thousands of hungry residents from shantytowns outside Pretoria in South Africa awaiting food packages from a charity organisation. There was a chilling resonance with the images of 27 April 1994, 26 years ago, when citizens lined up to vote for the first time, and put Nelson Mandela into power. Today’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has vowed to find a balance between saving “lives and livelihoods” in his government’s response to Covid-19. And he has done well so far with the former. South Africa has been justly lauded for acting quickly to flatten the curve, delaying the pandemic’s exponential trajectory with one of the world’s strictest lockdowns, now in week six, so that it could screen people in hotspots and prepare its ill-equipped health system to manage the load. But in a country that now faces unemployment shooting up to more than 40%, according to the government’s own estimates, Ramaphosa’s balance is increasingly hard to strike. And the rigid and unexplained way the government began this week’s easing of the lockdown has brought its admirable reliance on science, and sense of empathy, up against its own political baggage. This has caused a perhaps inevitable fraying of common purpose in this fractious country. Although the curve has been flattened – only 6,336 confirmed infections by the end of last week, and 133 deaths, in a population of 58 million people – a wave of infections at some point this year is almost inevitable. All the state can do is delay it. Given that, does it make sense to keep schools and the economy largely shut, and to deny certain freedoms too? The restrictions include a strict nightly curfew, limited and illogical exercise hours, and a total ban on alcohol and tobacco sales. As a direct result of the alcohol ban, and the closure of the ubiquitous shebeens, the trauma wards of the major hospitals are largely empty: in South Africa, many injuries are a result of drinking, from fights to road injuries. The tobacco ban is harder to justify, and the industry has declared a legal challenge. Sin taxes are high, and the finance minister, Tito Mboweni, has complained publicly about the bans: he is losing £70m a month at a time he can ill-afford it, given the £5bn he has to find in the state coffers as part of a projected £17bn bailout. Ramaphosa has a background in both the trade union movement and the corporate world, and he ran the negotiations that brought about democracy in South Africa. He has used the pandemic to accelerate his ideology of “social compacting” – bringing government, business, civil society and labour together – and has been astonishingly successful at getting big business to pitch into the bailout. He has presented the lockdown restrictions to his compatriots with a kind of mournful compassion, apologising for the tough decisions he has had to make. But this trust is being rapidly eroded by the actions of some of his ministers. The police minister, Bheki Cele, in particular, has brought a martial swagger to the table, threatening harsh retribution for contravening lockdown regulations. It is not surprising the UN Commission for Human Rights has explicitly called South Africa out for using undue force in the lockdown; there have been nearly 120,000 arrests for non-compliance, and at least two people have been murdered by security forces. The minister responsible for managing the state of disaster, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, lectured the country last week in a castigating tone. Dlamini-Zuma is the ex-wife of the former president Jacob Zuma, and narrowly lost the ANC leadership battle to Ramaphosa in 2017, in which she was widely believed to be a stalking horse for Zuma and his cronies. Dlamini-Zuma champions the tobacco ban (as health minister, she banned public smoking in 2001), and journalists and opposition parties have alleged she has connections to tobacco smugglers. Both Dlamini-Zuma and the alleged tobacco smugglers have denied any wrongdoing. Such claims notwithstanding, she represents the old-school vanguardism of the African National Congress leadership. Many in the party came to power in 1994 with Soviet-style ideas of state control, but were unable to put them into practice because of the globalisation of free-market economics, the negotiated settlement, and the kind of liberal multiparty democracy that fostered a vibrant civil society. The compromises that the movement’s leaders have had to make have left, in many of them, a profound sense of disappointment, one borne out by the reality of South Africa today. It is the world’s most unequal society, and – particularly given the expectations of 1994 – one of its most disaffected. And, to be fair to Cele, South Africa is not Sweden. Due first to apartheid and then to the corruption of the state, South Africans are not known for respecting the law. Into this reality sailed the Covid-19 pandemic. For Ramaphosa, and the reformers in the party, it has presented an opportunity to implement a more collaborative approach to government. But for Dlamini-Zuma and others, it offers an unprecedented opportunity to take control. Already, young South Africans feel alienated from the party’s paternalistic leadership: in the 2018 general election, only 20% of eligible first-time voters even registered to vote. Ramaphosa himself has noted that there can be no business as usual in the post-Covid-19 world. What this means, exactly, remains to be seen: here, as everywhere. What is at stake now in South Africa is far more than a power struggle within the ruling party, now fought on the battleground of the pandemic. Rather, it is the nature of trust itself, at a time when this is most necessary. Without such trust, based on the mutual respect between citizens and their elected leaders, rather than a government’s command of its subjects, South Africa’s fragile contract will disintegrate. • Mark Gevisser’s next book, The Pink Line: The World’s Queer Frontiers, will be published in July.