Ramaphosa becomes 'wartime president'

“The night Cyril Ramaphosa became a wartime president” is how South Africa’s leading News24 website described the president’s decision on Monday night to impose a nationwide lockdown to defeat the coronavirus.

The move was unprecedented.

It is the first time since South Africa became a democracy in 1994 that a president has stripped away the most basic freedoms of citizens - to walk, to shop, to socialize and to pray freely.

In fact, even the apartheid regime had never imposed such stringent measures, during its almost five-decade-long rule, to suppress opposition and to remain in power.

But the hard-won freedoms that South Africans attained after defeating apartheid have been temporarily lost a mere 25 years later as they - like many other nations in the world - cede their rights to governments to fight what UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has called an “invisible enemy”.

It is an extraordinary moment, and one can only hope that the virus is defeated before it reaches more nations and kills more people.