South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has said that the COVID-19 pandemic has presented the country with opportunities to transform service delivery and restructure its economy.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has said that the COVID-19 pandemic has presented the country with opportunities to transform service delivery and restructure its economy.
In light of this an online platform called HeyCyril (www.heycyril.co.za) has been launched which allows the public to share ideas on how to transform service delivery and restructure its economy.
According to the latest figures, there have been almost 35,000 confirmed infections, just over 17,000 recoveries and 705 deaths due to COVID-19 in South Africa, with consistent large daily increases in cases over the past fortnight as interventions such as testing increased.
South Africa partly lifted a two-month-old coronavirus lockdown on 1 June , letting people outside for work, worship, exercise or shopping, and allowing mines and factories to run at full capacity to try to revive the economy. The lockdown measures, among the strictest in the world, have battered the economy of Africa’s most industrialised nation.
“If anything, COVID-19 now gives us a much stronger platform – a stronger reason if we ever needed one — to transform and restructure the economy,” Mr. Ramaphosa said during an interaction with representatives from the South African National Editors Forum in a live TV broadcast.
“Our economy has been crying out for restructuring. We’ve been operating under an economy that is both colonial and racist over many years. That economy now needs to be realigned to deal with the challenges that South Africa faces right now,” the president
said.
HeyCyril! allows the public to help the president and government with ideas and collaborations to reboot, re-imagine and reignite our people, economy and country.
The head of economic transformation in South Africa’s ruling party proposed a range of measures to bolster the economy, ranging from encouraging the use of pension funds and the central bank to finance infrastructure spending to the creation of a state bank and
pharmaceutical company.
