Coronavirus in Africa
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 14 April 2020
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Coronavirus has been slow to arrive in Africa but the continent has been warned the wave is coming. South Africa has so far been the hardest hit and it’s responded with some of the harshest lockdown restrictions in the world. Faeza Meyer lives in a township in the Cape Flats on the outskirts of Cape Town and is finding social distancing and getting enough food difficult in cramped conditions. Businesses have also been hit hard as we hear from Thato Rangaka-Maroga in Johannesburg who runs five family businesses - all but one of which are now closed. We also talk to Dr Mary Stephen, from the World Health Organisation’s Africa office in Brazzaville, Congo and Isaac Matshego, an economist at Nedbank in Johannesburg. (Picture: The South African National Defence Force patrols the streets of Cape Town during the national lockdown by Brenton Geach for Getty Images).
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Tamerson Ford. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Living under lockdown is |
| 0:09.2 | challenging for everyone. But for millions of people in South Africa, it's quickly becoming a |
| 0:15.0 | situation of life and death. All of us, we want to be protected from this virus. We want to stay indoors. We want to |
| 0:22.2 | be in shutdown like everyone else. But we can't. How can we be in shutdown when our survival |
| 0:28.0 | depends on what we bring in or what we make today? That's the reality for the millions of people |
| 0:34.3 | who live a day-to-day existence. For those who do have jobs, they're rapidly |
| 0:39.8 | disappearing too. We had to close down four of our five businesses, our building material store, |
| 0:47.0 | our liquor store, our pizza restaurant, and then we close down our guest house. So that's a lot of |
| 0:53.1 | people that we've had to tell to go home |
| 0:55.7 | and we honestly can't pay them. |
| 0:58.4 | Many are now asking if the cure is worse than the disease. |
| 1:02.8 | That's all in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 1:09.2 | So I'm outside my gate standing in the street just looking around. |
| 1:13.6 | You know, as you can hear, people are busy fixing their windy houses. |
| 1:18.6 | I live in a backyard shack myself. |
| 1:21.6 | Very common type of house. |
| 1:24.6 | People who have put extended checks onto other people's homes in the backyard or in the |
| 1:31.4 | front yard, wherever there's space. On some spaces, there's almost two or three what we call |
| 1:38.6 | wendy houses. We are a family of 10. We have one toilet for nine people and my father uses his own. |
| 1:49.3 | But there's still people walking outside, moving around. |
| 1:53.3 | Probably those trying to secure food or medicine, whatever it is that they need. |
| 1:58.9 | 44-year-old Faiza Meyer lives in a township in the Cape Flats |
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