Social Distancing and Distanced Societies: A Case study of leadership in the early days of COVID-19 in South Africa

Abstract

The outbreak of COVID-19 This paper provides a leadership analysis of the first five months of the COVID-19 response in South Africa. Societal mobilisation requires a unified and rapid response to crisis, meaning that effective leadership must reach all areas of society. This paper examines the strength of the leadership foundation by applying Olanisakin and Walsh’s markers of sustained influence to two disparate communities in Durban, South Africa: Inanda, a working-class township, and Durban North, a middle-class suburb. A case study was produced using social media, news articles, and government communications to compare mobilisation in the two neighbourhoods. This paper argues that the sense of the threat posed by COVID-19, as articulated by the government, was not shared across society. While Durban North residents felt the medical threat of the virus, people living in Inanda were more concerned with the threat of poverty. This research found that the government's COVID-19 policies did not sufficiently protect those living outside of everyday structures of governance, such as informal workers, and this led to an exacerbation of pre-existing inequalities. Without a common sense of what is at stake, and a common experience of this threat, it is difficult to establish a ‘whole society’ response. While a strong software of leadership infrastructure enables action based on trust and shared values of togetherness, a weakness in the software can lead to reliance on the hardware of leadership infrastructure, which in this example reproduces existing inequalities within society.