Today’s threads pull together voices from Australia, Florida, Canada and a brief snippet of PANDA’s first foray into a German-language publication. With calls for global peaceful demonstrations on 20 March 2021 getting louder, PANDA supports everyone’s right to demonstrate peacefully against lockdowns and the loss of civil liberties in the name of pandemic management. The question is not whether there is a pandemic - the question has always been ‘how do we respond to it?’ On 15 March 2021, South Africa reached its 1-year anniversary of the ongoing State of Disaster. Since February, the government has stopped the televised press briefings (or ‘family meetings’ as they were referred to) announcing the monthly extensions of the State of Disaster. Why are we not invited to family meetings anymore? They ensured lots of discussion among the public. Now all is quiet and the relentless extensions are no longer brought up in conversation. Is it a foregone conclusion that we are to remain under the governance of the undemocratic Disaster Management Act ad infinitum? South Africa, we need to talk. |