Abstract:
President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that a national lockdown would commence on 26 March 2020 in response to COVID-19 or what some have labelled, the ‘panic pandemic’. Since the start of the lockdown, reports and articles on the economic effect of the lockdown have been ubiquitous. The South African Reserve Bank (SARB) predicted that South Africa’s gross domestic product (GDP) would shrink by 6.1% in 2020 and other sources claimed that the contraction would be around 8%. Most sources noted that the unemployed and informal workers will suffer the most and that “the hardship will fall hardest on black people, and especially black women and children”.
