End the curfew now!

I launched this #NoCurfewOnNewYearsEve petition on change.org yesterday which has gone viral since and gotten over the 1000 signature mark a few hours ago.

Update December 30th: The curfew is gone! Government just lifted the curfew with immediate effect! BEERHOUSE will host the biggest NYE party in Cape Town with all of Long Street being closed for cars!

The combination of an impactful petition and diverse voices from various spheres of society made this campaign effective. Many church-goers and the DA opposition joined the #NoCurfewOnNewYearsEve war cry and gave their own story and angle to ours. Today, Thursday at 2 pm I received the first messages from a trusted friend in Johannesburg, that we might get a surprise present and by 8 pm it was confirmed after a special Cabinet meeting and made global headlines later that night…

Original posting: To end the 11pm – 4 am curfew and allow businesses (like my own BEERHOUSE) and tourism to succeed again, I launched this petition as part of the #NoCurfewOnNewYearsEve campaign and ask everyone to sign and share it too!

The following were the most prominent media appearances that followed in the next 48 hours:

• eNCA – Calls mount to lift curfew
• Newzroom Africa – A #NoCurfewOnNewYearsEve petition goes viral
• SABC News – Voices call for curfew to be lifted, arguing it will boost hospitality industry
• [su_youtube url=”https://youtu.be/jMJAokl12NI” title=”Voices call for curfew to be lifted, arguing it will boost hospitality industry”]
• SABC’s SAfm “Business owners launch #NoCurfewOnNewYearsEve petition”
• SABC’s SAfm “Business owners launch #NoCurfewOnNewYearsEve petition”
• CapeTalk & 702 morning radio interview, many online articles and thousands of tweets… 👍💛

I got several reasons why I have not been back to South Africa since leaving for a quick ‘winter break’ and escaped lockdown in South Africa in June 2020:
a) my public awareness campaign against the Cape Town racketeers resulted in death threats and phone surveillance against me and murder of the investigating officer Charl Kinnear.
b) I decided not to return to a society that locks up their citizens in their own homes due with a curfew that lasts from midnight to 4 am every day. I’ve enjoyed the privilege of traveling wherever lockdowns are not currently happening and had an exciting journey traveling America for 5+ months in a pink limo and explore new opportunities abroad, best followed on my @YellowRandolf Instagram.

Dear Mr. President,

South Africans deserve to be free to celebrate NYE 2021 with their friends and families instead of having to be locked into their homes for 1/6th of every day, from midnight – 4 am!

For the last 21 months, we’ve been living with a curfew that has not shown to have any effect on the transmission of the Covid-19 virus that is not known to keep working hours.

Instead, it has introduced an element against our very democracy that infringes on our basic rights enshrined in the constitution. It goes against the very ethos of what the majority of South Africans fought for over the decades.

We have gone through the 4th, Omicron wave, with remarkably low hospital admission-numbers and there is therefore no justification for limiting these rights. 

Ironically South Africa has seen enormous economic devastation from Covid-induced lockdowns and seen blows to our reputation from intense travel bans and international isolation due to two variants discovered by our scientists. We decided to follow an agenda prescribed by the West which had not accounted for the dynamics particular to our country and continent in general.

We should be sending a message to the world that South Africa is very much open for business and visitors. We need at this stage not just a passive signal, but an active one. Ending the curfew is the message we so desperately need and NYE is the perfect time to do so.

The curfew is impossible to justify in terms of the science of preventing the spread of the Virus. It is useful in terms of messaging a public in the urgent need to change behavior. We argue that the utility of this has passed. It is time to bring our citizenry back to normality, that is the new message required.

The curfew is beginning to have the taste of a police state at this point. It is only serving to keep the law abiding at home. It may have some benefits in terms of crime reduction and trauma reduction, but these benefits stand against basic freedom, our constitution, and are impossible to justify in a free society. 

Celebrating New Years Eve 2021 under curfew rule would invite unequal use of power by the police. The pictures of random arrests as regular citizens celebrate outside their homes, should ring all your alarm bells and would send the opposite message our tourism industry now needs.

We urge you Mr President to do the right thing, the brave thing and lift the curfew now and help rescue our economy and bring back civil liberties in 2022!

About us: this petition was initiated by BEERHOUSE founder Randolf Jorberg and the Hospitality Leadership group, a nationwide interest group for the hospitality industry.

Randolf Jorberg, Beerhouse, Cape Town 
Ebrahim Asmal, SIX Melville, Johannesburg
David Donde, Truth Coffee Roasting, Cape Town