Tag: West Africa

Ebola threatening Liberia’s existence, minister warns

Health workers at ELWA’s hospital isolation camp in Liberia. (Pic: Reuters)

Ebola is threatening the very existence of Liberia as the killer virus spreads like “wild fire”, the defence minister warned Tuesday, following a grim World Health Organisation assessment that the worst is yet to come.

After predicting an “exponential increase” in infections across West Africa, the WHO warned that Liberia, which has accounted for half of all fatalities, could initially only hope to slow the contagion, not stop it.

“Liberia is facing a serious threat to its national existence,” Defence Minister Brownie Samukai told a meeting of the UN Security Council on Tuesday.

The disease is “now spreading like wild fire, devouring everything in its path,” he said.

The WHO upped the Ebola death toll on Tuesday to 2 296 out of 4 293 cases in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Nigeria as of September 6. Nearly half of all infections had occurred in the past 21 days, it said.

The agency also evacuated its second infected medical expert, a doctor who had been working at an Ebola treatment centre in Sierra Leone.

Emory University Hospital in the United States admitted an American on Tuesday who had contracted the disease in west Africa, but declined to confirm whether the patient was the WHO employee.

The hospital has successfully treated two other infected US nationals.

Ebola, transmitted through bodily fluids, leads to haemorrhagic fever and – in over half of cases – death. There is no specific treatment regime and no licensed vaccine.

The latest WHO figures underscore Ebola’s asymmetric spread, as it rips through densely populated communities with decrepit health facilities and poor public awareness campaigns.

Speaking on Tuesday, WHO’s epidemiology chief Sylvie Briand said the goal in Senegal and Nigeria was now “to stop transmission completely”. Senegal has announced only one infection, while Nigeria has recorded 19 infections and eight deaths.

The Democratic Republic of Congo is battling a separate outbreak which has killed 32 in a remote northwestern region.

“But in other locations, like Monrovia, where we have really wide community transmission, we are aiming at two-step strategies,” Briand said in Geneva, “first, to reduce the transmission as much as possible and, when it becomes controllable, we will also try to stop it completely.

“But at this point in time we need to be pragmatic and try to reduce it in the initial steps.”

A day earlier the WHO had warned that aid organisations trying to help Liberia to respond would “need to prepare to scale up their current efforts by three- to four-fold”.

Before the current outbreak, it noted, Liberia only had one doctor for every 100 000 patients in a population of 4.4 million.

In Montserrado county, which contains Monrovia, there are no spare beds at the few Ebola treatment sites operating, the WHO said.

It described how infected people were being driven to centres only to be turned away, return home and create “flare-ups” of deadly fever in their villages.

It said 1 000 beds are needed – far more than the 240 currently operational and 260 planned.

Guinea’s President Alpha Conde described Ebola as a “war” his nation – with 555 dead so far – needed to win.

He slammed neighbouring states including Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal for shutting their borders, and airlines for suspending flights to affected countries.

“They forget that when you close borders, people just go through the bush. It’s better to have official passages of transit,” he said.

African Union commission chief Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma also called Monday for travel bans to be lifted “to open up economic activities”.

In Gambia, customs officials said Tuesday they had closed the borders to Guineans, Liberians, Nigerians and Sierra Leoneans – though not to neighbouring Senegal.

“We are also advising Gambians intending to travel to these countries to cancel their trips, but any Gambian who fails to heed our advice, we will not allow you in the country if you return,” Ebrima Kurumah, a health officer posted at the border with Senegal, told AFP.

There were restrictions further afield, too. China, one of the region’s main investors, announced on Tuesday it was reinforcing checks on people, goods and vehicles – and even mail – arriving from affected countries.

Meanwhile, Italy announced its first possible case of Ebola – a woman recently returned from Nigeria.

10 years ago

Ebola taking toll on West African economy

Locals in a market in Kenema, Sierra Leone. (Pic: AFP)

The worst-ever outbreak of the Ebola virus is taking a heavy toll on West Africa’s economy as crops rot in the fields, mines are abandoned and goods cannot get to market.

The epidemic has ravaged the region since it erupted in the forests in the south of Guinea earlier this year, killing 1 427 people and infecting thousands more.

On Friday health officials said the fever had spread to every corner of Liberia, the worst-hit country in the grip of the epidemic where 624 people have died so far.

But beyond the mounting death toll, the disease is also undermining the region’s economic growth and threatening the long-term development of some of the world’s poorest countries.

“It is a total catastrophe. We are losing lots of money,” said Alhaji Bamogo, who sells clothes in the market in the Liberian capital Monrovia.

“All those who are coming to the market come only to buy food or products for the disinfection of Ebola,” he said.

Economic crisis
Across the resource-rich countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Nigeria, companies are suspending operations due to fears of the haemorrhagic fever, which is spread through contact with bodily fluids.

Steel giant ArcelorMittal this month said the contractors at its expanding iron ore works in Liberia had suspended operations and were pulling out staff.

Several international airlines have halted their flights to west Africa in a move that Moody’s ratings agency warns “will exact an economic toll” on the region.

And in Nigeria, Africa’s top oil producer and most populous country where 15 cases have been identified and five people have died, experts warn that the impact for the regional economy could be dire if the disease takes hold.

“The Ebola epidemic is not just a public health crisis, but an economic crisis… affecting many sectors of activity,” the president of the African Development Bank, Donald Kaberuka warned this month.

Too dangerous to invest
Philippe Hugon, Africa research director at the French think-tank IRIS, said the biggest threat for west Africa is a long-term pullout of global companies that the region relies on.

“Everything depends on whether this stays limited or whether the epidemic continues to spread in a prolonged way. The heads of foreign businesses on the ground are very concerned,” he said.

The epidemic may “reinforce the idea that Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia are countries where it is dangerous to live — because of diseases like Ebola and AIDS — and thus to invest in,” he said.

The disease is also exacting a direct economic toll on the countries where it is spreading by sapping already stretched government budgets.

Moody’s warned it will squeeze state coffers from all sides, by forcing both “increased health expenditures, and… an Ebola-induced economic slowdown on government revenue generation”.

This month the African Development Bank pledged $60 million to support the over-stretched health systems of the four affected countries.

Critics have accused west Africa’s governments of being slow to admit the extent of the problem because of the cost of deploying resources to fight the disease.

Amadou Soumah, a trade union official in Guinea, which only last week declared a national emergency despite being at the epicentre of the outbreak earlier this year, said the government had played down the crisis “to stop investors fleeing”.

And now “Guinea is going to deploy its forces along the border to rack up even more spending,” he added, referring to the closure of its frontiers with Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Food shortages
For people on the ground, the epidemic has created an even more pressing problem: food shortages.

In the markets, supplies of staple commodities such as rice are already dwindling, with only the bravest traders willing to venture far afield to buy stocks.

In quarantined zones in Sierra Leone and Liberia, key cash crops such as cocoa and coffee have been left rotting in the fields as farmers fear to stray far from home.

“People are going to move around less and less,” said Philippe De Vreyer, a specialist in west African economics and professor at the University of Paris.

“For instance, the man who usually goes to the local market to sell his vegetables will decide to stay home. People are not going to get their supplies, with all that entails.”

In Nigeria, even though it is the least hit by the epidemic, Ebola fears are already keeping people indoors.

So far the epidemic has not threatened the economically vital oil industry, which is centred in the southern Niger Delta about 1 000 kilometres from Lagos, where the cases have been found.

The service industry is feeling the effects, however.

“Bookings to hotels have dropped by almost 30 percent so far this month, as have orders for food and drink for large social gatherings like weddings and funerals,” said Bismarck Rewane, head of the Lagos-based Financial Derivatives Company.

Zoom Dosso for AFP

10 years ago

How Ebola challenges the ‘Africa Rising’ narrative

A medical worker checks his protective clothing at an MSF facility in Kailahun, Sierra Leone. (Pic: AFP)

A Cameroonian friend shares a conversation between two of his fellow nationals in an airport. One of them remarks that he is not feeling too well. The immediate, and hysterical, reaction of the other is that he must have Ebola.

“Maybe you’ve been infected with Ebola from those Lagos passengers at the arrival hall,” my friends recounts one of them saying.

On Twitter, a Kenyan user notes that passengers on flights from Entebbe to Nairobi are not being screened for Ebola. The checks are inconsistent, he notes, meaning the disease can be brought in to the nation via Uganda.

Last week, a hoax did the rounds on Whatsapp as Zimbabweans shared a Photoshopped version of a local newspaper with a headline claiming that the country had confirmed its first Ebola patients.

With news that the DRC has reported its first two cases of Ebola, fear and panic is set to deepen if the virus continues to spread outside of west Africa. A meme doing the rounds on social media shows a surge of people running in all directions from a central location with a caption to the effect, “When Pastor says someone in the congregation has Ebola and he’s going to heal them.”

It may all seem a joke, especially for Africans who are geographically distanced from the epidemic’s epicentre, but a scenario as posited in that meme is probably not far from becoming a reality. With inadequate health response mechanisms bedevilling many parts of the continent, death from Ebola remains a real threat.

But as West African nations seal their borders to protect their nationals, as international airlines abandon routes that ply nations worst affected by the epidemic, and as western nations claim and evacuate their citizens affected by the disease, a larger problem beyond the virality of Ebola – both physical and mediated – is festering.

Over the last few years, meticulous work has gone into crafting the ‘Africa Rising’ narrative; a narrative founded upon the continent’s rising economies (like South Africa and Nigeria), the emergence of tech and innovation (think Kenya) and the growth of a middle class that we might call ‘post-African’; savvy, urban, cosmopolitan with no flies to swat off their faces and no begging bowls in their manicured hands.

In a May editorial, David Brooks of the New York Times wrote about ‘The Real Africa’ wherein he cited various economic measures – trade and mobile phone growth among others – to show why Africa has become “the test case of 21st-century modernity”.

The challenge I have always had with this narrative is that while the statistics do point to a truth, another truth, a truth of lack, still prevails.

Across the different parts of Africa I have had the privilege to visit in the west, east and south of this continent, I have seen the consumerist dream (high-end malls, cars, mansions and general financial exuberance) coexist with abjection, poverty and depleted social services. The rich do exist, but they are not the majority.

In many ways, the spread of Ebola shows up this suitable Africa Rising narrative. It shows hysteria, fear and othering, things which many Africans in poverty already have to live with daily, away from the narratives of luxury. Quite instantly, Ebola has become ‘the great leveller’ among Africans, reperpetuating stereotypes of barbarism and savagery; that Africans eat ‘strange foods’ like fruit bats and bush meat and other ‘filthy creatures’, that we are unclean, diseased and therefore dangerous.

A photograph taken from the window of a bar in Seoul, South Korea, aptly shows how collective and inclusive this othering has become. “We apologize, but due To Ebola virus, we are not accepting Africans at the moment,” the notice reads. The Daily Beast reports that in Italy, some schools have warned that pupils of African origin will require additional health certification before returning to school; something which has not been deemed necessary for white pupils who may have travelled to Africa over the summer vacation.

In palpable ways, Ebola has opened up way for the ‘dark continent’ narrative to re-emerge, if it ever really disappeared. And in its inclusivity, Africa is collapsed into one territory, one country, one race, even if the fatality of Ebola represents about 0.15% of the continent. Through these short-cut understandings emerges a dominant global hysteria that lends itself to racial profiling and generalisations that make me wonder just how far, if at all, the discourse around blackness has progressed.

But the converse of this argument shows us, as Africans, being complicit in this typecasting in many ways. Ebola is serving to deepen regionalism (west Africa versus the rest of Africa) and the dangerous sort of nationalism that has often led to ineffectual collaboration across the continent; a superiority complex we tend to develop when we buy too deeply into the Africa rising ideology. Therefore, it is a ‘them’ that is diseased, a ‘them’ that must be avoided at all costs. And the great irony of it all is that a few months ago, the continent banded together to support African teams at the World Cup, the majority of them from the region that has since been affected most deeply by Ebola.

As we rail against news channels like CNN getting the geographical locations of Niger and Nigeria wrong, let us not forget the challenges we face beyond the semantics, which I agree are essential to get correct. If Africa – given its wealth of human and natural resources – cannot contain Ebola, then we must sober up and accept that we haven’t risen to where we should be, given the accompanying discourse of booming economies and commodity markets.

The truth, for me, is somewhere between the dichotomies (“rising” and “darkness”) that have been constructed for easy navigation of, and interaction with, Africa. The continent has great promise and developments, but it also has many challenges to overcome. For how do we term it rising if we must constantly fall to our feet in failure to respond to our own problems?

Fungai Machirori is a blogger, editor, poet and researcher. She runs Zimbabwe’s first web-based platform for women, Her Zimbabwe, and is an advocate for using social media for consciousness-building among Zimbabweans. Connect with her on Twitter.

10 years ago

Recognition for Nigerian architect’s ‘floating school’

Two years ago, a floating school in Lagos’s ‘floating’ slum of Makoko was labelled as ‘illegal’ by authorities who then threatened to demolish it. This year the school, which is the brainchild of Nigerian architect Kunlé Adeyemi, was nominated for the London-based Design Museum’s Design of the Year award.

The Makoko Floating School was built for the Makoko water community in Lagos. (Pic: NLÉ / Iwan Baan)

Adeyemi is the founder of NLE, a design and architecture company focused on creating sustainable buildings in developing regions. His innovative design came about after he had had several discussions with Makoko residents about how to resolve the environmental issues – such as flooding – that concerned the local community. He and his team came up with a prototype for a floating building, which is now the Makoko Floating School.

“There are hundreds if not thousands of Makokos all over Africa,” Adeyemi says. “We cannot simply displace this population; it’s important to think about how to develop them, how to create enabling environments for them to thrive, to improve the sanitation conditions, to provide the infrastructure, schools and hospitals to make it a healthy place.

“My belief is that in developing Africa we need to find solutions that can be developed by the grassroots, through the grassroots, and achieve the same level of significance as we have on the high-end projects.”

Read more about the construction of Makoko Floating School

Now, in a new documentary series by Al Jazeera that looks at unconventional pioneers in the architecture industry, Adeyemi’s floating school is brought to life in the episode “Working On Water”, directed by award-winning South African filmmaker Riaan Hendricks. Launched on August 18, the six-part Rebel Architecture series will air every Monday through to September 22.

Dynamic Africa is a curated multimedia blog focused on all facets of African cultures, African history, and the lives and experiences of Africans on the continent and in the diaspora – past and present. Visit the blog and connect with the curator, Funke Makinwa, on Twitter.

10 years ago

Ebola epidemic sparks state of emergency across West Africa

A fast-spreading Ebola epidemic sparked a state of emergency in overwhelmed West African nations on Thursday as the death toll neared 1 000.

In Liberia, where the dead lay in the streets, lawmakers gathered to ratify a state of emergency while Sierra Leone sent troops to guard hospitals and clinics handling Ebola cases. Nigeria held out hope it could receive an experimental US-developed drug to halt the spread of the virus.

Since breaking out earlier this year, the epidemic has claimed 932 lives and infected more than 1 700 people across west Africa, according to the World Health Organisation.

Staff and volunteers at the ELWA hospital in the Liberian capital Monrovia. (Pic: AFP)

Ebola causes severe fever and, in the worst cases, unstoppable bleeding. It is transmitted through close contact with bodily fluids, and people who live with or care for patients are most at risk.

Spanish priest, nun evacuated
As African nations struggled with the sheer scale of the epidemic, Spain flew home a 75-year-old Roman Catholic priest, Miguel Pajares, who contracted the disease while helping patients at a hospital in the Liberian capital Monrovia.

The missionary was the first patient in the outbreak to be evacuated to Europe for treatment.

A specially equipped military Airbus A310 brought him to Madrid’s Torrejon air base along with a Spanish nun, Juliana Bonoha Bohe, who had worked at the same Liberian hospital but did not test positive for the deadly haemorrhagic fever, the Spanish government said.

Immediately after landing Thursday morning, ambulances took the pair to Madrid’s Carlos III Hospital, which specialises in tropical diseases.

The priest was stable and showing no sign of bleeding while the nun appeared to be well but would be re-tested for Ebola just in case, health officials said.

Two Americans who worked for Christian aid agencies in Liberia and were infected with Ebola while taking care of patients in Monrovia were taken back to the United States for treatment in recent days.

They have shown signs of improvement after being given an experimental drug known as ZMapp, which is hard to produce on a large scale.

The vast majority of those infected face a far inferior level of health care at home.

State of emergency in Liberia, Sierra Leone
There is no proven treatment or cure for Ebola and the use of the experimental drug has sparked controversy as Ebola experts call for it to be made available to African victims.

Liberia President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf declared a state of emergency of at least 90 days on Wednesday, saying extraordinary measures were needed “for the very survival of our state”.

“The scope and scale of the epidemic, the virulence and deadliness of the virus now exceed the capacity and statutory responsibility of any one government agency or ministry,” she said.

Liberia’s Parliament is to ratify the decision on Thursday.

In Sierra Leone, which has the most confirmed infections, 800 troops including 50 military nurses were sent to guard hospitals and clinics treating Ebola patients, an army spokesman said. The Parliament was to meet to ratify a state of emergency declared last week.

Nigeria
Fears are growing that the disease is also taking hold in Nigeria after the death of a nurse in Lagos, a megacity of more than 20 million. It was the second Ebola death in Nigeria, where another five people have tested positive for the disease.

Nigeria’s Health Minister Onyebuchi Chukwu told reporters he was in contact with the US Center for Disease Control on the possibility of getting drugs from them.

“I said we are getting reports that this experimental drug seems to be useful. Is it also possible that we can have access for our people presently being treated and under incubation?” he said Wednesday.

Chukwu said all seven confirmed cases in his country had “primary contact” with a Liberian finance ministry employee who brought the virus to Lagos on July 20 and died later in hospital.

US President Barack Obama said it was too soon to send experimental drugs for the treatment of Ebola to west Africa, however, urging officials instead to focus on building a “strong public infrastructure”.

“I think we have to let the science guide us. And I don’t think all the information is in on whether this drug is helpful,” Obama said on Wednesday.

WHO emergency session
The World Health Organisation is meeting in emergency session behind closed doors in Geneva to decide whether to declare an international crisis. It is not expected to make a decision until Friday.

A Saudi Arabian who had travelled to Sierra Leone and developed Ebola-like symptoms died on Wednesday of a heart attack while being treated in hospital in Jeddah, the Saudi health ministry said.

First discovered in 1976 and named after a river in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ebola spreads through contact with bodily fluids such as blood, saliva and sweat.

It has killed around two-thirds of those it has infected over the last four decades, with two outbreaks registering fatality rates approaching 90 percent. The latest outbreak has a fatality rate of around 55 percent.