Africans Worst Responders in Ebola Crisis
Fri, 10/31/2014 - 10:18am
In
this Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2014 file photo, Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma,
chairperson of the African Union Commission, speaks at United Nations
headquarters in New York. The head of Africa’s continental body did not
get to an Ebola-hit country until last week - months after alarm bells
first rang and nearly 5,000 deaths later. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File)The
head of Africa's continental body did not get to an Ebola-hit country
until last week - months after alarm bells first rang and nearly 5,000
deaths later.
Pledges to deploy 2,000 African health workers have remained largely that - promises.
No African countries are on the United Nations list of contributors to fight the epidemic.
The
E-word did not even figure on the agenda of a session on peace and
security at the Pan-African Parliament in South Africa last week - more
than a month after the U.N. Security Council declared the Ebola outbreak
a "threat to international peace and security."
Angry
legislators from Sierra Leone and Liberia got up to protest. "They said
as far as they are concerned, nobody wants to talk about Ebola," said
Jeggan Grey-Johnson, a governance expert who watched the session.
"They
said countries like Liberia feel totally abandoned by the rest of
Africa and shut off from the rest of the continent," he told The
Associated Press.
With few exceptions, African
governments and institutions are offering only marginal support as the
continent faces its most deadly threat in years, once again depending on
the international community to save them.
Ebola
"caught us by surprise," the chairwoman of the 53-nation African Union,
Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, said this week at a meeting with the U.N.
secretary-general and the World Bank president in Ethiopia.
"With
the wisdom of hindsight, our responses at all levels - continental,
global and national - were slow, and often knee-jerk reactions that did
not always help," she said.
She is a medical
doctor from South Africa, where mining magnate Patrice Motsepe Tuesday
announced he has donated $1 million to the fight against Ebola in
Guinea, where the outbreak started.
Motsepe's
gift, the largest donation by far from any African individual, came
after the World Food Program lashed out at China's billionaires, saying
their contributions lagged behind their companies' huge economic
interests in the mineral-rich region. Motsepe's office said his company
has no interests in any of the countries where Ebola is raging out of
control - Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.
"Ebola
is first and foremost our problem," the president of the African
Development Bank, Donald Kaberuka, told a business forum in Brussels
this month. "Before relying on international aid, we must first
encourage Africans to take action."
The African
Development Bank is the second largest institutional contributor to the
U.N. fund to fight Ebola, second only to the World Bank, having given
$45.4 million and promised another $17.4 million.
By
contrast, the African Union has made an "uncommitted pledge" of just
$700,000. Africa's equivalent of the Organization of America States, it
is the body many believe should have taken the lead from the start.
The
WHO identified the first Ebola case in Guinea on March 21; on March 30
the virus crossed the border into Liberia; Sierra Leone reported its
first two cases on May 30. On June 20, with some 330 recorded deaths,
Doctors Without Borders warned that the outbreak was "totally out of
control."
Yet it was only on Sept. 20 that the
first team of 30 military and civilian volunteers were deployed by a
newly designated African Union Support to the Ebola Outbreak in West
Africa. Most costs for that mission are being paid by the U.S. and other
governments.
Jacob Enoh Eben, spokesman for the
AU chairwoman, said more than 2,000 volunteers have been pledged to
date: 1,000 from Congo, 600 from the East African Community, 500 from
Ethiopia and 506 from Nigeria.
But he said they still need to know "when the first of these pledges will materialize."
Those
promised volunteers are only a tiny fraction of the number needed to
stem the outbreak. The European Union said this week it is looking to
put 40,000 local and European workers into place in the affected
countries.
Uganda and Congo, which both have
experienced Ebola outbreaks in the past, already have medical teams
deployed in Liberia, under contract to WHO and not funded by their
governments.
It is difficult to say how many Africans are deployed on the front lines of the Ebola battle.
In
Uganda, Dr. Anthony Mbonye, the commissioner for community health
services at Uganda's Health Ministry, said he believes up to 40 Ugandan
health workers are on the ground but that most traveled privately. He
said the Ministry of Health had officially approved the deployment of
about 10 doctors to Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.
South
Africa has been the most responsive African country and has budgeted
$3.2 million, according to the Department of Health. That includes
funding for a mobile testing lab operating in Sierra Leone since August.
The
continental body's lack of a robust response "showed the fragility of
our African Union, so heavily dependent on the international community
to rescue us from catastrophe," said Isata Kabia, a Sierra Leonean
legislator at the Pan-African Parliament.
"We
cannot blame the WHO for their lack of knowledge; we can't blame the EU
for lack of interest," she told The Associated. "But I think the AU
should not only have led the response but also the requests to the
international community." http://www.dddmag.com/news/2014/10/africans-worst-responders-ebola-crisis
