When asked “what are you doing about Ebola?”, leaders should not go on the defensive to protect Africa’s reputation, says Peter Fabricius.
Pretoria - Someone in the Americas asked this weekend if they should cancel their plans to fly through OR Tambo International Airport in transit to the east. The airport is a major regional hub and were many West Africans not using it, potentially carrying Ebola, they asked.
That email abruptly brought home the immediate perils for South Africa of the Ebola outbreak; even if it never reaches here, many potential travellers from the wider world might now be scrapping visits to this country, with serious economic consequences.
Are we being unfairly lumped together with Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone just because we’re in Africa? Perhaps, since there have been a few confirmed Ebola cases in the US and one in Spain but none, so far, in South Africa.
Yet the person in the Americas asked a legitimate question, out of a reasonable concern for safety.
The question recalled a revealing moment at US President Barack Obama’s US-Africa leaders’ summit in Washington in August when Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete was asked in a panel discussion what Africa was doing about Ebola.
Kikwete retorted, rather acidly, that “Tanzania is in East Africa and Ebola is in West Africa”. Too often, he added, “the whole of the African continent is perceived as if everywhere, everybody is suffering from Ebola”.
President Jacob Zuma agreed and added, for good measure, that African governments had the virus under control.
The African leaders – and many fellow Africans listening – were clearly annoyed that at a summit that was supposed to present the positive “Africa Rising” narrative, they were being asked the same dreary questions about disease (and war, as it happened).
Yet two months later, far from Zuma’s reassurances, Ebola is raging out of control in the three epicentre counties and threatening to spread beyond.
This week the head of the African Development Bank, Donald Kaberuka, criticised the international response to the Ebola outbreak as too little, too late.
“It was treated as a small, local public health problem in a remote part of Africa with no global significance,” he said, adding that Ebola should be treated as SARS and mad cow disease were and not as a disease of Africans.
But if Kikwete was telling the world early in August that Ebola was a West African disease and Zuma was providing assurances that Africa had it under control, why should the international community not have treated it as a localised problem?
In fact at that time, the US was already gearing up considerable resources to fight Ebola. And the international community, though perhaps tardily, was following suit.
Yet the attitude of some of the African leaders taken together implies that one should expect the world to look the other way, to avoid focusing unflattering attention on Africa, and yet also mobilise its utmost resources to come to our rescue.
Was it too much to have expected a reaction from the African leaders in that panel discussion that was simply geared to the urgency of the crisis?
To have expected a practical answer to the question, apparently asked in good faith, about what Africa was doing to contain Ebola?
Rather than an emotional response to what he perceived to be the underlying prejudice in the question?
It is true, as Senegal’s President Macky Sall said in that panel discussion, that Ebola is just an aircraft flight away from spreading anywhere in the world.
So it is, of course, by no means an African disease. But, let’s face it, it has done its worst work by far in Africa to date. In the current outbreak, the worst ever, all but a handful of the 4 000-plus people who have died, have been Africans.
And so, if only out of solidarity with their fellow Africans, those African leaders should have been going on the offensive against the disease, along with the rest of the international community, not going on the defensive to protect the continent’s reputation, when they were asked “what are you doing about Ebola?”.
* Peter Fabricius is Independent Newspapers’ foreign editor.
Pretoria News