Pretoria - Minister of International Relations and Co-operation Maite Nkoana-Mashabane put her arm around her counterpart from Guinea on Monday to demonstrate her confidence in the measures his government is taking to prevent the spread of the deadly and highly infectious Ebola virus.
“Well, here I am touching my brother,” she said in Pretoria, when asked if South Africa should not be putting in place its own measures to prevent Ebola entering this country from the West African country.
“Don’t worry,” Minister Francois Fall added.
He offered the assurance that before they caught their flight to South Africa, he, all members of his delegation, and South Africa’s ambassador to Guinea, Nomasonto Sibanda-Thusi, had gone through a screening process at Conakry airport to ensure they weren’t carrying the virus.
“We have a medical crew on hand who check every single passenger – outgoing and incoming – to make sure we control the disease,” he said at a press conference after meeting Nkoana-Mashabane at talks by the two countries’ Joint Commission for Co-operation.
Guinea has been annoyed by its neighbour, Senegal, closing their common border to contain an Ebola outbreak. To date, 157 suspected cases, with 101 deaths, have been reported in Guinea, and 21 suspected cases in Liberia, with 10 deaths among them.
Fall said his country had the disease under control through quarantining infected patients, and had four of them had recovered.
“Our priority now is that we are happy that Guinea, working with the countries in the neighbourhood, have taken full charge of the situation,” Nkoana-Mashabane said.
“I think we are also making a statement, by receiving this delegation led by Minister Fall, that we are confident they are doing the right things and that’s why he didn’t need to be quarantined at the airport.”
Nkoana-Mashabane said the AU was devising strategies on how African research institutions could work with the World Health Organisation to discover vaccines for diseases like Ebola.
“When an outbreak like this comes about, we don’t only worry about how we seal our borders, but also how we should be combat-ready for any other outbreak that would originate from any corner of our continent.”
Fall said his government had been shocked when NGO Doctors Without Borders, also known by its French name Médecins Sans Frontières, had described the Ebola outbreak in Guinea as the worst yet.
This was not true because many more people had died in Ebola outbreaks in other African countries, he said.
“We are controlling the disease and we have even cured some people.
“And we’d also like to inform you that the ambassador of South Africa in Conakry, Guinea, took the same flight we took and that she is here in South Africa,” Fall added.
“She was not evacuated,” Nkoana-Mashabane quipped. - Independent Foreign Editor