A brief tale of Covid priorities in Africa

What Africans have been telling me about Covid this year

The arrival of the Omicron variant has finally, although rather unfairly, brought some of the focus in the pandemic onto Africa. There is at least now more discussion of the inequalities in the system that is putting profit before people, leaving Africans at the bottom of the vaccine supply chain. Having spent this year living in Africa and I ought to add, living with Africans, entirely disconnected from any expat communities, I’ve been getting a different message from what little talk there is in the West about the pandemic in Africa.

I’ve certainly encountered a degree of scepticism among many, which on the surface may appear to echo that found in the West, but in fact is coming from a totally different source. This brief tale will help illustrate that point.

I recently accompanied my friend Paulin on a trip to his home village, here in northern Benin, to oversee the processing of his modest maize crop. After the work, chatting with his family, they were laughing about how people had come the previous week to give them vaccinations against Covid. Surely that’s a good thing, why did they find it funny? I hear you ask. Firstly, you need to know where they live: from the nearest road, it’s at the dead end of a bumpy, twenty minute motorbike ride down a dirt track, followed by a fifteen minute walk. You’d have to wonder what the chances of ever catching Covid were in the first place, unless it was brought by the vaccination team. With at a minimum of 100m, often much more between each house and virtually all interactions taking place outdoors, even if someone got infected, it would be almost impossible for it to spread beyond the immediate family.

More to the point however, are the conditions of life here. Most live in traditional mud buildings without toilets or electricity and their drinking water from the well is a murky, grey colour. The kids are often with distended bellies, only partly clothed, even then dirty and ragged. One had a festering wound with no means of treating and bandaging it, while his stick thin baby brother had birth defects brought about by malnutrition. Shifting the maize supplies had killed a family of mice that gave the children improvised toys for a while, before they roasted them on the fire to eat with their grubby hands.

This year, climate change brought more problems, as the rainy season had lasted a month longer than usual, delaying harvesting and reducing crop yields. The other reason for Paulin’s limited crop was that he simply could not get hold of any fertilizer at the right time of year. As it is, farmers till the fields with tools you can find in the Iron Age section of many African museums.

I’ve had several conversations in recent years with African farmers in different regions talking about how the weather has changed. None of these people had any knowledge of global climate change or scientific issues but being farmers they all have an intimate connection with the seasons and weather patterns and could state precisely how things had changed from the long term norm.

Although some here do make it to a ripe old age, it’s a blessing, not the expectation we have in the West. You don’t see many over sixty when life is this demanding and medical facilities are forty five minutes away by motorbike, if you’re still well enough to hold on that long and have the money to pay for it when you get there.

There’s a thousand things that could have killed off anyone here before Covid would and a thousand things the money could have been spent on that would have improved their lives more. I literally have not heard of one person who got Covid in my time here and in Ivory Coast this year. No doubt some have but it was just shrugged off as one of the multitude of ailments that can afflict anyone, many of which are far more deadly.  This is broadly the same message I’ve heard from others this year, to both to their own and our governments, “how come you can find money to deal with this problem you tell us is so important, yet you do nothing to help us with things that affect our lives much more”?

What’s more, is that the measures taken, initially with lockdowns but more long term with border closures and other restrictions, is that, at least to some, these have caused more harm than the illness they’ve seen precious little evidence for.  Economies have shrunk, tourism has collapsed and nothing has been done to help the average person. Without benefits and free healthcare, a drop in income turns the precarious life of millions in Africa into potential tragedy.

African countries often acted quicker and more efficiently on WHO guidelines than the West, particularly in the case of my own sorry excuse for a nation, Great? Britain. Despite being some of the poorest nations on earth, they have introduced effective systems in response to the pandemic. Take my current destination Benin (at 158 out of 189 on the U.N. development index). The efficiency and professionalism of the testing system at Cotonou airport, noting my own country doesn’t even have any system at airports, stands up to anything else on offer in the world. Getting off a busy plane late at night, I was in and out of the airport testing centre in five minutes, with results available on the internet within 48 hours. Many in the West should be taking lessons from Africa not the other way round.

Maybe actions such as this have limited the spread of the virus but given that much of the continent has proved itself far more resilient than expected, we have to ask if the human cost has been justified.

A subject of far greater importance to the village was the funeral arrangements for Paulin’s brother, a solider killed the previous week defending his country’s borders against Islamic extremist groups in neighbouring Burkina Faso, just to the north. The presence of these groups is largely a direct result of the fallout from our disastrous, illegitimate war in Libya. Of course you won’t see words like disastrous and illegitimate used to describe the war in our own media, as it’s almost impossible to find a single western politician or mainstream media outlet who gives a fuck for the multitude of lives ruined across the region by removing the stabilizing effect of Gaddafi’s government. They have enough trouble even understanding that the thousands of refugees drowning in the Mediterranean might have something to do with the war. Due to restrictions on security issues I can’t use his name but even if I could, he, as with so many other victims in the region would remain invisible. We can’t even say he’s a statistic or forgotten, because the whole reason for his loss isn’t even acknowledged. The concerns about these violent groups were echoed the next day at one of my local shops, chatting with the owner and other customers.

Another friend can’t return to his home village in northern Burkina Faso, since jihadists held the population at gunpoint earlier this year and threatened to kill them if they informed the authorities of their presence. Since then four have been kidnapped, with no news of their situation and half the people have fled to the safety of bigger towns. One friend from the same village risked a brief return only to sell his cattle which would have otherwise been taken by the extremist groups.

Work as a guide in the tourist industry had kept an Ethiopian friend gainfully, if somewhat erratically employed until Covid struck. Tourism can no doubt recover fairly rapidly once the pandemic recedes but the war in the north launched by the TPLF, supported by the US, with the connivance of the supposedly neutral U.N., will leave the kind of stigma that takes years for tourism to recover from.

These more extreme situations are of course not typical for the huge continent but the role the West plays in them is entirely relevant. Africans might say, “you don’t have trouble finding money for wars and military bases on our land, while you interfere on our continent and you eventually find some for Covid, but your hands remain in your pockets when it comes to the things we really need”.

Paulin has spent many years working on local aid projects, and time and time again he’s seen western NGOs come and do whatever it is they do, then depart, leaving next to nothing sustainable behind. Hardly anyone has actually asked villagers in the region, “what is it that you really need to make your lives better”. Covid vaccinations are just a continuation of this process. Nothing intrinsically bad about it, but ultimately of no great consequence to their lives.

The pandemic has just repeated what happens all too often with Africa. First it was mostly ignored, except to make dire predictions or concentrate on where the virus was having the most damaging effect. The successes, diligence of authorities and effective measures weren’t exciting enough to write many stories. When we did come, with good intentions or not, we often came looking to support narratives we’d already written or telling Africans we know what’s good for them. Far too rarely did we make the effort to genuinely listen to people’s concerns, while our politicians deflected from our responsibilities to our fellow humans on the continent, primarily to protect the profits of the pharmaceutical industry.

How widely shared the experiences I relate are across Africa I can’t honestly say but I have at least been here and have listened to what many ordinary Africans have said. Being here for a relatively long time means that I haven’t had to push people for opinions, I’ve been able to let people talk, which I hope better reflects what people actually think. What we should be aiming for however, is not the voices of Africans moderated by the likes of me. In this digital age there is no excuse for the media not providing more direct access to African opinions, particularly letting their own journalists tell us in their own words. Can we learn how to truly listen?