Ebola has engulfed West Africa. The pandemic has summed up the mood of foreboding in the African continent since it began in late February in Guinea. It has also generated an enormous amount of media commentary, much of which has been unabashedly biased and has simply sustained the suffering it retells. With Ebola, the whole direction of national politics in impoverished West African states appears to be going off track. Resorting to extra-constitutional methods of dealing with the disease is a mistake, and Ebola has whipped up mob hysteria in Liberia in particular. The hapless inhabitants of the country feel trapped. The Liberian scenario has prompted the UN Security Council to pass a resolution pronouncing Ebola to be a threat to international peace and security. Africa thus now represents a direct challenge to core principles underpinning international security, and the disease has flared up at a moment when the old crises of the continent, poverty and underdevelopment, have burned on. The zero-sum atmosphere between the haves and have-nots in Africa has reached its nadir, both on the international level and within individual nations. All-encompassing cynicism pervades Africa, even as the West embraces a curiously bracing posture of magnanimity. The African continent continues to conjure up images of “darkest Africa” in the international media, which takes it cue from the western media. Africa south of the Sahara still languishes in the mind-set of the sixties, hanging on tenaciously to an illusory deliverance from want and lack, tyranny, oppression and injustice. Indeed, the scenes of despair engendered by the Ebola pandemic are reminiscent of the horrors of the movies of a decade ago. Blood Diamond, for example, a 2006 film that followed a rare pink diamond ostensibly found in Sierra Leone, was a gripping political thriller set against the backdrop of Sierra Leone's civil war (1996-2001). It was co-produced and directed by Edward Zwick and starred Leonardo DiCaprio, who was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor. Blood diamonds are purchased by western financiers and entrepreneurs who have a vested interest in fomenting conflicts in mineral-rich Africa and across the globe. “That diamond is my ticket out of this God-forsaken continent,” confesses DiCaprio in the film. He plays the part of Rhodesian “soldier of fortune” Danny Archer. “Relief agencies are useless, and the hospitals are overwhelmed,” Archer adds in the film. “You come here with your laptop computers, your malaria medicine and your little bottles of hand sanitiser and think you can change the outcome, huh?” “Out here, people kill each other as a way of life. It's always been like that,” he shrugs. Pray the Devil Back to Hell, an award-winning documentary directed by Gini Reticker that premiered in 2008, revolves around Liberian women's quest for peace. Muslim and Christian women from the various ethnic and tribal groups of the country come together to struggle for peace and an end to the country's civil wars that claimed the lives of between 250,000 and 520,000 people in a country of four million people. Small wonder that the war-ravaged West African nation became the first country in Africa to elect a woman head of state, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, as president in 2005. She understood that her country had not been decapitated by a lack of leadership during the long years of civil war. She needed to garner maximum publicity for her country's plight, and undertook the daunting task in a spirit of humility. She mobilised her people to cope with the catastrophes that accompanied the civil war and to embolden the victims of war, the women and children in particular, to defy the warlords and their ruthless militias. “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,” the Liberian president has now conceded. The death toll now stands at more than 3,000 people in West Africa. Johnson-Sirleaf, a former World Bank official, has appealed to US president Barack Obama for urgent assistance in the epidemic and has refrained from reminding him of the paltry 25-bed facility he had previously promised to cater for the mainly American healthcare workers in Liberia. “I am being honest with you when I say that at this rate, we will never break the transmission chain and the virus will overwhelm us,” Johnson-Sirleaf told Obama. Liberia is the stepchild of the US, being the only country in Africa that was created by Washington and founded by US colonisation. Obama reassured Johnson-Sirleaf and Liberians last week when he publicly committed $763 million in emergency aid funding and 3,000 military personnel to building hospitals, laboratories, and training facilities across Liberia. Combatting Ebola was akin to containing the warlords and their militias, he said, and both were a menace to be dealt with squarely. Putting Ebola in perspective, if half a million people perished in Liberia's civil war, less than two thousand, so far, have succumbed to Ebola in the war-ravaged country. Yet, the chaos that came with the civil war has threatened to rear its ugly head once again, with Ebola undoing the good work the president and her team of assistants began. PRECAUTIONS ABROAD: In his recent address to the United Nations' General Assembly, Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi highlighted the importance of containing the Ebola pandemic. The Egyptian authorities seem to be actually taking all necessary precautions. “The emphasis at border crossings and especially airports is placed on arrivals from regions in which the emergence of the epidemic has been confirmed, and so strict health screening is performed on arrivals from West African countries, particularly Sierra Leone, Guinea, Liberia, Ivory Coast and Nigeria,” said Nagi Al-Saadi of the preventive affairs and endemic diseases section at Egypt's Ministry of Health. A host of African students at Al-Azhar University in Cairo hail from the predominantly Muslim countries of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, as well as neighbouring Ivory Coast, Mali, Nigeria and Senegal. The Egyptian authorities working in conjunction with the Egyptian diplomatic missions in West Africa are monitoring the health of Egyptian residents in the countries concerned. EgyptAir, with Accra, the Ghanaian capital, as its regional hub, has not halted flights to and from its West African destinations. With the approach of the haj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, many West African Muslims are expected to fly EgyptAir to the Muslim holy places in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi authorities have banned Guinean, Liberian and Sierra Leonean Muslims from participating in this year's haj, but Nigerian Muslims are still welcome in Saudi Arabia. It is against this backdrop of international isolation that Ebola has been seen as such a rabble-rouser. Liberia is one of the major recipients of US development assistance in Africa. Yet, an estimated 85 per cent of the Liberian population still lives below the international poverty line. The scars of war have not entirely healed. No independent studies have been conducted to assess the psychological impact of the Ebola pandemic on either the Liberian or Sierra Leonean populations. In Sierra Leone a three-day curfew with house-to house investigations of the health condition of residents was imposed last week as a preventive and precautionary measure to halt the spread of Ebola. Residents were asked to stay indoors, and the populations willingly obliged. But this has not been the case in Liberia. West Point, a shantytown on the outskirts of Monrovia, the Liberian capital, named after the fifth president of the US, James Monroe, is a case in point. Its residents were forcibly quarantined on 20 August. The Liberian authorities said they were obliged to barricade thousands of people in the slum in a desperate bid to contain the Ebola pandemic. Liberia, a country of four million people, has only 56 medical practitioners. Sierra Leone with six million inhabitants has roughly 136 doctors, most of them consigned to the capital Freetown. When the bombs rained down on Liberia and Sierra Leone during the civil wars, child soldiers brandishing machetes, and landmines peppered the landscape and thousands of professionals fled the country to seek better employment opportunities overseas. Today, there are more Liberian and Sierra Leonean medical personnel in the US, Canada, Britain and Australia than there are doctors and nurses at home. The proverbial brain drain has been at work. Western hands have also grasped power even closer than usual in their former African colonies, and conspiracy theories have been rife. There have even been hints of biological warfare. The Elysée Palace and the Pentagon have come under suspicion. Peasants in remote rural backwaters have been suspicious of foreign medical facilities and on occasion have attacked aid workers. The villagers are searching for answers to the mysterious plague. In the largely illiterate and isolated communities of West Africa, the unfamiliar activities of the foreign humanitarian staff have been linked with why Ebola has spread so exponentially in the past few months. Personalities such as Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of Médicins Sans Frontières (MSF) and French foreign minister under former president Nicolas Sarkozy, have come under scrutiny in some quarters. The local media have been inundated with smear campaigns. MSF has denied the charges of any implication in the spread of Ebola. And yet detractors point accusing fingers at MSF, claiming that the resources of its main sources of funding such as the Bill Gates-founded behemoth Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, AIG, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Bloomberg and the French advertising giant Havas, would be better deployed if directly delivered to the governments and civil society groups concerned in the countries ravaged by the horrific fever. The World Health Organisation (WHO) suspects that the “burial of victims in accordance with cultural practices” in West Africa is one of the causes of Ebola's exponential spread. In the words of Thailand-based science writer Yoichi Shimatsu, “MSF, formerly headquartered in Paris and now based in Geneva, also comes under a dark cloud of suspicion because of its distribution of a two-step anti-cholera vaccine” in the area. “What is striking about the Red Cross-Red Crescent Society map of the outbreak zones was the lack of infections over a wide swath along the border with Senegal, where MSF keeps its regional headquarters with a 300-member staff, which includes 80 foreigners,” Shimatsu observed. “With reports of the Ebola outbreak seeping into the mainstream media, the Pasteur Institute branch in Dakar, Senegal, dispatched a mobile microbiology laboratory to Conakry at the request of the Guinean ministry of health. Meanwhile, the German-funded Bernhard-Nocht Institute of Tropical Medicine's office in Ghana cooperated with the WHO to set up a mobile lab in Gueckedou prefecture in Guinea. More rapid deployment medical teams are sorely needed,” Shimatsu contends. “The news media have focused on two potential cures for Ebola issued by biotech companies ZMapp and Tekmira, both of them essentially fronts for patent-sharing consortia. Whichever company gains approval from a US Federal Drugs Administration ready to overlook the possibility of driving mutations will be sure to win huge supplier contracts from the WHO and the US department of defense,” Shimatsu adds. Shimatsu added that the US department of defense had funded two companies that are developing drug therapies for Ebola and was working with another company to develop an Ebola vaccine. The course of action of the US authorities poses pertinent questions that necessitate answers. Impacts of Ebola: WHO Director-General Margaret Chan has warned against the economic impact of Ebola. The fertile fields of Lofa county, once Liberia's breadbasket, are now fallow. In that county alone, nearly 170 farmers and their family members have died from Ebola. When the Ebola epidemic surfaced, UN agencies were conducting nationwide vaccine campaigns for three other diseases in rural districts of the country. The simultaneous eruptions of the virus in widely separated zones strongly suggested that the virulent Zaire Ebola strain (ZEBOV) had been deliberately introduced to test an antidote in secret trials on unsuspecting humans. The filovirus, a viral family (filoviridae) that includes the Ebola and Marburg viruses, induces haemorrhagic fevers in humans. It includes the West Nile virus, the Dengue fever virus, and the yellow fever virus. “Flavus” is the Latin word for “yellow”. “The supply of ZMapp, the drug that was given to a few health care workers, is exhausted. It comes from a small pharmaceutical company with nine employees,” Shimatsu points outs. He cast a shadow of doubt on the three major vaccine campaigns conducted by the WHO and the UN children's agency UNICEF. At least two of the vaccination programmes were implemented by MSF. “Some of those vaccines were produced by Sanofi Pasteur, a French pharmaceutical company whose major shareholder is the Rothschild Group. This uncovers the French connection to the African Ebola pandemic,” Shimatsu said. But Ebola is not just an African disease, and non-Africans are often the transmitters of the fever. Patrick Sawyer, an infected American resident of Liberia, first transmitted Ebola to Nigeria. “Liberia was in its 11th year of peace. We experienced a 90 per cent collapse in the productive sector of our economy because of the civil war and our health infrastructure was not what it should have been. We were just bringing back hope and life when we were struck by Ebola. It is having terrible consequences for every aspect of our national existence,” said Lewis Brown, minister for information, cultural affairs and tourism in Liberia. “An entire farming season has been wasted.” The mystery at the heart of the Ebola outbreak is how the 1995 Zaire (ZEBOV) strain, which originated in Central Africa some 4,000 km to the east in the Congolese (Zairean) provinces of Central Africa, managed to suddenly resurface a decade later in Guinea in West Africa. The French army is the largest foreign force on the continent, though this does not necessarily prove that French bio-warfare has been at work. US military aircraft landed in Liberia last Thursday with the first shipment of increased US military equipment and personnel for the anti-Ebola fight, promised by Obama in a speech at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, in September. General Darryl Williams, commander of the US Army's Africa and Operations United Assistance, also promptly flew to Liberia. “It is important to follow a set of guidelines developed by the WHO and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help prevent and control the spread of Ebola. The manual, entitled ‘Infection Control for Viral Haemorrhagic Fevers in the African Health Care Setting,' describes how to recognise cases of viral haemorrhagic fever such as Ebola and how to prevent transmission of the infection in healthcare settings by using locally available materials and minimal financial resources,” said Cesar Chelala, a health consultant with several UN agencies. Chelala, along with several other experts in health matters, has been highly critical of Washington's response to the Ebola pandemic in West Africa. “Bringing military personnel in is not the best way to build confidence in the countries most affected by the infection,” Chelala said in a commentary on the Website CounterPunch. “Our forces are going to bring their expertise in command and control, in logistics, in engineering. And our department of defense is better at that, our armed services are better at that, than any organisation on Earth. We're going to create an air bridge to get health workers and medical supplies into West Africa faster,” Obama had declared. “The outbreak in Nigeria can be declared officially over only if there are no more cases after 42 days, or two incubation periods from the last confirmed case,” Faisal Shuaib, head of the emergency operations centre for Ebola in Lagos, told the news agency Agence France-Presse earlier this week. “Nigeria has not reported any new cases since 8 September,” it added. According to Nigeria's minister of health Onyebuchi Chukwu, “there are no cases under treatment and no suspected cases. There are no contacts in Lagos that are still under surveillance, having completed a minimum of 21 days of observation. Presently, there is not a single case of Ebola virus disease in Nigeria – none.” “If we move fast, even if imperfectly, than that could mean the difference between 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 deaths versus hundreds of thousands or even a million deaths,” Obama said. “We are not doing enough. Right now everybody has the best of intentions, but people are not putting in the kinds of resources that are necessary to put a stop to this epidemic.” “It's a marathon, but you have to run it like a sprint.”
