The Irish Times view on hunger in the Horn of Africa: racing to avert a catastrophe

In parts of the Horn of Africa, no rain has fallen in two years. The cattle have died, food supply is meagre. The land – and the incomes that depend on it – have dried up. Across whole swathes of this vast region, the worst drought in more than 40 years has taken hold. Without urgent international mobilisation, aid agencies say, famine will follow. The last time a famine was declared in Somalia, in 2010-11, a quarter of a million people died.

Already, the figures are staggering. Up to 22 million people in Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea are at risk of starvation, according to the United Nations. More than 1 million have been forced from their homes in search of food and water. One in three Somali children is facing chronic malnutrition.

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/editorials/2022/09/12/the-irish-times-view-on-hunger-in-the-horn-of-africa-racing-to-avert-a-catastrophe/

 

Gas is a dangerous distraction for Africa

At the start of this century, when much of the developed world woke up to the dangers of smoking, Big Tobacco turned to Africa to seek out new profits.

To this day, in my country, Uganda, and many others, foreign tobacco companies work to undermine regulations designed to protect people against the industry – they even market cigarettes to schoolchildren in some African countries.

Now, the same is happening in the context of the global fight against climate change.

As the world finally begins to wake up to the climate emergency, major oil and gas companies from Europe and North America are increasingly losing their licence to operate there, so they are turning to Africa to try and secure at least a few more years of extraction and profit.

Despite United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres recently warning that investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure is “moral and economic madness”, leaders in Africa are being persuaded that extracting more gas is a prerequisite for the continent’s development.

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/5/16/gas-is-a-dangerous-distraction-for-africa

 

Hitting the poorest

‘War in Ukraine means hunger in Africa, ” International Monetary Fund managing director Kristalina Georgieva has warned. The interdependence of Africa’s vulnerable economies, now intimately connected in the global commodity trading system, has the continent by the throat.

And the effects of the Russian invasion are already being felt as far away as Sierra Leone and Ghana as oil price hikes squeeze struggling economies. In the latter, the cost of a litre of fuel has gone up 6.4 cedis (79c) to 10 cedis (€1.23) a litre in just a few weeks.The effect on oil prices is just the start. Ukraine and Russia together produce nearly a quarter of the world’s wheat, feeding billions of people in the form of bread, pasta and packaged foods. That represents almost 90 per cent of Kenya’s wheat imports and the same in Sudan, Rwanda, Ethiopia and Somalia, already suffering from a devastating drought. The real test will come in four months when the next wheat harvest begins; it is inconceivable that war-ravaged Ukraine will be even partially capable of meeting demand. Rising hunger and political instability are inevitable. Egypt, for example, which has regularly experienced bread riots in recent years, has enough grain reserves and domestically-produced wheat to last the country only until November.

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/editorial/the-irish-times-view-on-the-ukraine-war-hitting-the-poorest-1.4832644

 

Climate crisis in West Africa will get worse

From Dakar to Freetown, Abidjan, Accra and Lagos, West African cities are locked into a difficult future because of the continued carbon pollution of wealthy countries. As drought, floods and violence drive people into these coastal cities, they’re becoming examples of how climate change exacerbates existing problems. 

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, released last week, has a chapter on Africa. It also looks at the continent’s main regions and its warnings for West Africa are the most urgent.

More than half of the continent’s population live in big cities such as Lagos, home to 15 million people. They’re being driven to cities because agriculture, a source of livelihoods for up to 80% of people in countries such as Burkina Faso, is failing. 

Rainfall is less predictable and droughts harsher. This is not evenly distributed: West Africa is getting wetter in the east and drier in the west. When rain falls it is in violent spells that strip topsoil and ruin crops. Crops are producing less food, with the yield from a staple such as maize 6% lower than in the 1960s. 

Climate crisis in West Africa will get worse

 

A tale of two pandemics: the true cost of Covid in the global south

For the past year and a half, people everywhere have been in the grip of a pandemic – but not necessarily the same one. In the affluent world, a viral respiratory disease, Covid-19, suddenly became a leading cause of death. In much of the developing world, by contrast, the main engine of destruction wasn’t this new disease, but its second-order effects: measures they took, and we took, in response to the coronavirus. Richer nations and poorer nations differ in their vulnerabilities.

Whenever I talk with members of my family in Ghana, Nigeria and Namibia, I’m reminded that a global event can also be a profoundly local one. Lives and livelihoods have been affected in these places very differently from the way they have in Europe or the US. That’s true in the economic and educational realm, but it’s true, too, in the realm of public health. And across all these realms, the stakes are often life or death.

The three countries I mentioned have a median age between 18 and 22 years, and the severity of Covid-19 discriminates sharply by age. A big way that Covid can kill is by hampering the management of other diseases, such as HIV, malaria and TB. In Africa alone, 26 million people are living with HIV and, in a typical year, several hundreds of thousands die of it, while malaria, which is especially deadly to infants and toddlers, claims almost 400,000 lives.

Those are big numbers, and yet they used to be much bigger – a major healthcare effort brought them down. Amid the pandemic, though, people stopped visiting clinics, in part because it became harder to get to them, and healthcare workers had to curtail their own movements. According to a Global Fund survey of 32 countries in Africa and Asia, prenatal care visits dropped by two-thirds between April and September 2020; consultations for children under five dropped by three-quarters.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/23/a-tale-of-two-pandemics-the-true-cost-of-covid-in-the-global-south

 

Why are white elites afraid of Black babies?

The second in line to the British throne, Prince William, has once again caused an uproar by blaming population growth in Africa for the declining fortunes of the continent’s wildlife. Many have pointed out the hypocrisy of a father of three demonising African households for having too many babies.

Others have noted that the United Kingdom is much more densely populated than any part of Africa and that British hunters and colonial settlers have been responsible for the savage decimation of animals. Not to mention the effect of global warming and climate change, majorly caused by William’s ancestors, countrymen and neighbours, which may endanger between 25 and 40 percent of mammal species in national parks in Africa.However, little has been said about the historic discomfort of white elites with Black fertility and Black babies. It was the second time William was complaining about the continent’s rising population having previously raised the issue in 2017. That same year, French President Emmanuel Macron, who also likes to talk about African birthrates, blamed the continent’s “civilisational” problems on nations that “have seven or eight children per woman”.

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/12/1/why-are-white-elites-afraid-of-black-babies

 

Malaria vaccine is a breakthrough but don’t celebrate yet

On October 6, the world made great strides against malaria, when the World Health Organisation approved use of Mosquirix, the vaccine against the malaria parasite that Glaxo-SmithKline has been trialing over the past six years.

Commentators have heralded the announcement as the conclusion of a century-old effort to find a preventive vaccine to one of the world’s most deadly diseases. Endemic in the tropics, malaria kills anywhere between half a million and three quarters of a million people, most of them children, every year.

The John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health attaches a $12 billion annual price tag to the economic cost of malaria, factoring in the costs of health care and lost productivity. The school further observes that though treatable, malaria infection at its most severe can result permanent damage to the brain, coma, and even death.

https://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/tea/oped/editorial/-malaria-vaccine-is-a-breakthrough-but-don-t-celebrate-yet-3577730

 

Charity alone will not end the calamity of COVID-19 in Africa

Last year, American billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft founder, Bill Gates, was roundly condemned by many for peddling racist stereotypes of African helplessness after he warned that the coronavirus pandemic could overwhelm public health services within the continent and lead to 10 million deaths. And as the pandemic seemed to bypass the continent, Western media puzzlement over why Africans were not dying at the rates Americans and Europeans were, and why the expected biblical scenes of plague-ravaged Black masses had not materialised, were similarly met with outrage.

However, today as COVID-19 deaths ramp up across Africa, and with vaccine access for many proving to be a mirage, many of the same doomsday scenarios and associated implications of Africans as powerless to resist their fate, are being heard once again. Only this time, it is Africans themselves who seem to be selling the story.

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/7/31/accountability-is-africas-best-route-out-of-the-pandemic

 

Lockdowns are crucial but offer limited benefits

As Africa sinks deeper into the third Covid-19 wave, the temptation to reinstate punishing lockdowns is growing. From Lusaka to Kampala, governments are coping with a sudden surge in new cases averaging 130 percent week-on-week.

Grim as the present situation appears, total lockdowns should be the last of possible responses to the latest surge. Keeping people indoors is attractive to governments in Africa because it comes with little responsibility for the vulnerable individual. The elite are protected from their more painful consequences. Amid rising social discontent, they also hand authorities the tools for repression under the guise of the public interest.

As Europe, the US and India have shown, lockdowns are beneficial and practical only under certain social dynamics. Where the state or other agencies are able to supply the basic needs of the people, the benefits outweigh the downside. Where people live from hand to mouth, they are simply impractical. They are more beneficial when they are coupled with massive vaccination against the virus.

https://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/tea/oped/editorial/editorial-lockdowns-are-crucial-but-offer-limited-benefits-3442742

 

How Africa fought the pandemic — and what coronavirus has taught the world

In a deserted wing of the African Union complex in Addis Ababa, John Nkengasong was hunched over a desk peering at numbers. It was early evening and almost everyone had gone home, disappearing into the dusty air of the Ethiopian capital. The large, drab room was one of several occupied by the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, a pan-African public health agency charged with bolstering health systems across the vast continent of 54 nations. Africa CDC was only three years old and Mr Nkengasong was its first director. 

Four days earlier, Egypt had reported Africa’s first case of coronavirus when a Chinese national tested positive after flying into Cairo. So far, no further infections had been confirmed. But Mr Nkengasong, a virologist who had been working in public health for three decades, knew what was coming.

Although Europe had barely woken up to the threat of Covid-19, Africa was on high alert. At Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa, where half a dozen planes from China rumbled in each day, masked staff were collecting passenger information and checking temperatures.

https://www.ft.com/content/c0badd91-a395-4644-a734-316e71d60bf7