President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw funding from WHO underscores how powerful UN member states play politics with people’s lives. But by withholding information that paints them in a bad light, influential countries like China are also endangering the world’s health.
Relationships between African countries and China are more complex than they appear in the media and academia.
In an update on the COVID-19 pandemic across Africa, Heike Becker, Femi Aborisade and Issa Shivji report on the reaction of governments, the struggles of poor communities and the urgency of building a new world out of the ruins of the old.
The United States’ military operations in Somalia are not well known because they are carried out secretly or via proxy armies. These operations have not been hampered by the coronavirus pandemic; on the contrary, they seem to have accelerated.
In the face of an onslaught of harrowing and, occasionally, life-affirming news, we reached out to our storytellers and editors to reflect on the times. The following is a journal bearing witness and foretelling the effects of an unfolding pandemic seen through African eyes.
If the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed anything, it is that health is a multi-faceted sector that requires the cooperation of people with specialisation in the humanities, social sciences, life sciences and physical sciences. In other words, every discipline has to be involved in the discussions, knowledge and politics of health.
In a prolonged crisis, formal establishment workers are more exposed to job losses and financial insecurity than those in the micro and small enterprise informal sector. The jua kali economy is better cushioned and, as counter-intuitive as it may sound, the “job insecure” jua kali workers are more economically secure.
The difference lies in this: that as Mr. Kenyatta makes all the right moral pitches, Mr. Akufo-Addo canvasses all the right responses. If only Mr. Kenyatta would reach for the phone and give President Akufo-Addo a call.
The imposition of a curfew in Kenya in response to COVID-19 has been accompanied by increasing levels of violence against civilians by the police. This has, once again, underscored how poorly trained Kenya’s police “service” is and why it is the most dreaded institution in the country.
The government does not understand the magnitude of the response that is required. There is no appreciation that the key challenge of responding to the COVID-19 economic shock is policy instruments, not funding. And that is a problem.
