Strictly Personal
Mpox crisis: We need an equity-driven pandemic treaty, By Magda Robalo
Published
3 months agoon
The current multicountry Mpox outbreak started in January 2022. It has now been declared a Public Health Emergency of Continental Security (Phecs) by the Africa CDC and, for the second time, a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (Pheic) by WHO, under the International Health Regulations (2005) highlighting critical deficiencies in the global public health response.
Endemic to West and Central Africa, the first human case of Mpox was detected in 1970 in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Nigeria experienced a large outbreak in 2017 and 2018. Only sporadic cases occurred outside endemic areas before 2022.
According to the World Health Organisation, most people suffering Mpox recover within two to four weeks. The disease is transmitted through close, personal, skin-to-skin contact with someone who has Mpox, contaminated materials, or with infected animals. Transmission could also occur during pregnancy or childbirth and among people with multiple sexual partners, who represent a high-risk population.
Despite early warnings, failures in implementing robust surveillance, contact tracing, and containment strategies have allowed the virus to spread across at least 120 countries. In the DRC, where the outbreak has been particularly severe, two distinct outbreaks are evolving, caused by clade Ia and the newly emerged clade Ib.
Increasingly, and rightly so, voices are coalescing to demand an urgent, coordinated international action and global solidarity toward an equity-driven, focused response to curb the virus’s spread and mitigate its impact.
Loud calls for equitable vaccine distribution are being heard, a reminiscence of the Covid-19 dramatic experience. But vaccines are only one complementary tool in the box of interventions against the outbreak. Two fundamental questions we should be asking are: whether we have done enough to prevent the outbreak from becoming Pheic and Phecs, and if we are doing all we can to contain it, beyond placing our hopes on the still scarce doses of vaccine.
The Mpox outbreak underscores the urgent need for a comprehensive, equity-driven pandemic treaty, to coordinate global efforts to improve pandemic prevention, preparedness and response. The potential impact of this treaty is substantial, promising to address critical areas such as public health infrastructure, equitable access to treatment, vaccines and other supplies, and enhanced international cooperation during health emergencies.
The spread of Mpox across multiple continents in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic confirms the persistence of significant vulnerabilities in national and global health systems, particularly in surveillance and rapid response—areas a well-crafted treaty could strengthen.
A united voice from Africa is critical to the negotiations. Without systemic changes, the world risks repeating the mistakes of Covid-19 and the ongoing Mpox outbreak in future outbreaks. Global health security depends on timely action, transparent communication, and a commitment to protecting all populations, regardless of geographic or socioeconomic status. It depends on strong health systems, based on a primary health care strategy and underpinned by the principles of universal health coverage.
There is no doubt that the world is facing an emerging threat. The scientific community is confronted with knowledge gaps in relation to Mpox. Several unknowns persist on the real pace of the evolving outbreak, its modes of and transmission dynamics, evolutionary routes and the human-to-human transmission chains. It is uncertain if we are moving toward a sustained human-to-human transmission and its potential scale and impact.
However, despite the fragility of health systems in most of its countries, Africa has decades of vast, diverse, cumulated experience in dealing with major epidemics, such as HIV/Aids, Ebola and most recently Covid-19, in addition to the decades of surveillance for polio eradication and containment of outbreaks.
In recent decades, African countries have improved their human, technical and infrastructural capacities and capabilities to detect, diagnose, and respond to outbreaks and large epidemics. Expertise and skills have been built in disease surveillance, infection prevention and control, diagnosis, epidemiological data management, including pathogen genomic sequencing.
Communities have developed systems to fight stigma and discrimination, built resilience and capacity to respond to and address their unique challenges, including poor access to information, education, communication tools, as well as to treatment and prevention interventions.
Admittedly, the response to this outbreak continues to expose significant flaws, particularly inconsistent and inadequate surveillance and monitoring systems to track the spread of the virus, contact tracing, and infection prevention measures (isolation, handwashing, use of masks and condoms, etc).
Many countries still lack the necessary infrastructure or have relaxed these measures, leading to delayed detection and widespread transmission. Moreover, a reluctance to deploy aggressive contact tracing and isolation protocols, partly due to concerns about stigmatisation, resulted in missed opportunities for early containment.
While negotiating for potential vaccine doses to protect high-risk populations, countries should invest in and deploy what they have learned and now know how to do best, based on the lessons from polio, HIV/Aids, Ebola and Covid-19. It is imperative that we contain the Mpox outbreak before it is too late. It is time to put our best foot forward. We have no reasons for helplessness and hopelessness.
You may like
-
African Union must ensure Sudan civilians are protected, By Joyce Banda
-
Economic policies must be local, By Lekan Sote
-
Dangote Refinery: A timely win for industrialisation, By Abiodun Alade
-
Olympics had free lessons for African leaders, By Tee Nugugi
-
Athletes bring gold, economists bring debts, botched projects, By Joachim Buwembo
-
What is killing Nigerian musicians? By Azuka Onwuka
Strictly Personal
African Union must ensure Sudan civilians are protected, By Joyce Banda
Published
3 weeks agoon
October 25, 2024The war in Sudan presents the world – and Africa – with a test. This far, we have scored miserably. The international community has failed the people of Sudan. Collectively, we have chosen to systematically ignore and sacrifice the Sudanese people’s suffering in preference of our interests.
For 18 months, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) have fought a pitiless conflict that has killed thousands, displaced millions, and triggered the world’s largest hunger crisis.
Crimes against humanity and war crimes have been committed by both parties to the conflict. Sexual and gender-based violence are at epidemic levels. The RSF has perpetrated a wave of ethnically motivated violence in Darfur. Starvation has been used as a weapon of war: The SAF has carried out airstrikes that deliberately target civilians and civilian infrastructure.
The plight of children is of deep concern to me. They have been killed, maimed, and forced to serve as soldiers. More than 14 million have been displaced, the world’s largest displacement of children. Millions more haven’t gone to school since the fighting broke out. Girls are at the highest risk of child marriage and gender-based violence. We are looking at a child protection crisis of frightful proportions.
In many of my international engagements, the women of Sudan have raised their concerns about the world’s non-commitment to bring about peace in Sudan.
I write with a simple message. We cannot delay any longer. The suffering cannot be allowed to continue or to become a secondary concern to the frustrating search for a political solution between the belligerents. The international community must come together and adopt urgent measures to protect Sudanese civilians.
Last month, the UN’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan released a report that described a horrific range of crimes committed by the RSF and SAF. The report makes for chilling reading. The UN investigators concluded that the gravity of its findings required a concerted plan to safeguard the lives of Sudanese people in the line of fire.
“Given the failure of the warring parties to spare civilians, an independent and impartial force with a mandate to safeguard civilians must be deployed without delay,” said Mohamed Chande Othman, chair of the Fact-Finding Mission and former Chief Justice of Tanzania.
We must respond to this call with urgency.
A special responsibility resides with the African Union, in particular the AU Commission, which received a request on June 21 from the AU Peace and Security Council (PSC) “to investigate and make recommendations to the PSC on practical measures to be undertaken for the protection of civilians.”
So far, we have heard nothing.
The time is now for the AU to act boldly and swiftly, even in the absence of a ceasefire, to advance robust civilian protection measures.
A physical protective presence, even one with a limited mandate, must be proposed, in line with the recommendation of the UN Fact-Finding Mission. The AU should press the parties to the conflict, particularly the Sudanese government, to invite the protective mission to enter Sudan to do its work free from interference.
The AU can recommend that the protection mission adopt targeted strategies operations, demarcated safe zones, and humanitarian corridors – to protect civilians and ensure safe, unhindered, and adequate access to humanitarian aid.
The protection mission mandate can include data gathering, monitoring, and early warning systems. It can play a role in ending the telecom blackout that has been a troubling feature of the war. The mission can support community-led efforts for self-protection, working closely with Sudan’s inspiring mutual-aid network of Emergency Response Rooms. It can engage and support localised peace efforts, contributing to community-level ceasefire and peacebuilding work.
I do not pretend that establishing a protection mission in Sudan will be easy. But the scale of Sudan’s crisis, the intransigence of the warring parties, and the clear and consistent demands from Sudanese civilians and civil society demand that we take action.
Many will be dismissive. It is true that numerous bureaucratic, institutional, and political obstacles stand in our way. But we must not be deterred.
Will we stand by as Sudan suffers mass atrocities, disease, famine, rape, mass displacement, and societal disintegration? Will we watch as the crisis in Africa’s third largest country spills outside of its borders and sets back the entire region?
Africa and the world have been given a test. I pray that we pass it.
Dr Joyce Banda is a former president of the Republic of Malawi.
Strictly Personal
Economic policies must be local, By Lekan Sote
Published
3 weeks agoon
October 24, 2024With 32.70 per cent headline inflation, 40.20 per cent food inflation, and bread inflation of 45 per cent, all caused by the removal of subsidies from petrol and electricity, and the government’s policy of allowing market forces to determine the value of the Naira, Nigerians are reeling under high cost of living.
The observation by Obi Alfred Achebe of Onitsha, that “The wellbeing of the people has declined more steeply in the last months,” leads to doubts about the “Renewed Hope” slogan of President Bola Tinubu’s government that is perceived as extravagant, whilst asking Nigerians to be patient and wait for its unfolding economic policies to mature.
It doesn’t look as if it will abate soon, Adebayo Adelabu, Minister of Power, who seems ready to hike electricity tariffs again, recently argued that the N225 per kilowatt hour of electricity that Discos charge Band A premium customers is lower than the N750 and N950 respective costs of running privately-owned petrol or diesel generators.
While noting that 129 million, or 56 per cent of Nigerians are trapped below poverty line, the World Bank revealed that real per capita Gross Domestic Product, which disregards the service industry component, is yet to recover from the pre-2016 economic depression under the government of Muhammadu Buhari.
This has led many to begin to doubt the government’s World Bank and International Monetary Fund-inspired neo-liberal economic policies that seem to have further impoverished poor Nigerians, practically eliminated the middle class, and is making the rich also cry.
Yet the World Bank, which is not letting up, recently pontificated that “previous domestic policy missteps (based mainly on its own advice) are compounding the shocks of rising inflation (that is) eroding the purchasing power of the people… and this policy is pushing many (citizens) into poverty.”
It zeroes in by asking Nigeria to stay the gruelling course, which Ibukun Omole thinks “is nothing more than a manifesto for exploitation… a blatant attempt to continue the cycle of exploitation… a tool of imperialism, promoting the same policies that have kept Nigeria under the thumb of… neocolonial agenda for decades.”
When Indermilt Gill, Senior Vice President of the World Bank, told the 30th Summit of Nigeria’s Economic Summit Group, in Abuja, Federal Capital Territory, that Nigerians may have to endure the harrowing economic conditions for another 10 to 15 years, attendees murmured but didn’t walk out on him because of Nigerian’s tradition of politeness to guests.
Governor Bala Muhammed of Bauchi State, who agrees with the World Bank that “purchasing power has dwindled,” also thinks that “these (World Bank-inspired) policies, usually handed down by arm-twisting compulsions, are not working.”
What seems to be trending now is the suggestion that because these neo-liberal policies do not seem to be helping the economy and the citizens of Nigeria, at least in the short term, it would be better to think up homegrown solutions to Nigeria’s economic problems.
Late Speaker of America’s House of Representatives, Tip O’Neill, is quoted to have quipped that, at the end of the day, “All politics is local.” He may have come to that conclusion after observing that it takes the locals in a community to know what is best for them.
This aphorism must apply to economics, a field of study that is derived from sociology, which is the study of the way of life of a people. Proof of this is in “The Wealth of Nations,” written by Adam Smith, who is regarded as the first scholar of economics.
In his Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of “The Wealth of Nations,” Andrew Skinner observes: “Adam Smith was undoubtedly the remarkable product of a remarkable age and one whose writing clearly reflects the intellectual, social and economic conditions of the period.”
To drive the point home that Smith’s book was written for his people and his time, Skinner reiterated that “the general ‘philosophy,’ which it contained was so thoroughly in accord with the aspirations and circumstances of his age.”
In a Freudian slip of the Darwinist realities of the Industrial Revolution that birthed individualism, capitalism, and global trade, Smith averred that “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principle in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasures of seeing it.”
And, he let it slip that capitalism is for the advantage of Europe when he confessed that “Europe, by not leaving things at perfect liberty (the so-called Invisible Hand), occasions… inequities,” by “restraining the competition in some trades to a smaller number… increasing it in others beyond what it naturally would be… and… free circulation of labour (or expertise) and stocks (goods) both from employment to employment and from place to place!”
Policymakers, who think Bretton Woods institutions will advise policies to replicate the success of the Euro-American economy in Nigeria must be daydreaming. After advising elimination of subsidy, as global best practices that reflect market forces, they failed to suggest that Nigeria’s N70,000 monthly minimum wage, neither reflects the realities of the global marketplace, nor Section 16(2,d) of Nigeria’s Constitution, which suggests a “reasonable national minimum living wage… for all citizens.”
After Alex Sienart, World Bank’s lead economist in Nigeria, pointed out that the wage increase will directly affect the lives of only 4.1 per cent of Nigerians, he suggested that Nigeria needed more productive jobs to reduce poverty. But he neither explained “productive jobs,” nor suggested how to create them.
In admitting past wrong economic policies that the World Bank recommended for Nigeria, its former President, Jim Yong Kim, confessed, “I think the World Bank has to take responsibility for having emphasized hard infrastructure –roads, rails, energy– for a long time…
“There is still the bias that says we will invest in hard infrastructure, and then we grow rich, (and) we will have enough money to invest in health and education. (But) we are now saying that’s the wrong approach, that you’ve got to start investing in your people.”
Kim is a Korean-American physician, health expert, and anthropologist, whose Harvard University and Brown University Ivy League background shapes his decidedly “Pax American” worldview of America’s dominance of the world economy.
Despite his do-gooder posturing, his diagnoses and prescriptions still did not quite address the root cause of Nigeria’s economic woes, nor provide any solutions. They were mere diversions that stopped short of the way forward.
He should have advocated for the massive accumulation of capital and investments in the local production of manufacturing machinery, industrial spare parts, and raw materials—items that are currently imported, weakening Nigeria’s trade balance.
He should have pushed for the completion of Ajaokuta Steel Mill and helped to line up investors with managerial, technical, and financial competence to salvage Nigeria’s electricity sector, whose poor run has been described by Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, President of Africa Development Bank, as “killing Nigerian industries.”
He could have assembled consultants to accelerate the conversion of Nigeria’s commuter vehicles to Compressed Natural Gas and get banks of the metropolitan economies, that hold Nigeria’s foreign reserves in their vaults, to invest their low-interest funds into Nigeria’s agriculture— so that Nigeria will no longer import foodstuffs.
Nigerians need homegrown solutions to their economic woes.
EDITOR’S PICK
Nigeria has become a ‘failing state’ under Tinubu— Ex-President Obasanjo
YFormer Nigerian President, Olusegun Obasanjo, has described the country under incumbent President Bola Tinubu as a “failing state” which is...
Chidimma Adetshina makes history as she emerges first runner-up for Miss Universe 2024
Chidimma Adetshina, Nigeria’s representative at the 73rd Miss Universe Competition held in Mexico, made history as she finished as the...
Again, Zambian court denies bail to ex-defence minister on medical grounds
A Zambian High Court has, again, denied bail to detained former Defence Minister, Geoffrey Bwalya Mwamba, who is seeking release...
Ghanaians in tears as Black Stars fail to make AFCON 2025y
Ghanaians in tears as Black Stars fail to make AFCON 202 Football lovers in Ghana have been thrown into sadness...
Tinubu’s reforms in Nigeria not working— IMF
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) says the various reforms carried out by Nigerian President, Bola Tinubu, are not working for...
EU launches initiative to reintegrate over 417,661 out-of-school children in Nigeria
The European Union (EU) has launched an initiative to reintegrate over 417,661 out-of-school children in Nigeria, particularly in the northwestern...
World Bank pledges $3b to support Zambia’s development goals
The World Bank Group has pledged to avail Zambia with approximately $3 billion to support the country’s development goals under...
Kenyan marathon legend Kipchoge advises young athletes to prioritize success over money
Kenyan marathon legend, Eliud Kipchoge, has advised young athletes to place success ahead of quick money and riches. The former...
Tyla set to drop new single ‘Tears’ on November 20
South African “Ampiona” crooner, Tyla, is set to thrill her fans to her new single titled, “Tears’, which is set...
1,172 Nigerians killed, over 1,000 kidnapped in nine months— NHRC
The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has put the figures of Nigerians killed and kidnapped by non-state actors from January...
Trending
-
Sports23 hours ago
Ghanaians in tears as Black Stars fail to make AFCON 2025y
-
Metro1 day ago
Tinubu’s reforms in Nigeria not working— IMF
-
Metro2 days ago
EU launches initiative to reintegrate over 417,661 out-of-school children in Nigeria
-
Metro22 hours ago
Again, Zambian court denies bail to ex-defence minister on medical grounds