The COVID-19 pandemic has become quite the issue of major concern. Everyone is talking about it, the global community has been thrown into disarray. With no end in sight, and with death rates and cases of infected persons continually rising up, we draw our focus back to the motherland, Africa, to see how much solidarity she is being afforded by the rest of the world, and the efforts her leaders are putting towards managing the situation.
With over 600 cases and counting, most European media outlets are concerned with regards to why the virus is not spreading massively in Africa seeing as the rest of the world is massively ravished by the virus. Their ‘concern’ has all of us in Africa worried about the REAL intentions of the Europeans on Africa. Do they really want us underneath to the point of questioning our survival rate in the midst of a global pandemic?
I will tell you why. Why do the Europeans, after all these years, still see Africa as being underneath and hugely incapable of any feat; why they are not concerned about our fact that the pandemic is rapidly spreading across various regions, rather why we are not having massive cases like other Europeans and non-African states. The reason why this is the case is simple: Our leaders.
Like it or not, this pandemic has shown us all in Africa a huge problem: we are so FUCKED. In Nigeria, the continent’s No. 1 economic power, billions have been allocated for health care, and yet only a few hospitals, in a country of over 200 million, have a functioning ventilator system, which is very essential equipment in the treatment of the COVID-19 patients. In fact, one out of the two ventilators in a hospital in Abuja, the country’s capital, had to be removed and sent to the Presidential Villa, as there was none in the Villa’s clinic. This clinic has seen billions of Naira allocated to it for its equipment over the last four years, and yet no single ventilator was there.
It is not just about Nigeria, the rest of the Africa states have shown, through this pandemic, that we are rather a REACTIVE continent and not a PROACTIVE continent. With no functioning health care facility and our leaders spending huge amounts of money to invest, and treat themselves in European states when they are ill, why should the Europeans not be worried that we are not been ravished by this pandemic?
They understand that we have no way of protecting ourselves as they do. They know that they allow our governments access to various loans for “health care facilities” knowing fully that these loans will be re-invested in their countries through paid medical trips, vacations and so on. So despite cursing the Europeans for wishing us more predicaments than we are already passing through, all blame should fall on our leaders who have put their interests against the interest of us all.
We hope they all learn a lesson from this. a lesson which is loud and clear: If you set your house on fire to chase rats when you are done with the rats, you have no place to go back to. If our leaders keep on soiling and milking this continent, a time will come (just like now) when nowhere will be safer than home. And when that time comes, you will understand how much damage you have done. A situation where you cannot go anywhere but home should tell our leaders the need to make our home as good as wherever they go to invest our collective resources.
Build hospitals. Equip them with state-of-the-art equipment. Fund medical research institutes within your country. When you apply for a loan, use it to the benefit of your people. If we do not learn from this predicament, we could face something worse. The best way to keep the Europeans at bay is for us to begin to show more concern about our issues and combating them.
And for this, our leaders have much work to do.
