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

In the absence of vaccines, accountability, rather than charity, may be the continent’s best route out of the pandemic.

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. Just in the past week, in an article published in Nature, Dr Mosoka Fallah, deputy director for technical services in the National Public Health Institute of Liberia, said “mass fatalities from COVID-19 have begun in Africa” and “the wealthy world must rally or nations will collapse across Africa”.