As Europe and the US are grappling to cope with the effects of COVID-19, Africa is getting ready to add the corona virus to the long list of challenges the continent is already facing. In the context of widespread poverty, armed conflict, terrorism and climate change, African governments have reacted surprisingly swift, many imposing social distancing measures and closing borders early on.
In the context of widespread poverty, armed conflict, terrorism and climate change, African governments have reacted with surprising speed to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Yet, extensive lock-down measures are probably not, as others have already pointed out, the right, or even the possible, way to go for most African states. For a continent where 70% of the population are under the age of 30 and around 5% aged 65 or over, the political, social and economic consequences of isolation measures are likely to cause more havoc than the actual virus.
Grabbing Power through Emergency Powers and Suspended Elections
The current pandemic has provided political leaders with the opportunity of a lifetime to extend their powers through a variety of different measures. In Europe, Hungarian prime minister Orbán has pushed through a bill which allows for the government to maintain the state of emergency as long as it wants, while in the US, Trump’s vast emergency powers and history of attempts at eroding institutional checks and balances, should send shivers along any democratic citizen’s spine. The risk of political leaders using the corona crisis as a means to grab more power, is thus a global phenomenon.
Yet, this risk is especially worrying in states with a history of weak democratic institutions, which are overly represented on the African continent. The 2019 Democracy index, where half of the 44 sub-Saharan governments included are categorized as authoritarian, and the remaining 22 as hybrid regimes or flawed democracies with the exception of one state, paints a bleak picture of the strength of the continent’s democratic institutions. There is also a worryingly high number of senior political officials that have contracted COVID-19 in countries that already are unstable gerontocracies, including Burkina Faso and Nigeria. Popular unrest and increased political instability related to power competition are just two of the consequences that the death of a leader can trigger in states where politics are more personalized and democratic institutions are weak.
In 2020, Africa is set to host a dozen presidential or general elections, out of which a majority will be held in countries confronting or emerging from conflict. Ethiopia having already postponed its first competitive democratic parliamentary election, scheduled for August, due to corona, can serve as reference for less democratic leaders to follow suit. However, leaders inclined to stay in power may also choose to go ahead with the elections, benefitting from the limited possibilities that opposition parties will have to go prepare and execute election campaigns, or use emergency powers to extend their time in office. Somewhat ironically, Uganda’s 2013’ law against meetings between more than three people, aimed at stifling the opposition, was declared unconstitutional the 26th of March, yet the nation-wide lock-down which amongst other, prohibits public transport and exercise in public will substitute it for the weeks to come. In sum, the options of how undemocratic leaders may avoid elections, extend powers and suppress opposition are disturbingly many this year.
Unemployment, Food Insecurity, and the Risk of Increased Debts
The vast majority of the world’s poorest countries are located on the African continent with over 40% of sub-Saharan Africa’s population living in extreme poverty and 55% of the urban population living in slums. A large part of the urban population get by from work in the informal sector, such as street trading and open markets with no access to unemployment benefits or sick pay. Imposing isolation measures in such contexts is not only practically impossible but also counterproductive, as it will increase poverty and lead to food insecurity. Outcries against lock-down measures can already now be heard across the continent, with people rightly identifying starvation as a bigger threat than the virus. Few states on the continent have the financial capacity to offer a sufficient number of welfare packages or adequate support measures for lost incomes.
Africa is an integral part of the global economy and as such, the economic downturn related to China, Europe and the US ‘quarantine measures has seen the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) give bleak prognostics for the continent. Africa may lose half of its GDP due to reasons related to the covid-19 crisis, including falling oil revenues, a decline in tourism and investments. In addition, African states importing goods, such as basic food and medicines, see their currencies losing value against the dollar in an instable economic context. Predictions of nearly half of all jobs in Africa getting lost, underline how the corona crisis is likely to deepen socio-economic inequalities unless wealthier states help carry the disproportionate burden that many of the states in the southern hemisphere are facing.
UN launched a $2 billion coordinated global humanitarian response plan to fight COVID-19 for the world’s poorest countries, while the EU announced €15 billion to fight the virus in vulnerable countries, with EU High Representative Borrell promising that Europe will not forget its sister continent, reflecting the new EU-Africa strategy proposed only a few weeks earlier. Wealthier states and individuals have also made contributions to fight both the virus and its socio-economic consequences on the continent. The Chinese billionaire, Jack Ma, has donated a total of 1,1 million testing kits, six million masks and 60,000 protective suits to help the continent fight the virus, while the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will provide up to 100$ million to improve detection, isolation and treatment efforts and protect at-risk population in Africa and South Asia.
Upcoming discussions between the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the G20 leaders about debt reliefs and the creation of $1 trillion special drawing rights (SDRs) to offer grants and loans are incentives which may provide short-term relief for many African states. Yet, delaying debt payments while giving greater access to credit only risk delaying the economic chock until a later date. Debt cancellations and increased aid budgets in the current context are not only signs of solidarity, but also self-protective measures for wealthier states which otherwise are likely to see spill-over effects from the southern neighbors’ crises. Importantly, the consequences from the responses to COVID-19 will not be limited to the political or the economic sphere but will increase social inequalities as well.
When Social Distancing and Handwashing become a Luxury
To socially distance and wash your hands have been the message hammered into populations across the world as the main measures to avoid spreading the virus and to flatten the curve. Flatten the curve implies slowing down the rate of infection so that the number of severely ill patients is reduced, allowing countries to prepare and increase hospital capacity. This three-axed strategy presupposes that 1) social distancing is feasible 2) there is an access to clean water and soap and 3) that health care sectors can ramp up the capacity in a short amount of time. Even in richer countries on the continent, such as Nigeria, South Africa and Angola, all three of these assumptions pose problems.
African urban areas are often densely populated even in relatively sparsely populated countries in the Sahel. Public transport often consists of privately-owned vehicles where people are sitting shoulder to shoulder, and access to clean water is limited even in many of the major cities for the poorer part of the population. Of course, there are enormous variances between different areas, even within the same country. While the large majority of white citizens in Stellenbosch, a university town outside of Cape Town, may not have difficulties following the advice of social distancing and handwashing, only 20 kilometers away in Khayelitsha, the largest township in Western Cape which has five times the population density of Stellenbosch, this will be considerably more difficult. This is especially the case as the City of Cape Town decided to temporarily suspend new water restrictions for those who had not paid their bills in time, just days before the lock-down was enforced.
Increased tensions in areas where lockdowns have severe repercussions on the population evoke the risk of clashes with security forces. While South African President Ramaphosa urged the military to be a force of kindness and not of might, the use of water cannon and rubber bullets to enforce lockdown has been difficult to associate with kindness and is likely to have increased rather than diminish tensions. In the DRC, the head of the Kinshasa police force sent a video of police officers beating a taxi driver for violating a one-passenger limit to encourage others to obey the rules. These examples of forcible impositions of lockdown are not only likely to lead to large-scale evasion and subversion, but also risk crowding in the streets and increased distrust of government motives.
Women on the frontlines
While so far men seem to be overrepresented in the casualties of COVID-19, women are more likely to suffer disproportionately from the socio-economic consequences of the virus’ spread. Women make up 70 percent of health workers globally and provide 75 percent of unpaid care, looking after children, the sick and the elderly. Women are also more likely to be employed in poorly paid precarious jobs that are most at risk, while access to healthcare for sexual and reproductive health risks will be constrained during the pandemic. In addition, domestic abuse, which affects women disproportionately, has already seen a horrifying surge in places like China and France, and is likely to continue to rise worldwide, as stress, alcohol consumption and financial difficulties, all triggers for violence at home, increase during isolation.
While these aspects affect women globally, they will most likely hit women harder in poorer countries where the health sector is weak, traditional gender roles are deep-seated, and a majority are employed in the informal sector. Entrenched gender roles can be seen in the exceptionally high percentage of single mothers in sub-Saharan Africa: 32%, to be compared to the global average of 13%, while due to overwhelmed health care sectors, women’s sexual and reproductive health is likely to be sidelined. In Sierra Leone during the Ebola outbreak, for example, more women died of obstetric complications than the infectious disease itself. In places with ongoing conflicts, like Mali, Burkina Faso, South Sudan, or the Central African Republic the risks are obviously even greater as healthcare sectors already are under enormous strains, violence normalized and infrastructures weak.
It is utopic and unrealistic to attempt to change gender roles in the midst of a pandemic. However, it is irresponsible not to do a gender analysis of how the measures to contain the spread of the virus will affect women and men, boys and girls differently. Humanitarian aid should take into account these differences, including earmark funds for the disproportionate risk of domestic abuse that women face during quarantine periods. Providing emergency child-care provision, economic security even for informal sector workers and shelters which can host abused women and children are aspects that are needed now. Collecting high-quality data about how women and men are affected differently, both by the actual virus and the socio-economic consequences, also needs to be done now, to be better prepared for the next pandemic.
Conclusion
Africa is a large continent with over 50 highly diverse states. Any analysis that attempts to capture the whole continent is deemed to be general, superficial and miss important differences. This brief is no exception. Similarly, any type of ‘one-size-fits-all-response’ to a global epidemic is likely to neglect crucial local variances. That is why it is critical to take into account country-specific demographic patterns and make sure to communicate with concerned populations. This is not only for the sake of transparency and compliance, but also to improve the efficiency of the measures.
Letting communities propose their own ideas of how to control the spread of the virus, while providing the essential epidemiological facts is one way to take local differences into account. Here it is essential that both men and women are consulted to make sure that diverse gender needs are responded to. Likewise, building on previous lessons from managing epidemics such as Ebola and HIV/AIDS is vital to get efficient responses, but also to prepare for the fact that socio-economic consequences will outlive the threat of the virus. Africa has extensive experience from these previous diseases, experience which unfortunately also translates into important numbers of individuals with weak immune systems.
While Africa’s young demographics seem to make the corona virus less of a lethal threat here than in Europe, the political and socio-economic consequences will most likely hit Africa harder than other continents. Their impact risk undermining significant advances made during the past few decades in terms of democratization, economic growth and improved living conditions. This is why Africa cannot and should not be facing the coming crisis alone. As US and European states struggle to show solidarity in between themselves, they should make sure to extend this further South, and show that slogans of partnership, sister continents and equality actually reflect values and guide action.
Based on an article originally published in the Egmont Royal Institute for International Relations on 16 April 2020.
Dr. Nina Wilén is Research Director for the Africa Programme at the Egmont Institute for International Relations and Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science at Lund University, Sweden. She has been doing research on Security Force Assistance (SFA), Security Sector Reform (SSR), the politics of peacekeeping operations and gender with a focus on the military institution. Geographically her research has been concentrated to Sub-Saharan Africa, where she has conducted extensive fieldwork. She is currently part of a collective research project on Security Force Assistance at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo (PRIO), and another project funded by the Swedish Research Council on SSR and gender in Liberia and Mali. She has published extensively on the challenges of peacebuilding and peace operations in a range of international academic journals such as Gender, Work and Organization, Third World Quarterly and Journal of Eastern African Studies. Since 2018, she is a Global Fellow at PRIO (Peace Research Institute in Oslo) and since January 2020, the Editor-in-Chief of International Peacekeeping. She tweets at @WilenNina.