Welcome to Foreign PolicyOverview of Africa.
Highlights this week: Public health organizations are struggling to keep up The fastest growing Ebola outbreak ever recorded, Addis Ababa is eagerly awaited Ethiopian national dialogueand Nigeria announces plans to take over a large domestic holding human response.
The Ebola outbreak in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo is the fastest growing outbreak on record—and according to The World Health Organization (WHO), the epidemic is now “exceeding” the response efforts.
The Congolese government has confirmed 2,473 cases, including more than 1,000 deaths, since the outbreak was first reported in May. Health officials think that number could be four times up. Ebola has occurred sporadically in Africa since 1976, but the 2013-16 outbreak, previously considered the worst on record, it took eight months to reach 1,000 deaths.
More than 80 percent of new Ebola cases are found outside known routes of transmission. “Almost two-thirds of deaths occur in the community, among people who do not receive care in a health facility,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. he warned last week. This makes it difficult to implement safe burial and burials to stop the spread of disease.
Thierno Baldé, events manager at WHO, he said Tuesday, “Let’s be very clear, these explosions remain in front of us and we are still in the process of catching up.”
The outbreak is being driven by the rare Bundibugyo virus, whose early symptoms may mimic other illnesses, such as the flu, make detection difficult. There are still no approved vaccines or specific treatments for the Bundibugyo strain.
Welcome 90 percent among the known cases is in Ituri state in eastern Congo, where there is an ongoing conflict between the federal government and the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a Ugandan Islamist group that has been operating in eastern Congo since the 1990s.
The ADF is among more than 100 militias loot gold and other minerals from eastern Congo. Professionals believe me that the virus spread largely undetected in many of those mines this spring. The outbreak was also made worse by the lack of a coordinated health response between the government and rebel groups.
The changes are particularly noticeable in the eastern provinces of North and South Kivu, where the public health response is divided between the federal government and the M23 rebel group. M23 makes his own answers in the cities of Goma and Bukavu, both of which they captured last year and have since established parallel governments.
In the regions controlled by M23, only four cases of Ebola have been officially recorded. For the purpose of to justify itself as the governing body, the M23 and its broad political alliance, the Congo River Union, announced late last month that the Ebola outbreak was “over” within the areas they control. The M23 declaration followed a 21-day observation window, during which the rebels imposed a blockade. strict lockdown and suspended bus routes.
Yet the areas under M23’s control are on the edge of the outbreak, and international analysts told Reuters that the low numbers are a good measure of its potential to contain the virus.
Lack of funds is a major problem in the overall response to the outbreak. Last week, WHO he warned that it had received less than half of the 115 million dollars it needs to deal with the epidemic in the Congo.
The European Union has pledged nearly $572 million to help fight Ebola in Africa, while the Trump administration has given more than 220 million dollars and the discovery of an experimental drug called MBP134 treat the virus. But Washington has also drawn criticism amid an explosion to destroy the United States Agency for International Development, withdraw from WHO in January, and set up a strict travel ban in Congo that could prevent humanitarian action.
Meanwhile, some health workers in Congo have been on strike since last week due to non-payment of salaries and poor working conditions. In a hospital in the northeast of Ituri, the staff he said that they had not been paid since the beginning of the disease.
Emergencies like the Ebola outbreak “continue not because the world lacks scientific knowledge,” Annie Sparrow and Daniel Lucey he wrote in Foreign Policy in May, “but because conflict, inequality, crumbling immunization systems, and political weakness continue to erode the foundations of public health.”
Wednesday, July 29: The United Nations Security Council is debating the extension of targeted sanctions in the Central African Republic.
Ethiopian conversation. Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s national dialogue began on July 15, approx. 4,000 delegates gathered in Addis Ababa to reach an agreement on constitutional reform and elections. The talks are expected to continue for the next few weeks.
Conversation, which was first was launched in 2022 to deal with the fallout of the two-year civil war in Tigray, aims to resolve the deep-rooted political, social and ethnic divisions in the country.
When experts agree that the conversation is importantThe talks have drawn criticism for happening amid ongoing conflict in the Amhara, Oromia, and Tigray regions of Ethiopia and not involving armed groups, including Fano in Amhara, the Oromo Liberation Army, and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (JWTZ).
Constitutional change can also be difficult because it requires two-thirds approval from regional councils—a majority that is unlikely to happen in places like Tigray. In May, the TPLF, the region’s leading party, ousted the federally-backed transitional government in Tigray and restored its pre-war leadership. JWTZ has boycott conversation.
Canceled Congo protests. The opposition in Congo has canceled protests against a referendum bill that could change the constitution after the government agreed to hold national talks.
The C64 coalition, which takes its name from Article 64 of the Congolese Constitution, which obliges citizens to resist the seizure of power, had planned to hold a protest on July 22 in the capital Kinshasa after accusing President Felix Tshisekedi of using bill as a method serving a third term in office illegally.
Following negotiations with the African Union, both sides have agreed a mediated dialogue and religious organizations, to be held before August 15.
Nigeria aid program. Last week, the Nigerian government he announced that it will take over the internal responsibilities of the United Nations humanitarian response plan by January 2027. The announcement comes at a time when African governments are hoping to strengthen themselves further from shocks, as international aid to the continent has decreased in recent years.
Nigeria’s minister of humanitarian affairs, Bernard Doro, he suggested that Abuja will rely on more government and private sector funding to counter the decline in traditional foreign aid. As a petroleum nation, the country has sought in recent months to take advantage of that opportunity record fuel prices due to the Iran war. Crude oil production in Nigeria rose to an average of 1.56 million barrels per day in June, its highest level in more than six years.
Last year, the temporary suspension of US development aid by the Trump administration forced the Nigerian parliament to intervene 200 million dollars in its budget to cover gaps in malaria, HIV, and vaccination programs. Bill aim Alleged Christian persecution in Nigeria passed the US House of Representatives earlier this month, threatening a complete freeze on development resources if approved by the Senate. (Nigerians of all faiths are affected by insecurity.)
Kenya Ebola Center. The evangelical Christian humanitarian aid group Samaritan’s Purse has said that its seven aid workers from the United States are to separate at a controversial US quarantine facility in Kenya, despite a Kenyan court order preventing the facility from opening.
The people face a 21-day quarantine that is mandatory under the Trump administration’s policy requiring citizens returning from the Congo to self-isolate in a third country before entering the United States.
The Constitution Institute, a Kenyan civil society group, to accuse the use of the station as “clear and dangerous defiance” of the Supreme Court of Kenya and its constitution.
On Wednesday, Kenya’s Health Secretary Aden Duale refused to answer questions about aid workers. “I don’t know why you are targeting America. There are also presidential staff quarantined for 21 days,” he said. he told local media. Kenya has no known cases of Ebola.
A Sahrawi Odyssey. In GuardianSahrawi filmmaker Mohamed Sleiman Labat he argues that Christopher Nolan’s decision to make the film part of it Odyssey in the Western Sahara occupied by Morocco is a “betrayal” that cancels the 50-year exile of the indigenous Sahrawi people.
As Labat writes, Nolan’s film, which explores the themes of displacement and “the decades-long struggle to return home,” was shot in a place where local filmmakers face prison for documenting life under occupation.
“Today, half of our people languish in refugee camps in the Algerian desert, while the other half live under a suffocating military police state, separated by a 2,700-kilometer military wall built by Morocco and reinforced with millions of landmines,” he writes.
Nigerian Diplomacy. In Foreign PolicyEbenezer Obadare he argues that Nigeria’s foreign policy, far from declining, is facing a resurgence under President Bola Tinubu, whose administration has successfully managed diplomatic tensions with the United States and begun to restore Abuja’s influence in West Africa.
“Overall, Tinubu has been driven by concerns about protecting liberal democracy in Nigeria’s immediate neighborhood — an instinct that makes perfect sense given his history as a pro-democracy activist who was forced into exile by the military,” Obadare writes.
