Impossible choice — life or livelihood?
FACED WITH STARVATION OR A WIDER OUTBREAK, AFRICAN LEADERS OPT TO EASE LOCKDOWN
Two months after most African nations closed their borders and imposed lockdowns to contain the spread of the coronavirus, they’re deciding it’s not worth the cost.
Countries began shutting their economies soon after the first case was detected in Nigeria in February and before the disease started to take hold on the continent. That helped keep Africa’s reported case count well below 80,000 out of a population of some 1.2 billion people. But as the pandemic risks dragging them into the worst economic recession on record, governments from Ghana in the west to Rwanda in the east have started to ease restrictions.
Faced with an impossible dilemma — starvation and deepening poverty or a wider outbreak — many leaders are opting to save people’s livelihoods.
“Africa is now victim of its success,” said Nana Poku, a political economist and vice chancellor of the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. “Thanks to a strong publichealth response, we have kept the number of infections and deaths relatively low. Compared to those numbers, the economic cost of Covid-19 in terms of lost output and increased poverty seems very large.”
Financially untenable
The first country in sub-Saharan Africa to ban travellers from high-risk countries, Ghana also led the way in easing curbs when it lifted its 21-day lockdown on April 20. Even though the number of confirmed cases subsequently increased fivefold after the easing, the situation had become financially untenable in a country where the informal economy accounts for 90% of employment, the government said.
“We can’t stop economic activity in our country, our social lives, our children’s education, so we need to do something that will enable us to live our normal lives,” Health Minister Kwaku Agyeman-Manu said May 14. “We should begin to accept the fact that the disease will be with us for a while.”
Ghana’s neighbours are following suit. Ivory Coast on Friday
began lifting a curfew in its biggest city, Abidjan, allowing restaurants and bars that play an outsize cultural role, similar to those in France, to reopen immediately. Mosques and churches are being allowed to receive worshippers again from this weekend in Burkina Faso, where many people see Covid-19 as a flu that mainly
affects the rich and adherence to restrictions is low. In Nigeria, a five-week lockdown of the two main cities was only halfheartedly observed.
Possible numbers
As many as 190,000 people could die of Covid-19 and 44 million could be infected in Africa in the first year of the pandemic if containment measures fail, according to the World Health Organisation.
In South Africa, which has the continent’s highest number of confirmed infections, the government is taking the gradual approach — on May 1 it began relaxing one of the world’s strictest lockdowns in place since March 27.
But with thousands of small businesses at risk of collapse and the central bank expecting the economy to shrink 6.1% this year, business leaders and mining companies are asking the government to reconsider its rules and accelerate the easing of restrictions.