Africa’s truck drivers face virus stigma
THEY HAUL food, fuel and other essential supplies along sometimes dangerous roads during tough economic times. But Africa’s long-distance truckers say they are increasingly being accused of carrying something else: the coronavirus.
While hundreds of truckers have tested positive for the virus in recent weeks, the drivers say they are being stigmatised and treated like criminals, being detained by governments and slowing cargo traffic to a crawl.
That has created a challenge for governments in much of sub-Saharan Africa, where many borders remain closed by the pandemic, on how to strike a balance between contagion and commerce. Countries are struggling to reach common ground.
“When I entered Tanzania, in every town that I would drive through, they would call me, ‘You, corona, get away from here with your corona!’” said Abdulkarim Rajab, a burly Kenyan truck driver for 17 years, recalling when drivers were being accused of spreading HIV during that outbreak.
Rajab and his load of liquefied gas spent three days at the Kenya-Tanzania
border, where the line of trucks waiting to be cleared stretched into the distance and wound around the lush hills overlooking the crossing at Namanga.
Tanzania closed the border there this week, protesting against Kenya’s efforts to re-test all incoming truckers, including those who even had certificates showing they had been tested in the previous 14 days. It was the second time the frontier was closed in less than a month and the decision was taken after many Tanzanian truckers with negative results started testing positive at the border.
Some said they try to elude authorities or switch off their phones when they enter Uganda so they can’t be ordered to pull over. More than half of the country’s 507 coronavirus cases as of Wednesday have been confirmed among truckers.
Several Kenyan truckers driving through northern Uganda to South Sudan on May 30 made a distress call after locals threatened them as they sought to park, Kinene said.
Health authorities in East African countries don’t have enough tests for their populations, so they focus instead on highly mobile truckers.
Neighbouring Kenya and Uganda have enforced strict measures. The countries are on major transport corridors that serve a large part of central and southern Africa. Some trucks coming in from the Indian Ocean port of Mombasa head for South Sudan, which is emerging from civil war.