The hunger virus or what?

Laolu Senbanjo, a New York-based journalist originally from Nigeria, has provided some American and Nigerian perspectives on the global effect of the coronavirus. Firstly, he focused on the original expectations in the period when the virus began galloping around the world. Too little was known about the virus, leading to a late start in fighting it. Secondly, he wrote, many assumed that the virus would be a great global equaliser - that countries and regions everywhere would be on an equal footing as all faced the same uncertainty, and the same disease. With a common enemy attacking human bodies regardless of ethnicity, race or creed, all would be in the same boat and would fight it together. Not quite; this is a First World luxury assumption.

While the phenomenon of homogeneity in approaches - fighting the virus regardless of geographic, economic or cultural contexts - did emerge, these efforts, though well-intentioned, were bound to fail, and did more harm than good. The cracks in the idealistic thinking began when US president Donald Trump literally tried to put a face on the virus, calling it the "China virus".

"In Nigeria", Senbanjo wrote, "a desperate population was prescribed by wealthy Western nations to simply stay at home. For millions across Africa, this contained an agonising dilemma. Wage earners who live hand-to-mouth had to decide between the possibility of dying from the virus or the certainty of dying from hunger. It became clear to me in New York, by contact with my Nigerian co-workers, that there was a chilling refrain. Trapped in their homes, and with their ability curtailed to earn money, Nigerians were talking not about the coronavirus but what they had started to call the hunger virus. Families who live on the thinnest razor edge of poverty were being sliced apart by the very real spectre of starvation. We who live in global financial centres, spoke of our economic pain in terms of a decade of stock market gains being wiped out. For Africans the pain was a physical suffering of not having enough to eat."

The overall human toll of policies enacted on populations like Nigeria is not yet known. How many elderly people died from not having enough money to buy medicine? How many infants went without milk and good food? Impossible to calculate at this stage.

What must we in South Africa practically put on the table, also after taking note of reports such as Senbanjo's? Some brilliant, quick and ongoing thinking is needed for our multi-stratified socio-economic realities with their geographic variations. We need highly differentiated, but fair strategies, with applications to be enacted firmly and lawfully on a non-uniform war front. Figuratively stated, both the left hand and the right hand must strongly execute - separate in offering, but with intelligent coordination and clear, on-time communications on all steps of cooperation by politicians, financiers, economists, media, and the wide spectrum of community leaders [all relying on their wise advisers]. Wow, this touches on a whole scientific thesis!