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: Covid-19.
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.
A FOURTH round of stuttering negotiations between the UK and Brussels on a post-Brexit trade and security deal ended on June 5 with both sides saying there had been no significant progress.
British prime minister Boris Johnson is insisting that “defects” in the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement, dating back to negotiations conducted by his predecessor, Theresa May and her chief negotiator Olly Robbins, be “fixed”, according to the Express newspaper.
A source close to David Frost, the UK prime minister’s Europe adviser and chief negotiator for the talks on the country’s future relationship with the EU, is cited as claiming the deal penned in January has “unfair defects”.
While Johnson’s government did not have time to remedy the failings, Britain claims the source is now bringing the contentious issues to the negotiating table.
A government source was quoted as saying: “Unfortunately we couldn’t fix every defect with the Withdrawal Agreement last autumn – we had to prioritise abolishing the backstop and getting Brexit done in the face of a parliament that was trying to stop us.
“We’ll now have to do our best to fix it but we’re starting with a clear disadvantage.”
As an example of the “defects”, sources cite a problem over geographical indications (GIs), used to identify a product as originating in a particular country or region.
The product’s quality, reputation and other characteristics are connected to its geographical origin. This refers to such iconic items as Scottish whisky and salmon.
As EU GIs are protected in the Withdrawal Agreement, while UK GIs are not, the UK negotiating team has suggested proposals seeking to achieve a more balanced arrangement.
Amid accusations levelled at Brussels for “dragging its feet” over negotiations and imposing unfair demands on the UK (such as the contentious issue of access to its fishing waters and forcing the country to accept EU laws and the jurisdiction of the European Court), former cabinet minister Owen Paterson, chairman of the Centre for Brexit Policy think tank, was quoted as saying: “The EU continues to make ridiculous demands that it has never asked from other third countries when negotiating free trade agreements with them.
“It hasn’t got its head round the fact that we are an independent country.”