Thinking back to the future
Covid-19: how we plan and prepare ourselves for the “butterfly effect” will decide our fate
I HAVE BEEN trying to think back and count the number of Hollywood movies I have watched in my life with a plot based on an epidemic of the scale of Covid-19, and a lone American hero rushing against time to save helpless humanity from an impending dystopic outcome.
Sadly, when such a virus occurs in actual life, the US is controversial and demoralising in its role, and not the superpower, the superhero, we expected.
The epidemiology of this virus makes it very deathly. It spreads so easily, through innocent human contact and a touch of surfaces. And we do not have a vaccine to disrupt its parasitic, deceptive activities in human cells.
It will go into the annals of history for three reasons. First, it’s an obvious example of the “butterfly effect” long understood in Chaos Theory.
It shows how a small, invisible, parasitic biological agent that can easily be washed away by soap, could cause chaos and panic to such a complex system as human society across the globe, bringing life as we know it virtually to a complete standstill.
We must now start thinking public policy and organisational theory with the “butterfly effect” in mind, and accept, in action, the limitations of our hitherto reliance on mega-categories of analysis of society, and our belief that these categories can comfortably enable us to predict the future.
Second, this incident has shown how a virus can bring a way of life and established thinking that has been confirmed and reinforced by so many years of experience, to its knees.
Post this virus, all of us will be back to the drawing board to rethink our tools, models and forecasts about future global trends.
None of the well-researched publications in my physical and cloud library had foreseen that one day I would be home-bound under a national lockdown, kept out of the streets and our workplaces by as simple a thing as a virus.
Even Agenda 2063, our long-term vision of where we want Africa to be in the next 50 years, did not see this coming. In its 10-year implementation plan it makes just a passing reference to pandemics in the form of an isolated bullet point on “health” under one of its seven aspirations, the mega-category “sustainable development”.
Third, this virus will be epoch-making, only rivalled in our recent memory by the Second World War. It is set to affect how we organise our societies and prepare ourselves for emergencies in the future. It will change human behaviour.
Until a vaccine is found, we will have to go about our daily business wearing face masks and gloves like characters only imaginable in a work of fiction.
Early in February, we were in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, at the AU Summit, as this virus was only two months old and making its way to our continent.
Yet this menace did not take the centre-stage at our gathering. We even planned to convene an extraordinary summit in South Africa in May, which is now likely to be postponed.
We now understand better the limitations of human intelligence, and that even with the help of digital technology and artificial intelligence, we can’t cheat the future.
As a continent, we have our tools and categories for diagnostic analysis and prognosis of the African condition to blame.
Our methodology is heavily invested in the big three categories – sustainable development, democracy and good governance, and peace and security. The cross-cutting issues are dominated by the usual suspects – gender, youth and so forth. Infectious diseases are lumped under “public health”.
Even when we gave specific attention to infectious diseases, Aids and Ebola dominated our focus. Important as our work in this area has been, we didn’t push our boundaries enough, and further and further, to think outside the box.
Now this must change. For starters, we have to revisit Agenda 2063 and its national equivalents, like “visions” and “national plans” that many African countries crafted as their long-term master plans for development.
Like Agenda 2063, these national master plans did not adequately factor the “butterfly effect” in their methodology and orientation, relying in most cases on the mega-categories.
We must recognise our limitations as humans and integrate this recognition in public policy. How we prepare for emergencies must be given greater prominence in public policy and the allocation of fiscal resources.
From now on, our sense of emergencies should go beyond a flood, fire or hurricane to imagine what hitherto could only be imagined in horror movies.
Infectious diseases are one example. Another case is potential extraterrestrial invasions of our planet, like the asteroid that exterminated the dinosaurs millions of years ago.
In the same way we have national reserves for certain emergencies, we should now build a mechanism at national and continental level, with a war chest, that will help us better and effectively respond to an unforeseen incident with similar impact to that which we are seeing at this moment.
EDDY MALOKA