The Sunday Mail
AS sworn Pan-Africanists, we had strange acquaintances within our ranks in the past couple of weeks, as some of those among us who we know for obsequiously sucking up to the West joined us in roundly condemning the brazen arrogance of countries that recently slapped travel bans on Africa.
The blatantly xenophobic and racist move, which was made to ostensibly barricade Western capitals from a mutant coronavirus strain (the Omicron) that had been detected in Botswana and South Africa, was actually a moment of epiphany for some.
Even David Coltart and Chalton Hwende, who are not particularly known for a surfeit of either patriotism or Pan-Africanism, joined the procession of the aggrieved who thought of sharing a word or two about this latest outrage.
Zimbabwe is now among the 11 “diseased” African countries that have been red-listed by Britain, the US and other developed countries that purportedly want to keep away the new strain of the virus.
Nigeria — the most populous country on the continent — was the latest to be added on the list on Monday. Although the Omicron virus has since been discovered in more than 57 countries, we continue to be quarantined in the “naughty corner”.
Talk of closing the barn door when the horses have already bolted.
All this was not unexpected.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, Bishop Lazi has been telling you times without number that the Western world, which still struggles to accept Africans as worthy human beings, does not give a hoot about ordinary wananchi in this part of the world.
Of course, this is to be expected.
These are scions of people who raided, plundered, pillaged villages and frogmarched our ancestors as slaves to faraway strange lands.
These are the offspring of people who later returned to the continent and forcibly expropriated our land, livestock, minerals and treasure through colonialism before salting it away to build their ostentatious capitals.
And, most recently, these are the people who have been raiding vaccine manufacturers and primitively hoarding the life-saving drugs, leaving Africa holding the short end of the stick.
The world has been conditioned to view Africa as a continent that has the most virulent diseases
Our ancestors warned us before that “mwana wenyoka inyoka”, meaning a snake is not likely to breed anything than a snake.
Some day their greed and selfishness will become their road to perdition.
According to 1 Timothy 6: 17-19: “Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant nor to put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, but to put their hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share. In this way they will lay up treasure for themselves as a firm foundation for the coming age, so that they may take hold of the life that is truly life.”
Selfish bunch
But the current pestilence plaguing the world has once again revealed their basest instincts.
America and the European Union have since vaccinated about 60 percent and 70 percent of their populations, respectively, while only 7,5 percent of the 1,3 billion people in Africa have been inoculated.
This obscene discrepancy can be better shown through circumstances of two countries on two different continents.
Picture this: While our brothers and sisters in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have vaccinated 0,1 percent of their people, Portugal has put shots into the arms of 80 percent of its population.
So it is hardly surprising that they want to shut us out. But what makes this blacklisting even more preposterous is growing evidence from Botswana that the Omicron might have been brought into the continent by European diplomats.
This could be plausible.
A point that is scarcely considered is the fact that Europe has been in the grip of the fourth wave since late October.
What we know from epidemiological evidence is that a new wave is usually caused by a new strain.
On November 17, for example, the Robert Koch Institute — Germany’s public health agency — reported a record number of new Covid-10 cases since the pandemic began (about 53 000) and 294 deaths.
Conversely, on the same day in Zimbabwe, the Ministry of Health and Child Care reported only 53 new cases and one death.
It is, therefore, fatuous to think that closing off African countries would make the already bad situation in their backyards any better.
To their credit, the Germans have since recognised and reviewed the error of their ways.
A sick continent
Bishop Lazi would, however, understand why Americans and Europeans are spooked by what they perceive to be a heavily mutated virus cooked up in the cauldron of an African continent known for “poverty”, “disease” and “death”.
Their societies have conditioned them to view Africa as a continent that has the most virulent diseases such as Ebola and AIDS.
Of late, there has been an almost desperate attempt to cast the new Omicron variant as a monster strain that could only have been incubated in immune-compromised AIDS patients on the continent.
That is quite a frightful combo.
In September, US news service Bloomberg quoted Tulio de Oliveira, a professor of bioinformatics who runs gene-sequencing institutions at two South African universities, who alleged that SA might become a breeding ground for mutations.
“There is good evidence that prolonged infection in immune-compromised individuals is one of the mechanisms for the emergence of SARS Covid-2 variants,” he said, adding: “South Africa really risks becoming one of the mutation factories of the world.”
And how the hell did AIDS become an African disease when the first cases were reported in the United States in June 1981?
What crime did we commit against these people that in addition to centuries of egregious abuse they still hate us so much?
Shouldn’t it be the other way round?
Remember the doomsday predictions made by Melinda Gates that Covid-19 would probably make Africans drop like flies.
This has thankfully not come to pass.
And still Western journalists like Andrew Harding and their ilk are still questioning why Africans are not dying as envisaged.
Long Spoon
The point that the Bishop continues to make ad infinitum is that you cannot expect such ill-willed people to have our best interests at heart. The phalanx of Western media, politicians, multinational companies and institutions always wittingly or unwittingly work in concert to perpetuate the current world order, which continues to condemn us to endless cycles of poverty.
Expectations that somehow Western institutions would extricate our continent from problems that they created after centuries of systematic exploitation and plunder are quite woefully misplaced.
We can only hope that our brothers and sisters north of the Limpopo who have once again fallen into the loving arms of the IMF have a long spoon.
As they say, if you sup with the devil, you must have a very long spoon.
They have set off on a tortious path that was once travelled by Zambia’s founding president Dr Kenneth Kaunda in the early 80s and 90s.
We also travelled down that road.
It must be de javu for those who lived through those experiences.
In the beginning, “generous” facilities such as the SDR212 million standby facility in April 1983 and a further SDR97 million in May 1983 were showered on Lusaka as part of a prescribed structural adjustment programme.
The World Bank even convened a donor consultative groups meeting in May 1984.
But the support inevitably came with strict conditionalities such as devaluing the kwacha, scrapping subsidies and putting a lid on public spending.
The net result were food riots that broke out in the Copperbelt and Lusaka in April 1987.
Consequently, on May 1, 1987 Dr Kaunda decided to discontinue the IMF-inspired reform programme.
Zambia, however, rekindled its flirtation with the IMF in 1989, and support once again came with the traditional conditionalities.
Predictably, the outcome was the same.
Removal of price controls resulted in riots in Lusaka in mid-1990.
A panicky Kaunda became so desperate that he was later forced to humiliatingly appoint an IMF-approved expatriate governor for the Bank of Zambia — Jacques Bussière (from the Bank of Canada) — from 1990 to 1992.
It did not work out as expected.
In June 1991, the Zambian government phased out maize subsidies and doubled the price of mealie meal, which unfortunately touched off another bout of riots that claimed more than 27 lives.
It was followed by a farcical abortive coup on June 30. After Kaunda, whose image had been battered by unpopular policies, was jettisoned through the October 1991 elections, it was the same script which Frederick Chiluba, who had the ignominy of being confronted by strikes in April and May 1992 from the same workers who had helped elect him into power.
But we hope president Hakainde Hichilema, who is familiar with this story, has a well-thought-out playbook.
Our neighbour’s success is also our success.
Sudan’s former president Omar al-Bashir, who desperately latched on to IMF advice, wasn’t so lucky.
The problems facing African economies are structural and they will not be solved through shunting new faces in power.
The solution lies in overhauling the current economic order through people-centred policies.
Bishop out!
