The Sunday Mail
It’s all perfectly shaping up for our rich friends in the West.
By now, they should predictably be high-fiving and patting themselves on the back for a job well done in taming the coronavirus.
On Tuesday, two states in the US — California and New York — lifted all coronavirus restrictions after successfully vaccinating more than 70 percent of their adult population.
This is very symbolic: These two coastal states, which lie either side of the constellation of states making up the United States of America (from East to West), represent the breadth of America. Bars and restaurants are now allowed to operate at full capacity, while more people can go to concert halls and sports stadiums.
In fact, on Wednesday, there was a bumper 52 000-strong crowd at a baseball game at Dodger Stadium in California. You would not think the world is in the throes of an unforgiving health crisis.
In Britain, “Freedom Day” — as this return to normalcy is being billed — was supposed to be declared tomorrow, but it has since been deferred to a “terminus date” of July 19.
Well, these countries really deserve their freedom for they did a great job to hoard the available vaccines. In what the World Health Organisation (WHO) director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has described as a “catastrophic moral failure”, by last month rich countries had secured 53 percent of the world’s vaccine supplies despite having only 14 percent of the world’s population.
Put differently, it simply means 86 percent of the world was left to scramble for the remaining 47 percent of the life-saving doses.
Unbelievable!
But even now, they continue to sign contracts for more doses, booster shots and possible new coronavirus vaccine variants.
Bishop Lazi recently told some perennial whiners and whingers that were complaining about the perceivably slow pace of vaccinations that securing these priceless doses is not the same as walking into Lusaka Vegetable Market and choosing selected produce as one would ordinarily do with tomatoes and cucumbers, but it has become a rat race. Kikikiki.
Had it not been for ED’s diplomatic chutzpah, including bold, timely and decisive interventions, Zimbabwe would not be having a vaccine rollout programme that is enviable in the region and beyond.
Sick Man Tag
But in a world where rich countries have hoarded vaccines and ran for the hills, from where they watch with glee as “poor countries” scrounge for the little that are left behind, it is “helpless” Africans that are becoming the laggards.
It sets them up for a long-willed and long-expected failure, which fittingly makes them worthy of the “sick man of the world” tag.
It is a story long in the making, which the West has been craving to tell the world for some time.
It is the story of a “poor”, “dark” and “desperate” continent ravaged by disease and driven into the abyss by “inherently clueless” leaders.
Remember last year’s prophecy by Melinda Gates that Africans were likely to drop like flies from the coronavirus?
“It’s going to be horrible in the developing world. And part of the reason you are seeing that case numbers don’t look very bad is because they don’t have access to very many tests. . .Look at Ecuador. Look at what’s going on in Ecuador. They are putting bodies out on the street. You are going to see that in countries in Africa,” she predicted in an interview with CNN on April 10.
Well, it did not quite work out as scripted.
Quite the opposite, fatalities in the US at 600 000 — roughly the same deaths as during the 1918 Spanish Flu — are now disproportionately more than deaths on the African continent, which currently stand at 134 000.
You see, no matter how many obstacles are thrown our way, God is always faithful.
1 Coronthians 10: 12-13 says, “So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall! No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it.”
That Africans were not dying at a rate they were expected to was clearly troubling and worrying for the West.
They tried to come up with the most outlandish explanations to explain this “anomaly”.
Writing for the BBC in September 2020, British journalist Andrew Harding suggested that the pervasive poverty plaguing the continent obviously had something to do with the relatively low fatalities.
To give credence to his working hypothesis, he quoted South Africa’s top virologist, Professor Shabir Madhi, who unhelpfully surmised: “It seems possible that our struggles, our poor conditions might be working in favour of African countries and our populations.”
You simply cannot make this stuff up.
Since life is slowly but surely returning to normal in these rich capitals, it will not be long before we start seeing processions by the sanctimonious West to “donate vaccines” to “poor nations”, and the African — as a stereotyped symbol of global poverty — will again be caricatured as a charity case in desperate need of help.
The US, which was ironically the world’s chief vaccine hoarder, has already pledged to donate 500 million vaccines to poorer countries. Bishop Lazi believes that just as what happened with other pandemics such as AIDS, which eventually become known as a predominantly African disease, the coronavirus, too, might soon be an African disease.
This narrative ultimately constructs the preferred world order, where the West is the only Saviour of wretched countries of the Global South, which are innately and civilisationally incapable of amounting to anything in this life.
This narrative will soon be forcefully pushed through the machinery of an abiding global media through optics of the resumption of normal life in the West, while Africa grapples with another wave of the pandemic.
Already, images of football stadiums teeming with mask-less fans are already filtering through from the ongoing UEFA European Football Championships, while we face the real possibility of a hard lockdown if fatalities and infections continue to rise.
Australian activist journalist John Pilger always talks of how the interests of capitalism are preserved by corporate and media warriors whose “information dominance” and “control of the narrative” is the most powerful weapon.
Insurrection
Pilger also talks of the need for a Fifth Estate, which is “a journalism that monitors, deconstructs and counters propaganda, and teaches the young to be agents of the people, not power”.
If the coronavirus pandemic has taught us anything, it is the fact that our current unenviable circumstances, where we are the laughing stock of the world, are now untenable.
We need to come up with our own narrative to chart a revolutionary new course as Africans, and take our pride of place in the world.
This can only be possible through what fiery Indian scholar Vandana Shiva called an “insurrection of subjugated knowledge”.
Rebuilding our local systems of knowledge, which have been destroyed by centuries of dominant West narratives, will help to create a pathway towards a prosperous future.
In her work, “Monocultures of the Mind”, Shiva crucially observes: “The first level of violence unleashed on local systems of knowledge is to not see them as knowledge. This invisibility is the first reason why local systems collapse without trial and test when confronted with the knowledge of the dominant West. . .When local knowledge does appear in the field of the globalising vision, it is made to disappear by denying it the status of a systematic knowledge, and assigning it the adjectives “primitive” and “unscientific”. Correspondingly, the Western system is assumed to be uniquely “scientific” and universal.
The prefix “scientific” for the modern systems, and “unscientific” for the traditional knowledge systems has, however, less to do with knowledge and more to do with power.”
Thankfully, Zimbabwe, just like China and Russia, among other emerging economies, is redefining its own path.
Considering that it is currently buffeted by sanctions from the European Union, Britain and the United States, including ill-will from international financiers, the country has done exceedingly and exceptionally well to roll out an effective vaccination programme under the circumstances. And the deep economic reforms that are slowly taking root are likely to define the future of this great country.
The grudging acknowledgement of economic growth by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) show that we are on the right path. As Africans, we have to violently regard to be the sick man of the world once again.
We have to sort out our economics, not politics, to emerge from the current cesspool of poverty and hopelessness.
But to do so we must unlearn the philosophy and narrative inculcated into us by the West that we are irredeemably cursed and doomed.
Bishop out!
