The Sunday News
THAT the Coronavirus disease tends to be deadly on individuals that have other underlying health conditions is a scientific truth that has become commonsense in the African continent.
The logic of the scientific truth extends to the fact that the pandemic tends to have devastating effects on societies and nations, such as those in Africa, that have always had their structural and systemic problems of their own.
The underdeveloped and poor condition of African countries makes them particularly vulnerable to the viral disease that demands expensive medical care and rather sophisticated treatment to manage. To halt the spread of COVID-19 alone requires maximum sanitation and hygiene that do not come easy or cheap. Fortifying an individual body’s immunity against the virus demands nutrition and lifestyle that are expensive to keep up and maintain.
We are taken back to former South African President Thabo Mbeki’s controversial but compelling observation that the true problem with HIV and Aids in Africa was poverty and underdevelopment not the virus in itself. COVID-19, like HIV and Aids is demanding from Africans expensive sanitation, nutrition, lifestyle and behavioural change. The so called “new normal” is an assortment of social and cultural changes that are next to impossible for the poor that make a formidable majority in Africa.
The luxuries of “working from home” and maintaining “social distance” can be afforded by the few in Africa that even before the “new normal” had access to technology and other accessories of the rich, powerful and privileged. The majority of Africa’s manual labourers, menial workers and self-employed men and women cannot easily afford the communications technology and social distancing that COVID-19 has made a necessity.
People in overpopulated semi-formal and informal settlements that live in collectives and utilise communal water supplies and toilets can only dream of social distancing in the true sense of the term. The much hyped vaccines that the who is who amongst countries of the world are beginning to market and pilot will obviously cost struggling African countries the proverbial arms and legs.
The cost is not only going to be financial but also existential and political as all sorts of chemicals will, as usual, be tested on Africans and or dumped in the continent that has always been in the receiving end of military and medical experiments of the world.
Even social, political and economic theories and practices that have never worked anywhere are habitually experimented on and dumped in Africa which is the metaphoric dustbin and cemetery of the planet, in other words.
Considering Conspiracies and the Political
Not only in Africa but also in the USA and the UK ordinary bread eaters and water drinkers are full of suspicion concerning the new vaccines. The first suspicion, perhaps, is that those that have engineered the new vaccines are the ones that engineered the virus itself to create a market and demand for their drugs. It is an outlandish suspicion that is based on otherwise real fears in a world where big pharmaceutical companies profit with relish from disease and death.
That some money mongers may create, cultivate and irrigate disease for profit is thinkable in a vampiric capitalist world economy. Even if they might not have engineered the virus big pharmaceuticals will naturally capitalise on and promote the fear of the disease to boost their sales, ours is a throw-away world, after all.
Not only in backyard pubs and taxi ranks but also in the academy and the global media there are voices, some very loud, that circulate the scary possibility that the virus itself and the vaccines that have been formed against it are artefacts of biological warfare, some chemical World War Three of a kind.
What has fertilised the ground for this scary theory is the jostling for world leadership between China and the USA, a war that has financial and technological faces to it. There are even ghoulish details that we will all be injected with chemicals that will alter our genetic make-up and make us ready zombies for a New World Order.
We cannot but really fear the prospect where all of us are going to be chemically transformed into some other beings with certain abilities and inabilities.
As large a figure as South African Chief Justice, Mogoeng Mogoeng, publicly prayed against evil vaccines and other stratagems that might accompany the medical crusade into Africa.
The Chief Justice, a notoriously Christian man of law, cried about “satanic covid-19 vaccines” and declared prayerfully that: “I lockout every demon of Covid-19. I lockout every vaccine that is not of you, that is of the Devil meant to infuse 666 in the lives of people, meant to corrupt your DNA.”
Linking the vaccines to the Devil himself is perhaps the highest suspicion and indictment on the Euro-America scientific and medical crusade in the present world.
The world, over and above all the suspicion and fear, urgently needs a vaccine and or a remedy for the pandemic.
Even the good Chief justice ended his prayer with the words, “any clean vaccine, they must produce it quickly!”
There is an expectation that science should urgently do something to halt the spread of the monstrous virus whose Second Wave is proving deadly in many parts of the world including Africa. South Africa in particular is experiencing an alarming upsurge of infections and mortalities.
Africa: So Far so Good?
There is consensus amongst both the politicians and the medical scientists that COVID-19 has not killed Africans in the numbers that were initially feared. Some scientists in Europe had predicted piles of dead bodies and overflowing cemeteries in Africa.
The first explanation of African resistance to the virus has been our sunny and hot climate that is believed to be unfriendly to the extended family of viruses that cause COVID-19. The second is that Africa largely has a youthful population that as a group suffers rather minimally from attacks by COVID-19.
Some scientists project that the African diet and generic vaccines that are administered to prevent other ailments like Tuberculosis and Malaria help neutralise the impact of the virus on the African body. We Africans, it is said, are pandemic hardened.
We have suffered so many pandemics so much that this one has found us strong and prepared mentally and physically. That the worst might be on our way is a possibility that must keep us rightly afraid. Fear, precaution and care can only be our salvation.
Let us be Afraid
It is important that all the conspiracies surrounding COVID-19 are considered. Africa as a continent has for a long time suffered from conspiracies and attacks against herself from places and people far and near. We can be forgiven or at least understood for being suspicious and afraid. What we need more, however, is fear.
Our fear of mass death should jolt us into action, all actions possible, against the virus. Complying with recommended regulations and protecting ourselves and others is not just a matter of obedience but of life and death. COVID-19 is a nightmare that Africa in particular should urgently wake out of.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Gezina, in Pretoria:
[email protected]
