By Umaru Fofana
Seven months into the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone new infection rates are escalating while the response to the virus seems to be locked in some power play mostly from outside and mostly around resources.
While that goes on, Kingtom cemetery where all of Freetown’s dead are buried these days is being expanded. There are even plans to move the burials to somewhere at Allen Town. Space is clearly not enough for the dead. How fast our people are dying as Ebola continues to go on the prowl!
Ebola is tearing our nation apart. Grim as the deaths may look and sound the new infection rate is most worrisome. And some of those people and organisations here to help us seem to be leaving us more confused as they appear more unhelpful. We thank them for coming to our aid but the manner of their intervention has left us asking more questions, chiefly, WHAT REALLY GOES INTO THE FIGHT FOR THE SIERRA LEONEANS?
The United Nations had set itself the deadline of 1 December to ensure 70% of all Ebola dead were given a safe burial, and 70% of all the sick were isolated – meaning taken to treatment centres. While progress seems to have been made in the case of the former, for the latter it is the reverse. Things are getting worse. Sick people call the emergency response services and there is no way to pick them up. Now all the international helpers are taking credit for the attainment of safe burial.
It sometimes baffles me as to why there seems to be more attention focused on collecting dead bodies than picking up the sick. I know corpses are highly infectious. Sick people are also infectious even if less so than corpses. But have we forgotten that people are less likely to touch dead bodies than they are prone to touching sick people for care. That is a culture that has buried under the foolish notion that in Africa we drink the water with which we wash the dead. Sad! Here, women, example, do not touch male corpses but they are more likely to touch a man who’s sick. A child hardly touches their dead parent but they will definitely touch a sick one.
Whatever the reason for more attention being paid to collecting dead bodies, to my mind, it is the easier of the two without a modicum of intention to downgrade the sacrificial work of our burial teams. When corpses are collected they are put in a hole – buried. We have a lot of disused land which can be easily turned to graveyards. But when sick people are picked up they have to be taken to a medical facility and they need health workers to respond to them. Both are grossly insufficient. That begs the question as to how adequate the international response has been to what has been described as the worst health crisis since the founding of the United Nations. And my question is not in any way suggesting that the world is not here. Rather how effectively are they operating here?
November has been the grimmest – judging by figures of new infections – since the outbreak began. Higher than any other month’s figures, there were more than 2,000 new confirmed cases of Ebola in Sierra Leone, bringing to almost 6,000 the cumulative number of cases. That does not include suspected or probable cases which would bring the figure to almost 7,000 according to WHO stats. So how are we dealing with it?
Here we have the United Nations, Britain, the European Union, China, Australia, etc. I will deal with the multilateral front later but bilaterally it seems to me that they are pledging all these hundreds of millions of dollars – perhaps billions – most of which is phantom money aimed at the virus.
My biggest hope in dealing with Ebola in Sierra Leone was pinned on the British intervention as my past writings clearly suggested. Perhaps that optimism was based on what the former colonial master did here to end our civil war. But I have been left disappointed.
Before expressing my disappointment, let me hasten to say that Britain is under no obligation to clear up my country’s mess however massive the scale of this one. But it is a fact every right-thinking and honest Sierra Leonean has come to accept that our own government has failed us in this fight. Pointless to go over that!
So for Britain to build a treatment centre such as Kerry Town, at a time Ebola is rampaging Sierra Leone, and hand over the facility to Save The Children with no knowledge in frontline medicine, is akin to giving one of the world’s largest deposits of iron ore to an untried and untested mining company. The result is what we are all faced with today.
By their own admission, Save The Children were neither prepared nor ready to run what was supposed to be the best-equipped Ebola treatment centre in one of the places worst hit by the outbreak. That explains why weeks since the centre was opened it only took single digit number of patients at any particular time.
They have cited the need to be allowed to ramp up so as not to endanger their personnel. Fair enough! Except that it has taken too long for that excuse to hold water. Look at the Hastings Treatment centre which was opened on 19 September. To all intents and purposes, that was billed to be a Holding Centre to coincide with the three-day lockdown. It was out of sheer necessity – the lack of treatment areas – that forced the Sierra Leone army to convert it to a treatment centre. It took just a few days and the full 100-plus bed capacity was reached. They have only had one infection among their staff.
Kerry Town said they needed months to ramp up and one worker there got infected anyway. I feel sorry for the Cuban doctor who, thankfully, is recovering well. But come to think of it the Cubans were not even supposed to be working at Kerry Town in the first place. When he visited the place to officially commission it on 4 November, President Ernest Bai Koroma was visibly surprised – perhaps also shocked – to see them there.
The head of Sierra Leone’s Ebola response, Palo Conteh could not have put it better. “The Brits got it wrong with Kerry Town, handing over that facility to Save The Children who have never run an Ebola facility”.
So where are the doctors we were promised would be dedicated to running the British-built 700 beds across the country? With less than 100 of those beds ready, they are still not ready. Worse still, the apparent discriminatory manner in which our health workers are being treated at Kerry Town is shocking. We had all along been told that the 12-bed facility there, which I now understand is run separately from the public beds run by the Save The Children, would attend to all health workers in the country who would get infected with Ebola. It is unbelievable that Dr Martin Salia was turned away at the Kerry Town gate when he first reported there after he had been diagnosed with Ebola. Reasons: He had not been referred. He was not a health worker working in a British-run facility. He was not an expatriate.
Now I hear Australia will take over one of the treatment centres being built by the British. How? With what – and with whom? It sometimes begs the question what all the monies pledged by these countries and organisations go into. In my next article – on Thursday – I will look at the apparent duplication in the amounts pledged by some of these countries and organisations. A huge chunk of which is spent on expatriate staff some of whom work far less and far less dangerously than their local counterparts who get paid paltry sums. More incomprehensibly, the government of Sierra Leone is expected to pay the hazard allowances of these local staff which exceed by far the salaries they get paid by their foreign employers. As for the UN Ebola Mission, wait until we meet again on Thursday. Cheers
© Politico 02/12/14
