By Umaru Fofana
It looks like a re-enactment of what obtained in Sierra Leone in the late 1990s and at the turn of the millennium. A United Nations mission that seemed confused about what to do and often letting its guard down, a government that was out of its depth, a rebel outfit that was ravaging the population, and the British military intervention that was to save the day.
Five months since Ebola was first diagnosed in Sierra Leone it would seem like almost all the key players in stemming its spread have been treating the matter with kids' gloves and sometimes sheer foolishness. From a government whose ambivalence and initial lack of serious response served as a manure to make the disease flourish, to a United Nations organisation which has admitted to failing the people of not only Sierra Leone but also Guinea and Liberia, yet exhibiting more cluelessness.
If the UN was a country then the global head of the World Health Organisation would be its health minister. And if that country was a civilised society where public officials were held accountable for their action or even inaction, then Margaret Cham would have resigned her position.
A draft memo leaked to the Associated Press news agency says the WHO botched its response to the current Ebola outbreak which has killed nearly 5,000 people in the sub-region. It says "nearly everyone involved in the outbreak response failed to see fairly plain writing on the wall...a perfect storm was brewing, ready to burst open in full force". In other words it accused the agency's leaders of gross incompetence.
Everyone around the world agrees that the UN failed the people of the region. I cannot still understand why the head of WHO is still in her post despite this absolute lack of confidence shown in her leadership.
As a further sign of the UN bureaucracy and incompetence, its Secretary General has established layer after layer which will soon start to bicker while the poor and hapless people get sicker and continue to die. Ban Ki-Moon appointed an Ebola tsar in Dr David Nabarro whose competence I am not competent to question. However belatedly the appointment was a good move.
Few weeks later a new Mission - United Nations Mission for Emergency Ebola Response (UNMEER) - was set up. One would imagine that Dr Nabarro would be its head. But no! While he's still there as the Ebola point man, Antony Banbury has been appointed as the Mission head. Layering over an already over-layered response, while more continue to die and fall sick. If this does not bring those dark memories of how UNAMSIL dragged its feet in Sierra Leone while the nation burned, then nothing else does.
I hear the new UN mission has already brought in scores of Land Cruiser vehicles. Does UNMEER need telling that what is most needed in the Ebola response at this time is less ado about luxury vehicles and more attention to bringing in ambulances, mobile laboratories, health workers from abroad and good conditions for Sierra Leonean ones!
It is a shame that the entire northern Sierra Leone does not have a single Ebola-testing laboratory, or a treatment bed to respond to patients. Some of the so-called holding bays for suspect patients are unfit even for rats to sleep on. The whole of the southern province has no laboratory, with only one treatment centre - thanks to MSF. In Freetown, the only mobile laboratory at Lakka which was donated by the South African government, was said to have broken down for the whole of last week with many patients awaiting their test results until death snatched. Perhaps if those results had come through in good time treatment would have commenced at the appropriate places and their lives saved.
At the height of the recalcitrance of the RUF rebel outfit in the late 1990s and early 2000s, British troops landed in Sierra Leone in dramatic fashion ruffling feathers in UN mission circles - even in New York, I later learned. The then Acting UN force commander even openly stated his opposition to the military drills at the Lumley beach. In the end it was the British troops that redressed the stripped UN peacekeepers some of whom stood like babies while marauding RUF rebels took them hostage and killed defenceless civilians. When hundreds of Indian peacekeepers were encircled in Kailahun and some UN Military Observers held hostage it was the Brits who went to the rescue.
If the UN does not know what Sierra Leone needs at present, then they need look not beyond the clear strategy of the British. They have spent the last couple of weeks flying in army engineers and medics, ambulances and non-luxury vehicles, hands-on workers not bureaucrats. They are here building treatment centres - the surest way to deal with Ebola through containment of the sick and treatment of them. They are flying in ambulances and massive medical consignments, and I hear will soon take the lead in handling the burial of Ebola corpses said to account for over 75% of transmission in Sierra Leone. They are flying in medics to treat not only the public but also health workers who may get the virus. This is the way to go. This is called a plan.
I agree that governments can act faster than organisations such as the UN can. But let the world body first show us their plan, and not the US$ 1 billion they say they need. For what!
If anyone doubts why, like during the rebel war, British will not take instructions from the UN Mission, then this is it - the one is purposeful the other foolishly and nauseatingly bureaucratic. No wonder the world is so coy - reluctant if you prefer - to give money towards the UN's response to the outbreak.
In all of this, coordination will continue to be a problem. The government is completely out of its depth, and breath, in dealing with the epidemic. Most cabinet ministers are nowhere doing anything serious. We are cursed with some public servants who are anything but. And they were appointed and are being retained by a president who is under oath to protect Sierra Leoneans.
Now, just weeks after his appointment - because his predecessor obviously did not give a good account in the Ebola fight - the new minster of health has been sidelined. In a country where nothing else is going on at present but the fight against Ebola - or the counting of the cost thereof - removing this health issue form the hands of the health minister is a show of lack of confidence in him and akin to sacking him from post.
That response is now separate and independent of any ministry and now falls under the portfolio of the minister of defence. Besides some degree of militarism needed in the current fight, it does not make militarism the only quality to be possessed by the leader of the fight - which seems to be the consideration of the president in making his defence chief his Ebola chief - the latest in a long chain of mistakes or neglect. To be continued.
(C) Politico 21/10/14
