By Joseph Lamin Kamara
It took me almost three weeks without writing. I feel very sad about it, especially when there are never-ending anomalies in the administration of our country. I’m now here and I welcome you to this my new column – NATIONAL CHARACTER – which I have promised my editor to sustain. I will begin with this ironic topic.
Ebola is still here and it will not be eradicated with our present attitude. It has been here for more than a year now and it seems we cannot eliminate it. Everybody, save the unreasonably obstinate and those using it as trade, seems fed up with it!
With everything in place – holding and treatment centres, bed facilities, requisite medical personnel and whooping sums of money – we could have eradicated the disease long before Liberia. We could have if we wanted to do so. And we can if we want to.
The disease was here and in Guinea – where it still is ravaging – when Liberia was declared free of it on the 9th of May. In Liberia too, as here and in Guinea, people were stubbornly glued to their traditions. There, there were more widespread incredulity and cynicism than here. Community people attacked treatment centres and carried their relatives away and many people there felt Ebola was just a political thing. But there was just one thing. Political will. And that ended it all.
I know Liberia has recorded a fresh case, after almost two months of eradicating Ebola. It’s not yet clear how the disease re-emerged in the country, killing a 17-year-old man in the town of Nedowein, 30 miles from Monrovia, near the main airport. But as authorities in the country had always feared, Ebola in either Sierra Leone or Guinea was Ebola in Liberia. That is the case now.
Until two weeks ago in Sierra Leone, Ebola was in only Port Loko and Kambia districts, all in the north of the country.
People there still continue to keep sick people at homes and nurse them despite incessant warnings against traditional practices involving body contacts, through which the disease is spread. People have gone about their normal businesses as if there is no curfew in place in the two districts. Commercial activities between particularly Port Loko and Freetown have normalized, but with the presence at wharves in Freetown and the two districts of military personnel, persons with infrared thermometers and buckets of chlorinated water. The purpose of the military presence is to ensure there are no crowding or overcrowding at the wharves and overloading of boats and the thermometers and chlorinated water, you can tell.
Conspicuously inadequate! No one can gainsay that the outcome of banning water transportation at the peak of the Ebola outbreak between Freetown and the northern region led to the capital running ahead of the disease.
And it is incontrovertible that the harsh responses of district health management teams in the southern and eastern regions to the outbreak are the reasons Pujehun, Kailahun and Kenema are now free of Ebola, though all of them border the other worst-Ebola-hit countries.
It is difficult to tell why, but it is just too unreasonable that the ban on commercial activities between Freetown and Kambia and Port Loko through boats is no longer in force. Ebola re-emerged in Freetown about two weeks ago through ‘Magazine Wharf,’ a fishing community that imports mainly fish and palm oil and exports flour, rice, sugar and other cooking utensils to Port Loko specially. The authorities should explain why the ban has been relaxed. While waiting for them to reimpose the ban, let me say that if Kambia and Port Loko are not isolated with iron-hand measures and the border between Kambia and Guinea completely closed and constantly monitored, Ebola will not be eradicated.
I thought the transmutation of our national approach to Ebola from a civilian hand to a military one was meant to maintain obedience to preventive laws about the disease. Palo Conteh who heads the National Ebola Response Centre has acknowledged many times that his team is struggling against people’s failure to adhere to Ebola preventive advice and their continuance of their traditional practices. I’m not making a case for an irrational use of force, but people who fail to adhere to warnings should have heavier punishments than the two-three-month jail terms our courts are giving them.
Another jail term pronouncement for violators of Ebola regulations? This time it is six months, in Port Loko. I suppose this also will be empty, like the one the then minister of Health Miatta Kargbo made. She said they would hand down a sentence of two years in prison to anyone who knowingly kept a sick person at home. That was before the first lockdown in September, last year. You can remember that in both lockdowns we have had, hundreds of sick people were discovered at homes. And I challenge the authorities to point at anyone waiting for the two years in jail for knowingly keeping a sick person at home.
So if authorities failed to implement that ministerial pronouncement, are they going to implement a Port Loko pronouncement? If ever yes, that in itself is not enough to eliminate Ebola there. Isolate the districts like Kailahun and Kenema!
The whole country is never secure until the two districts are isolated. With people continuing to leave Port Loko and Kambia to relocate to Freetown, how will Ebola infections end? It is apparent that they are even running away from Ebola. But it is possible that what they are running from is even with them. Two weeks ago a man at Upper Gloucester received his relative with her five children from Kambia, with no expressed purpose.
We have had two national lockdowns to stem the flow of Ebola infections, which were some of the biggest opportunities to eradicate the virus. As authorities claimed they would do, if all sick people across the country were taken out of houses in those lockdowns and those who kept them there punished as Miatta Kargbo promised, I reckon, we would have far ended the outbreak.
People’s freedom of movements was seized in those lockdowns, with the hope that we would afterwards be free from the claws of Ebola, but actually little success was made, despite government claims they were very successful.
Human rights continue to be curtailed with the extension of the public health emergency. In early June Parliament extended the emergency to another 90 days, which will elapse in about September. It was utterly unnecessary to extend the public emergency which has come with so much human rights violation if we would continue leave Port Loko and Kambia the way they are. What is wrong in isolating them?
We were doing very well in fighting Ebola when President Koroma made a very controversial move – to me very untimely because of the Ebola crisis – by sacking his vice president. That has possibly helped Ebola to spread further, by directing the attention of the government to the Sam-Sumana Supreme Court case and bringing angry party supporters together in public places. The Public Health Emergency may have been implemented to stop transmission of Ebola, but it is quite reasonable now to revoke it if we have secured edge over the outbreak.
President Koroma may not have prepared the bed for the night, but it is clear that the Public Health Emergency is forcing opposition party members to go underground, which to him is an advantage. My fear now is for him to not harness that advantage, if he already has not started.
If Ebola has killed Dr Khan and ten more of our doctors and has continued to kill thousands of people, and if the disease has wrecked our economy and has hindered our education; yet Kambia and Port Loko are not isolated, then Ebola has done nothing to us.
(C) Politico 01/07/15
