In an update on the Covid-19 pandemic across Africa, Heike Becker, Femi Aborisade and Issa Shivji, report on the reaction of governments, the struggles of poor communities and the urgency of building of a new world out of the ruins of the old.
South Africa – social distancing and social solidarity
By Heike Becker
The good news first: From today, Monday 6 April, the South African government has begun to roll out an ambitious programme of countrywide screening for the coronavirus infection. Mobile units and a corps of 10,000 health workers are screening and testing in the communities, with an intermediate aim of reaching at least 50,000 people over the coming week.
South Africa is today also halfway through the scheduled 21-day lock-down that came into force on midnight of 26 March. What has happened during the past 10 days? Except for a few locations where residents flaunted the lock-down protocols in the beginning, most people have been complying with the severe regulations.
South Africa’s 60 million people are only allowed to leave the house to do essential shopping for groceries or medicine, visit the doctor, or collect social grants – no allowance is made for outdoor exercise as even people in European countries that are hardest hit by the pandemic still enjoy.
There have been reports of violent abuse that residents of poor neighbourhoods have suffered at the hands of the enforcement services, especially the police. From Day 1 of the lock-down reports, photographs and videos have been circulating of officers beating people, even of shooting rubber bullets at people queuing at the entrance to a supermarket.
A group of people whose lives have been particularly affected by the lock-down protocols are the homeless, an approximate number of 70,000 people who live on the streets of cities across South Africa. They have been collected, more or less voluntarily, and accommodated in temporary facilities, some of them decently run, others dangerous mass encampments, such as the tented camp that the city of Cape Town has set up some 27 km outside the metropole for 4,000 street people. This is happening just as autumn temperatures have dropped over the past weekend to a wet and chilly 15 degrees Celsius.
The severe and cold South African winter is on the doorstep, and speculations are rife that with the peak of the pandemic in South Africa expected for early May the lock-down may be extended, possibly until the end of June, or even longer. People in the poorest communities have been bravely patient thus far, although many have lost their income, especially those who make a living day-by-day – the domestic workers, the waste-pickers, the informal traders who sell much of the fresh produce in the townships, and many others. There is hunger and the longer the lock-down will last the hungrier the marginalised majority of the world’s most unequal society will get.
The tremendous efforts of South African civil society have continued. There are a remarkable multitude of community initiatives that provide practical support, from soup kitchens and food baskets to hygiene and face mask-making. Beyond that, an impressive C19 People’s Coalition of over 190 organisations has been built over the past couple of weeks that is running campaigns for social solidarity under the banner ‘Stay Home. Stay Safe. Demand a Just Response to Covid-19!’ The C19 Coalition has put together a wide-ranging programme of action that includes income security for all, specifically the extension of social grants, general easy access to water and sanitation, and food security. The Coalition calls for the appropriation of essential private facilities for public use during the crisis, for free and open communication, and for proper training and resources for community health workers. It also asks that the inequalities within the country’s educational system be considered in the move to remote learning. With all this, the focus is on grassroots organisation and mobilisation, including the identification of strategies to divert violence, especially domestic violence, in the country’s communities and homes. The C19 programme programmatically articulates: ‘How each of us responds to the Covid-19 pandemic will determine who we are as a society. The better we respond now, the better we will be after the pandemic… Our response must be just, equitable, and redistributive if we are to meet the needs of all our people. In times of physical distancing, social solidarity is key.’
Heike Becker is an activist and teacher of social and cultural anthropology at UWC in South Africa. Her work and activism explores culture and politics and focuses particularly on popular culture, digital media and social movements in southern Africa. Heike is a regular contributor to roape.net.
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Nigeria – the hunger virus and Covid-19
By Femi Aborisade
One basic point I must make is that the Covid-19 induced lock-down measures and effects in Nigeria are not uniform. For example, in Oyo State, South West, Nigeria where I live, only night life is curtailed by the imposition of the curfew between 7pm and 6am. So, people are allowed to carry on their activities normally outside these hours. However, because of the total lock-down announced by the Federal Government and imposed on Abuja, Lagos and Ogun State, activities in all other states are affected to one degree or the other as interstate movements are prohibited.
On a general note, the lock-down has meant unprecedented hardship, hunger and anger. In some cases, ordinary people have been compelled to defy the lock-down as they are compelled to go out in search of means of livelihood. Some states share raw food and bread but on a limited scale, but frequently to such a limited extent that young people and women have been seen protesting in their streets in rejection of these ‘food rations.’ One group of protesters complained that only one loaf of bread worth two hundred Naira (about 45 pence) was given to 650 people living in about 240 houses on a particular street. Young people turned the bread into football, all in anger. In another location in Lagos, the food rations, similarly pathetic in quantity were distributed, to widows and old women. Community focused, community based health and rights organisations have been unanimous in making demands for government provision of water, food and drugs to ensure a successful lock-down.
A community in Lagos protesting against the small quantity of rice and a two hundred Naira loaf of bread given to the entire community for the initial period of the 14-day lock-down.
Huge sums of money have been declared as set aside to fight Covid-19 by the Federal Government. But, in reality, it would appear that little is being used for this purpose. Only yesterday, it was announced that the Federal Government would take US$150m from the sovereign wealth fund to share between the different levels of government to fight the virus without providing any specific information about what the money would be used for.
Another community in Lagos were a government representative appeals to the community to accept what the government has allocated to them – three loaves of bread on top of small bags containing rice. He appeals to them to accept these gifts with ‘love’. The people reacted angrily and say that he is talking nonsense, they would not, they argue, accept hunger with love.
Whereas public offices are shut, Dangote workers, for example, are exempted from the lock-down and the workers are angry that adequate protection is not being made available for their health. Aliko Dangote is West Africa’s wealthiest businessman, who runs the Dangote Group employing thousands across Nigeria who work, principally, in his cement business. In response to the defiance of the lock-down by hungry and angry poor people, women and youths, some state governments such as Ekiti State in the Southwest and Kaduna state in the North West, are relaxing the lock-down, allowing movement on some days of the week to allow people go to the market to buy foodstuff.
But in situations where salaries are not paid, even market women are complaining of little activity. In Nigeria, there is no social security schemes to take care of the unemployed and the aged, etc. Therefore, people are saying, in the absence of public support, that the hunger virus is no different from Covid-19.
Femi Aborisade is a socialist, writer and lawyer based in Lagos. He was interviewed on roape.net and the interview can be accessed here.
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Tanzania – Chickens of capitalist modernity coming home to roost
By Issa Shivji
The fight against Covid-19 is as much a class struggle as any, perhaps fiercer. The pandemic is knocking on the doors of the continent. The ravages of five centuries of capitalist barbarity and its sycophant accomplices has left us most vulnerable. In Tanzania we have been made doubly vulnerable as floods are devastating some regions and rendering people shelter-less. I shudder to think what the consequences will be. But we must continue to hope and struggle as long as we live.
We are going through trying times. Humanity is on trial. This is the time when the worst and the best in us comes out in ways that we could not have been imagined in normal times. We are used to saying, ‘the personal is political’. Now the ‘social is personal’, so much so that the personal takes precedence, the social disappears. “Me first”, “my (family) first” overwhelms the ‘us’.
These are the times when ‘keep sane’, ‘stay sane’ become words of affection. Yet what is at stake is our humanity itself. We don’t say ‘be human’, ‘stay human’ for human is social and social is a distant second. Social is moral. Sanity is rational. And we are all children of Enlightenment rationality.
The chickens of capitalist modernity are coming home to roost.
But all is not bleak. It never is for we are humans and do not have the hide of a buffalo to be unaffected by human suffering. So, health workers are in the front line fighting the pandemic. Cuban doctors travel over the seas to save lives of fellow human beings while putting their own lives in danger. The Chinese send shiploads of medical kits to Italy and Iran in the people’s war (truly a peoples’ war) against Covid-19 (while Trump tightens the screws of sanctions against Iran and the EU mulls over financial instruments that would secure its loans to a fellow EU member). Humanity is not so bereft of humanness. No, it is not.
Julius Nyerere rhetorically asks in his article Usawa wa Binadamu (Human Equality) what is it that makes us all equal when we are so unequal in every respect. His answer: it is our humanness. Nyerere’s equality is human equality (moral). Enlightenment’s equality is legal equality (rational).
Why am I saying all this? I’m saying it because in such times of crisis our Enlightenment values, which inform the age of (capitalist) modernity, so starkly reveal themselves in all their nakedness. And they are barbaric to the core!
Will this pandemic teach us that humanity is crying out for a new civilisation, a civilisation whose centre is the human being, a social being with innate humanity, not an individual subject of the capitalist state who oozes out barbarity, greed and selfishness from every pore. People before property maybe sums it all up, though perhaps not sufficiently to drive our souls – nonetheless it is a good approximation to lead us on.
As I read the messages of love and warmth, of hope and solidarity from the continent, I cannot stop reflecting on how capitalist barbarity has destroyed our humanity yet how our underlying humanness is kicking in and that is what makes life.
In the name of struggle and solidarity, let us shout and scream:
- Cancel all African debts
- Send air loads of testing kits and medical supplies
- And you African rulers divert funds from your grandiose projects and your filthy salaries and perks to feed our people in quarantine
- without humongous feeding schemes, lock-down is not possible and without lock-down it will be impossible to control transmission.
Issa Shivji taught for years at the University of Dar es Salaam, Public law Department, and has written more than twenty books on Pan-Africanism, political economy, socialism and radical change in Africa. He is a longstanding member of ROAPE.
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The revenge of nature
By Issa Shivji
For over five centuries
Capital has devastated nature and human nurture.
Now nature is taking its revenge.
Once again capital will shield behind stimulus packages
While the working poor will die out packed like sardines in their slums.
Hope we should not lose, to despair we shall not surrender,
The struggle must continue.
We, the People of the World, will build a New Civilisation
Out of the ruins and rubbles of corona
We shall never again allow capital to ruin our homes and hearth
To build their domes and malls
Never again shall we subdue to its law and order
We shall stand up
Against their might
To fight back
And claim back our right to rebel
Never again revolution will be an episode
We will make it permanent
It will be the daily ablution
Five times a day
To wash away the sins of barbaric capitalism.
Stay calm
Stay human
Keep safe my friends
Featured Photograph: People on the move to the North West region of Cameroon, as Covid-19 restrictions began to bite (19 March 2020).
really good to have such vivid and illuminating reports from South, West and East Africa from such reliable commentators. RoAPE now needs, I suggest, to provide a running commentary and analysis of the evolution of this pandemic across the African continent. It is a truism that a crisis reveals the underlying structural faults and forces of any complex situation more clearly than during ‘business as usual’ – this is just such a crisis.
It is of course first of all a humanitarian and a health crisis, but it is also evidently a social crisis and a political crisis, and arguably fundamentally a political-economic and systemic crisis which is deeply associated also with the way contemporary capitalism exploits not only human resources (eg labour both manual and mental) but also ‘physical’ or so-called ‘natural’ resources, thereby effectively eroding pre-existing systems of exploitation and transformation of the physical environment and creating new ‘risks’ of various kinds, some of which now clearly threaten our whole way of life – epidemics as well as pollution and waste and a climate emergency..
As always in such crises, the distribution of consequences is uneven and unequal, strongly determined by the pre-existing distribution of wealth and power. There will be strong forces working to restore the status quo as soon as possible; but there need also to be forces working to turn this crisis into a new opportunity for a fundamental transformation of our prevailing environmental, economic, social, cultural and political patterns of behaviour. It will require a greater consciousness, a great collective will and a greater concerted movement for radical change. But in every deep crisis there is a possibility of revolution and renewal. Now is perhaps that time?
Hunger is becoming the biggest threat to South Africa’s strict response to the Covid-19 crisis, which is today entering a 14-day extension of the initial 21 day lockdown. Over the past few days protests and looting have broken out all over South Africa, especially in some of the country’s major townships. Earlier this week residents took to the streets in Mitchells Plain, Cape Town, since then people have come out to protest across the country. Grocery stores and warehouses have been looted on the Cape Flats, in Khayelitsha and in Alexandra (Gauteng) as well as Chatsworth (Durban, KZN). Thus far, the South African government has not yet responded positively to the massive campaign started by the C19 People’s Coalition to call for an extension of social grants. This would be the most effective way to get relief to those who need it most: the poorest and most vulnerable who have often lost their already meagre income and are now waking up hungry.
Neighbouring Namibia has been showing the way, where the government has rolled out an Emergency Income Grant for all citizens who have lost their income because of the lockdown in the country (now extended to a nationwide shutdown until 4 May), or who have been previously unemployed. The amount of N$ 750 (ZAR 750; about 37 GBP) may be modest but the scenes of joy and relief seen across Namibia today as people rushed to banks and ATMs to withdraw the relief money have been described as “surreal” – the effect and relief have been tremendous!
Namibia has seen an active campaign for a Basic Income Grant for the past decade, including a small pilot scheme in the country’s impoverished South. This initiative has received a massive boost by the government’s quick and unbureaucratic emergency relief measure. Namibian activists hope that the BIG may become a permanent feature to stay once the country will emerge from the Covid-19 threat and lockdown crisis. The news from Namibia have been picked up in South Africa, and strengthen the country’s civil society’s energetic campaigns. If Namibia with its tiny population and marginal economy can do it, certainly South Africa can do even better! Or so the argument goes.
Hunger virus is worse than coronavirus!
Anger is rising against the lockdown imposed by the Federal Government on Abuja, Nigeria’s Federal Capital Territory, Lagos and Ogun States.
Compelled by excruciating hunger, poor people are challenging the ‘copy and paste’ lockdown measure to curtail the spread of Covid-19. Protests have broken out in several parts of Nigeria, including Sapele, Abuja, Lagos and elsewhere with the battle cry of ’No palliatives, no lockdown!’
In the video below, a commercial driver was arrested for breaking the lockdown order. Angrily, he ran about as if he had lost his mind. He stripped himself naked, asking whether the government wants him to become an armed robber to feed his family. He then says that asking poor people to stay at home without food and water is tantamount to passing a death sentence on them. Further on, he says, as a commercial driver, if he does not work on a daily basis, he and members of his family cannot survive.
https://twitter.com/Hailfinger1/status/1249643543213289481
The video was filmed and broadcast by the private television house, the AIT, African Independent Television.
In other cases, unemployed youths who eke out a living by engaging in menial jobs, have resorted to armed robbery in gangs of hundreds.
Several food palliatives (foods and essential items), relief and Covid-19 funds have been announced by governments, the Central Bank of Nigeria, China and the G20. But it does not appear that this relief reaches the poor that need them most.
Covid-19 has reportedly killed 13 persons, but security forces have killed at least 22 in their bid to forcefully enforce the lockdown since 30 March when it was first imposed.
The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), the Federal Government’s Commission, in a report on 14 April confirmed 18 deaths. Since then, newspapers have reported an additional four deaths.
An unregistered political organisation led by a leading human rights lawyer, Femi Falana, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, has compiled and published comparative data about recent deaths in Nigeria, as follows:
1. COVID-19 REPORT
Total Confirmed-542
Discharged-166
Deaths-19
********
2. Lassa fever has killed more Nigerians than COVID-19
• 188 poor citizens died in 3 months
• 963 cases in 27 states
*********
3. Security Forces has killed more Nigerians than COVID-19
22 citizens killed in one month
Kaduna-12
Anambra-2
Delta-2
Abia-2
Cross River-1
Katsina -1
Niger-1
Ebonyi1
Compiled by People’s Alternative Front
Some useful links to Nigeria newspaper reports (trigger warning – some of the footage is disturbing):
https://www.vanguardngr.com/2020/04/police-in-anambra-shoots-two-to-death-over-enforcement-movement-restriction/
https://advocate.ng/2020/04/update-boy-15-one-other-shot-as-women-protest-against-lockdown-turn-bloody-in-delta/
Here is a case of a taxi driver being beaten to death by soldiers in Calabar:
https://gistvic.com/2020/04/no-face-mask-soldiers-beat-taxi-driver-to-death-in-calabar-video/
Statement on the Covid pandemic – 19
Since December 2019, the world has been shaken by a serious health crisis, with multiple and disastrous consequences, in particular for peoples and popular youth. After mainland China, home of the epidemic, all continents were affected in turn. Declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) in January 2020, coronavirus disease or Covid-19 has strained the health systems of major imperialist powers – United States of America, China, Spain, Italy , France, etc. – which include tens of thousands of infected people and victims.
On the economic and social level, this pandemic caused an economic recession – comparable to the crisis of 1929 according to certain analysts and political leaders – which results in the explosion of unemployment which affects especially precarious and vulnerable jobs, occupied mainly by young people. workers. Africa is also under severe strain. As of April 13, there were 14,524 confirmed cases of Covid-19 and 788 people dead, according to CDC Africa, a specialized agency of the Commission of the African Union (AU). In Burkina Faso, the first cases of contamination with Covid-19 were recorded on March 9, 2020. Since then, the disease has experienced rapid and worrying spread. On April 12, 2020, a press release from the government’s information service reported 515 cases, 317 of which were under treatment, 170 cured and 28 deaths.
Faced with this sad outcome, the ODJ offers its sincere condolences to the families and relatives of the victims and expresses its solidarity and wishes for a speedy recovery to those infected with the disease – many of whom are desperately waiting for medical treatment. It congratulates the workers engaged in the fight against this pandemic, and more particularly the personnel of the health structures (carers, administrators, surface workers, etc.) – among whom there are several young workers – for their courage, their professionalism in caring for the sick, despite very precarious working conditions and the risk of infection.
At the beginning of this health crisis, the power of the MPP ( ruling party) and allies wanted, not only to trick and save time in the face of social discontent, more precisely that following the enlargement of the Single Tax on wages and salaries (IUTS) premiums and allowances of workers in the public and private sectors, but also had not taken the full measure of the situation. Thus even before the first cases were officially declared, the government of Christophe Dabiré, through the voice of the Minister of Health, reassured the national opinion that he was ready for a substantial help, in case it occurs in Burkina Faso. This cavalier posture would explain the infancy or the “cacophony” (expression used by Emile Pargui Paré of the MPP on a local radio) in the government management of the pandemic, in particular the communication and the late adoption of adequate measures to eradicate it.
The rise in the disease curve is therefore one of the consequences of this political neglect of the MPP and allied power. And as “a misfortune never happens alone”, the Covid-19 disease occurred in a context of fragility, even bankruptcy, of our health system, stuck in a crisis since the application of structural adjustment programs by the two successive powers of the 4th Republic (CDP and MPP), under the injunction of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
The democratic and revolutionary movement of Burkina Faso has constantly denounced the harmful effects of these anti-social and anti-national public policies and called for their abandonment. Faced with these cries of heart and the plight of the masses, the CDP and then the MPP have always chosen to play a deaf ear. Worse, following recent struggles by health workers’ unions like SYNTSHA, to denounce the state of advanced deterioration of the health system, the MPP has insulted and threatened struggling workers . And heightened with hypocrisy, it is now that senior dignitaries of the MPP regime and allies pretend to realize this and begin to praise the bravery of the health workers who face the Covid-19 disease with terrible equipment and facilities.
Faced with the health crisis exacerbated by Covid-19 and multiple consequences, the ODJ invites its structures, activists and sympathizers and the popular youth of Burkina Faso to:
– scrupulously follow the barrier measures in order to break the chain of contamination of covid-19,
– develop chains of solidarity in raising awareness and taking preventive measures,
– develop active solidarity towards people who are at risk from the situation.
To the government, the ODJ recommends:
– the consequent care of the sick and confined,
– the clarification of the conditions for the allocation of government support and the involvement of control structures (ASCE-LC, RENLAC) in the management of material and financial aid from the State and individuals (especially that hints of embezzlement are reported by an economic adviser to the president),
– the urgent participatory adoption of additional support measures for populations whose activities have been stopped and reduced by government measures,
– the rapid and substantial equipment of health centers with protective equipment and rapid screening kits to promote large-scale screening,
– the levying of taxes on SMEs, SMIs to enable them to face the situation,
– lower prices for basic necessities (oil, soap, cereals, hydrocarbons, etc.) and tight price controls to avoid inflation,
– the pure and simple abolition of the IUTS on premiums and indemnities for workers in the public, parapublic and private sectors,
– an end to the repression of populations, in particular workers struggling to defend their purchasing power.
Long live solidarity between the working classes!
Long live the revolutionary youth of Burkina!
Long live the ODJ!
Ouagadougou, April 14, 2020
The National Executive Office
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Any ideas? Thanks!