As rich nations struggle, Africa's virus response is praised
Cara Anna20:10, Sep 22 2020

MULUGETA AYENE/AP
Director of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention John Nkengasong.

At a lecture to peers this month, John Nkengasong showed images that once dogged Africa, with a magazine cover declaring it “The Hopeless Continent”.

Then he quoted Ghana's first president, Kwame Nkrumah: “It is clear that we must find an African solution to our problems, and that this can only be found in African unity.”

The coronavirus pandemic has fractured global relationships. But as director of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Nkengasong has helped to steer Africa’s 54 countries into an alliance praised as responding better than some richer countries, including the United States.

A former US CDC official, he modelled Africa's version after his ex-employer.

Africa's groundbreaking vaccine agreement

African countries have signed a groundbreaking agreement aimed at securing millions of Covid-19 vaccine doses for the continent.

Nkengasong is pained to see the US agency struggle. In an interview with The Associated Press, he didn’t name US President Donald Trump but cited “factors we all know”.

While the US nears 200,000 Covid-19 deaths and the world approaches 1 million, Africa's surge has been levelling off. Its 1.4 million confirmed cases are far from the horrors predicted.

Antibody testing is expected to show many more infections, but most cases are asymptomatic. Just over 34,000 deaths are confirmed on the continent of 1.3 billion people.

BRIAN INGANGA/AP
Children run past a mural warning about coronavirus in Nairobi, Kenya.

“Africa is doing a lot of things right the rest of the world isn’t,” said Gayle Smith, a former administrator with the US Agency for International Development. She's watched in astonishment as Washington looks inward instead of leading the world. But Africa “is a great story and one that needs to be told”.

Nkengasong, whom the Gates Foundation honours Tuesday (local time) with its Global Goalkeeper Award as a “relentless proponent of global collaboration”, is the continent's most visible narrator. The Cameroon-born virologist insists that Africa can stand up to Covid-19 if given a fighting chance.

Early modelling assumed “a large number of Africans would just die,” Nkengasong said. The Africa CDC decided not to issue projections. “When I looked at the data and the assumptions, I wasn’t convinced,” he said.

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