COVID-19

Myanmar is set to hold general elections next month, for the second time since the end of military rule in 2011. The last election, in 2015, ushered Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) into power with a landslide victory. Since then, the NLD has had a mixed economic record, and Aung San Suu Kyi has gone from human rights icon to international pariah for defending the army’s brutal persecution of the Rohingya ethnic minority. More recently, the government has mismanaged its response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and Myanmar now has more cases and deaths than any other mainland Southeast Asian country. Still, the NLD remains popular among Myanmar’s ethnic Burman majority, and will almost certainly retain control of both houses of the legislature, as well as many state assemblies. Predictable top-line results aside, the elections still raise several important questions: Can Myanmar even hold a safe vote amid the pandemic, with the government imposing lockdowns in major cities like Yangon, its largest population center, and some other areas? Will the NLD lose some ground among ethnic minority voters, many of whom are increasingly dissatisfied with the party? Perhaps most importantly, will the NLD’s victory bring progress or retrenchment in Myanmar’s democracy? After all, the government is creating a climate of repression that, according to Human Rights Watch, makes the November 8 election “fundamentally flawed.” For more on the prospects for the election, see my new World Politics Review article.

Senegal is a major center of West African Islam, and its imams, mullah, and brotherhoods are influential across the Sahel. The holy city of Touba, 120 miles east of the Senegalese capital of Dakar, is the site of a major, annual pilgrimage called the Magal, which is now underway. While no estimates are yet available as to the number of participants this year, in past years there have been as many as five million. The pilgrimage is organized by the Mourides sect of Islam. The caliph of the sect issued a call for the pilgrimage, and the government of Senegal has not objected. Many government officials will participate. Such is the power of the Mourides sect that any government would be hard-pressed to stop the Magal, perhaps the world's largest gathering thus far during the pandemic. (The Magal commemorates the French exile of the Mourides sect's founder during the colonial period when Senegal was part of the French West Africa empire.) The government of Senegal has received high marks for its efforts to control the pandemic with extensive testing and fast turn-around times. It seems to have worked. For example, on October 6, out of 777 tests, only nineteen were positive. Nevertheless, conventional wisdom would see the Magal as a COVID-19 disaster. Social distancing is impossible; water shortages mean limited opportunities, if any, for handwashing. While some pilgrims are masked, most are not, according to Western media.  If there is no great upsurge in COVID-19 cases as a result of the Magal, that would be further evidence that special factors are at work in West Africa that limit the spread of COVID-19, or at least of the illness and mortality that accompany the virus elsewhere. There are a number of different hypotheses: the World Health Organization estimates that some 80 percent of COVID cases in Africa are asymptomatic. Further, Africans tend to live much of their lives outdoors, and the population is younger than elsewhere in the world, both factors that reduce the severity of the illness. The Senegal minister of health says that he has deployed five thousand monitors to Touba, and Senegal's statistics—while not perfect—are better than elsewhere in Africa. Hence, the likelihood is better than elsewhere that the incidence of COVID-19 during the pilgrimage will become known.

In the past six months, Chinese foreign policy appears to have taken a dramatic and aggressive turn. One way to understand this assertive foreign policy is through the lens of China's internal politics.

The United States must finally translate its longstanding rhetoric about pandemic preparedness into concrete action.

The confusion, mixed messages, and lack of candor surrounding President Donald Trump's health would surprise few Africans. However, they might well be surprised by the details that have been released, such as the president's oxygen capacity or medications prescribed. African governments rarely admit that a chief of state is ill, and they provide few updates. When they do, they are often met with skepticism. An African chief of state "enjoys excellent health" – until he dies. In the United States, administrations always try to manage the news about a president's health. For example, President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to minimize public awareness of his wheel-chair dependence or President John F. Kennedy public knowledge that he suffered from Addison's Disease. However, at least since President Dwight D. Eisenhower suffered a heart attack, the American public has come to believe that it is entitled to the details about a president's health – and an aggressive media has responded to that demand. The free American media limits White House ability to successfully manage the news about a president's health. While generalization about African publics is always fraught, unlike in the United States, in most of sub-Saharan Africa there is little sense that the public is entitled to know the details of a chief of state's health. In weak states, knowledge is power, and not to be gratuitously shared. Outside the westernized elites, there is fear that knowledge about an individual's health can provide the basis for mischief making. In African traditional societies, it would not occur to demand the medical details of a chief at any level.

Each Friday, I look at what the presidential contenders are saying about foreign policy. This week: The news that President Trump tested positive for the coronavirus injects new uncertainty into Election 2020.

Mainstream U.S. media is characterizing the September 29 debate between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden as a disaster. The moderator was never able to establish control. President Trump, especially, constantly interrupted former Vice President Biden. Rather than a discussion about policy and ideas, the debate was a rant or a temper tantrum. In Africa, the debate will hardly burnish the image of democracy or the United States. However, the October 2 news that President Trump and the First Lady have tested positive for the coronavirus is likely to overshadow the debate in Africa as elsewhere.  This debate was focused on U.S. domestic issues. Therefore, there is no surprise that there was – literally – no reference to Africa. A subsequent debate would address U.S. foreign policy, and it is devoutly to be hoped that the candidates would at least acknowledge the continent's growing importance. However, with the President's diagnosis, it is by no means certain that there will be any more presidential debates. The debate between Vice President Pence and challenger Kamala Harris is almost certain to go ahead next week, but its focus is likely to be purely domestic.   Though it varies from country to country, probably most Africans have access to the internet. (In any given month at least 80 percent of Nigerians, who number some 205 million, access the internet.) Africans, like others around the world, follow U.S. presidential elections closely. It must be anticipated that many, perhaps most, of Africa's leadership watched the presidential debate, along with a large number of other Africans. Over the next day or two, the news of the President's diagnosis will be universally known in Africa.  Many Africans acknowledge that in their country democracy is weak, government is unresponsive, and too often has been captured by self-serving elites. (With more than fifty states in Africa, there are, of course, exceptions to poor governance: Botswana, Namibia, Senegal, and South Africa immediately come to mind; there are others.) For much of the period since 1960 when most African states became independent, the United States has been a beacon of hope for democrats. But, the American image has been eroding, not least because of American police violence, the response to "Black Lives Matter" demonstrations, white supremacist rhetoric, and in some places new American immigration policies. The poor U.S. response to COVID-19 in comparison with other countries has also undermined the American brand. For Africans, the President's diagnosis is likely to highlight the shortcomings of the American response to the virus.

Thus far, COVID-19 has been far less devastating in Africa than observers had feared, including this blogger. It is true that there has been much less testing for the disease in Africa than elsewhere (perhaps one percent of the population, while the United States has conducted over one hundred million tests), and African statistics tend to be weak. But there have been only a few reports of mass deaths anywhere on the continent, such as were seen in Ebola outbreaks. Africa has a population of 1.2 billion people. There have been 1.4 million cases of COVID-19, with less than 35,000 deaths. The United States has a population of an estimated 331 million. There have been 7.1 million cases of COVID-19 and about 205,000 deaths. Despite its obvious shortcomings, the public health and medical infrastructure in the United States is far superior to that of Africa. How to account for the apparent lesser severity of COVID-19 in Africa than in the United States?  Matshidiso Moeti, World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Director for Africa, advances a credible explanation. Summarizing, its most important elements are: Africa's population is youthful; only 3 percent is over sixty-five years of age, while in the United States it is 15.2 percent, almost 50 million. In Africa, 90 percent of cases have been among people under sixty years of age; in the United States, in August, it was about 80 percent. Even though the continent is urbanizing fast, its population density is lower, and even in urban areas people live and work outdoors to a greater extent than in the developed world. It seems clear that COVID-19 spreads more rapidly in enclosed spaces.  Poorly developed infrastructure, especially roads and airports, results in fewer people traveling, reducing the spread of the disease. Some African states, notably South Africa (then ground zero for the disease), locked down early. There are estimates that the South Africa lockdown will save some 16,000 lives by the new year. The bottom line: Africa would appear to confirm that COVID-19 is most dangerous among elderly people living closely together.