Guinea

This is the conclusion of Dr. Joanne Liu, MD, president of Doctors Without Borders (Medicins Sans Frontieres-MSF). Her interview in the New York Times is a compelling must-read for those watching Ebola and West Africa. Far from echoing the cautious optimism that the disease may be coming under control in certain areas, she says, “no one yet has the full measure of the magnitude of this crisis. We don’t have good data collection. We don’t have enough surveillance.” Dr. Liu ought to know. MSF has been on the front lines of the struggle against Ebola in West Africa. In the three countries most effected by Ebola, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, the public health systems had already largely collapsed before the appearance of the disease, the result of civil war. Hence, MSF, a non-governmental organization (NGO) that is supported by private contributions and staffed by volunteers, has taken the lead in many places. But, Dr. Liu says, MSF is overwhelmed. In her interview she calls for greater involvement on the ground by public agencies such as the World Health Organization and the Center for Disease Control, as well as other NGO’s and government agencies. She makes the chilling point that the closing of hospitals due to the fear of Ebola is allowing diseases such as malaria, pneumonia and diarrhea to kill children who otherwise would have lived. The experience of Ebola in West Africa indicates that devastating pandemic diseases cannot be addressed by weak states with collapsing health systems. It’s time to reconsider the mandate of the World Health Organization, its staffing and its funding, as a possible way to fill the void.

This is a guest post by Mohamed Jallow, grants officer at IntraHealth International, a nonprofit organization that empowers health workers around the world to better serve their communities. A version of this post originally appeared on VITAL, IntraHealth International’s blog. “I am afraid for my life, I must say, because I cherish my life,” said Dr. Sheik Umar Khan, one of the leading doctors fighting the spread of the Ebola virus in eastern Sierra Leone. Last week, Dr. Khan’s fears came true when he was diagnosed with Ebola virus disease. He succumbed to the deadly disease on Tuesday and died at the very same hospital in Kenema where, just a few weeks ago, he was treating patients from the nearby district of Kailahun. Dr. Khan is only one among a growing list of medical workers who have been infected while battling the spread of Ebola across West Africa. In Sierra Leone, over forty nurses and other frontline health workers have died in the line of duty. In neighboring Liberia, two prominent doctors—Samuel Brisbane, a Liberian doctor, and Kent Brantley, an American doctor from North Carolina working for Samaritan’s Purse—have been infected with the disease while treating patients. Losing Dr. Kahn is an unmeasurable loss to Sierra Leone. According to the country’s minister of health, the doctor treated more than one hundred victims since the first reports of the Ebola outbreak back in February. The disease, with a fatality rate of up to 90 percent, has claimed the lives of more than six hundred people in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone’s health care system is already underfunded and understaffed, and now the Ebola outbreak is putting a strain on the country’s limited resources. In Liberia and Guinea, the response to the Ebola virus has inundated their respective health systems and disrupted cross-border commercial activities, the main lifeline of border communities. Liberia has announced the closure of its land borders with Guinea and Sierra Leone and has stepped up surveillance at all airports. According to the World Health Organization, Sierra Leone is among eighty-three countries facing a health worker crisis. The mounting death toll of health workers is only going to exacerbate the already perilous situation. The outbreak’s effects will linger long after the epidemic is brought under control. Moreover, the reputation of health workers is suffering. Sierra Leone is rife with rumors of health workers infecting patients, and families have at times violently attacked hospital staff and removed infected relatives from hospitals. This has, of course, contributed to the spread of the disease in other parts of the country. The long-term consequence of all this is that Sierra Leone’s health system will be weakened even further, reversing gains in providing essential life-saving interventions, especially for pregnancy and newborn services, and access to the care, treatment, and prevention of highly prevalent disease such as malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS.

This is a guest post by Emily Mellgard, research associate for the Council on Foreign Relations Africa Studies program. A great discovery often brings together strange bedfellows. Such is the case when the Jubilee Oil Field is discovered within Ghana’s national waters in the Gulf of Guinea. The heights and depths of the relationships between the people and groups pulled together around this oil field is the subject of the new Rachel Boyton (director) and Brad Pitt (producer) documentary Big Men. The documentary was filmed over five years from first discovery of the oil field to nearing “first oil” -when actual production begins. The cast includes the original owner of the oil exploration license, George Owusu, a Ghanaian; the leadership of Dallas-based Kosmos Energy, which buys out and hires Owusu; the Blackstone Group, which funds the exploration and initial production phases of the project; two administrations of the Ghanaian presidency; and “The Deadly Underdogs,” a Niger Delta oil bunkering group in Nigeria, which is primarily portrayed as a cautionary tale of everything that could go wrong should Ghana’s new “national resource” be misused. The documentary continually juxtaposes the conflicting motivations, goals, and intentions for the oil and its revenue between the different “big men.” Ghanaian presidents John Kufuor and his opposition successor John Atta Mills are interested in having the oil reserves extracted, but only -and this is particularly apparent in Mills’ rhetoric- on Ghana’s terms. The investors are looking to see a return on their investment, and the Ghanaians are adamant about benefitting more from these newly discovered oil reserves than they feel they have from over one hundred years of gold mining and export in Ghana. No single perspective is elevated above the others by the filmmakers, instead, each is given equal space to state their case. The effect is to provide a glimpse into the hugely complex sector of oil (and other extractive resources) production, and into corporate/government relations. Possibly the most interesting contrast in the documentary is that between the fortunes of Ghana and Nigeria. The filmmakers made multiple trips to the Niger Delta throughout the nearly five year process of filming. They record specifically the changing fortunes of one militant group in the Delta creeks that is destroying pipelines and bunkering (stealing) the oil. In interviews with the militant group “the Deadly Underdogs,” and with other individuals engaged in bunkering, the consensus is that Nigeria’s oil belongs, not only to Nigerians, but specifically to the communities in which the oil is found. Yet the benefits of oil extraction are not felt in the communities, nor is a path open to them to oppose their perceived marginalization. This disaffection is where the bunkering rises from. One militant with the “Deadly Underdogs” stated that “we are in the creeks so that our children can have something better.” Two other interviewees, who admitted to being engaged in sabotage of the pipelines in a bid to be hired as a repairman for those same pipelines had diverging sentiments on their actions. One felt that Nigerians were shooting themselves in the foot by attacking their resources, but could find no alternative action available to gain access to them. His companion however said -and I’m paraphrasing- “I don’t feel that this is wrong. If someone pays me to shoot myself in the foot, I will do it. If I survive I will have the money.” It’s a stark image of desperation and destitution amongst riches. I would highly recommend the documentary. It is showing in the West Village in New York City and opened this week in Washington DC and Los Angeles. It is a revealing window into the complex world of oil exploitation and production, the dreams such resources conjure, and (in some cases) the utter destruction of those dreams.

This is a guest post by Eric Silla. Eric has PhD in African history from Northwestern University and is the author of "People are not the Same: Leprosy and Identity in Twentieth Century Mali" (Heinemann, 1998). The recent crises in Mali have sparked discussions that are, unfortunately, often riddled with misinformation and misrepresentation of the country’s  history and current predicament. A recent example is The New Yorker’s “Letter From Timbuktu.” As a scholar of Mali who has lived and worked there, I read it with disappointment. This article, and others like it, give readers a false understanding of the factors that led to the conflict in northern Mali. The statement that slavery has dominated Mali’s history with “lighter skinned Arab descended peoples of the north” in control of “darker skinned Arab descended peoples of the south” is entirely wrong. Modern Mali encompasses a geographic area about the size of Texas and California combined. North of Timbuktu lies the Sahara desert where nomadic Tuareg and Arab tribes have circulated for centuries. Tuaregs are not Arabs; they are linguistically and culturally related to North African Berbers. Neither they nor Arab tribes have ever controlled southern Mali, though they occasionally encroached into the border areas. Mali south of Timbuktu is more ethnically diverse; parts have been controlled by a succession of polities, none of which were Tuareg or Arab. Mali’s present borders correlate with none of those polities. At its peak in the 14th century, the tributary state commonly called the “Mali Empire” dominated an area encompassing parts of present day Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Mauritania, Senegal, and Guinea. Its power never extended far into the desert much beyond Timbuktu. Between the 15th and 17th centuries, the Songhay Empire controlled parts of present day Mali and Niger. Its capital was Gao, situated at the northern bend of the Niger River. Between the late 17th and mid-19th centuries, a state known as the “Bambara Empire” controlled the areas around the Niger River roughly between Bamako and Mopti. In the mid-19th century, a religiously inspired figure named Umar Tall launched a jihad from present day Senegal and established a polity that, at its peak, encompassed parts of present day Guinea, Mauritania, and Senegal in addition to parts of Mali extending to Timbuktu. Another figure from southeastern Guinea, Samori Toure, led a military campaign that gained control of Mali’s southeast, in addition to northern Guinea and the Ivory Coast. Mali’s “northern problem” originated at independence in 1960 when the inhabitants of the Sahara feared subjugation under a postcolonial government that would be dominated by southerners, who far outnumbered the northerners and dominated the civil service and military. Some Tuareg claimed that France had promised them their own state, which also would have included parts of Algeria and Niger. Though there had been millennia of interaction between Saharan and sub-Saharan peoples, there was no historical or cultural basis for unity other than a few decades of shared colonial subjugation for their amalgamation into a modern nation state. Post-independence Mali has seen numerous rebellions beginning with the first in 1962-64, which was crushed. Another rebellion in 1990 was precipitated in large part by the droughts and famines of the 1970s and 1980s that had decimated Saharan livelihoods and dislocated its people. Throughout, the corrupt, southern-dominated military government in Bamako neglected northern development and concentrated international assistance in the south. Libyan leader Qaddafi was simultaneously recruiting and training Saharan Tuareg and Arab militants as part of his larger effort to foment revolution across Africa. Mali’s military government began to weaken under pro-democracy activism in the south and finally collapsed in 1991. Saharan militants took advantage of the instability to launch attacks on government installations in the north, invoking northern economic and political grievances as justification. After a succession of short-lived peace agreements with the newly elected civilian government, militants signed a more durable deal in 1995. This agreement formally lasted until 2006 but gradually became irrelevant as the political and security environment in the Sahara changed. Mali’s government lacked the capacity to provide the development and security needed for long-term stability in such a vast and desolate region. Some militants, most likely in connivance with corrupt government officials, took to smuggling, particularly in cigarettes, weapons, and illicit drugs. Remnants of Algeria’s failed jihadi movement also found refuge in the Sahara, joining in the smuggling, providing training to aspiring jihadis from the region, and earning multimillion dollar ransoms from European tourists who had disregarded travel warnings and became their hostages. Periodic militant raids against military patrols and government installations gradually escalated into a full fledged “third” rebellion that lasted from 2006 to 2009. A combination of military pressure, factional splits among militants, and diplomatic involvement of Libya and Algeria led to still another peace agreement in 2009. Like its predecessors, this agreement failed to undo the underlying sources of conflict and insecurity, and the Malian government lacked any capacity to enforce it. The escalation in fighting that began in late 2011 and precipitated the present crises resulted in large part from the collapse of Qaddafi’s regime in 2011. For three decades, Qaddafi’s patronage of militants and vast financial resources enabled him to play power broker across the Sahara. His demise created a power vacuum and unleashed weapons and militants across the region. The results are now seen not only in Mali’s instability, but Niger’s, Northern Nigeria’s, and the Central African Republic’s as well. The strains of renewed conflict also exacerbated tensions within Mali’s military and led to the coup in the capital Bamako in March 2012. The current conflict and the ones that preceded it are largely about Saharan peoples fighting each other and their governments for dominance over Saharan trade (licit and illicit) routes and the towns and communities that dot the region, not conquering “dark skinned” sub-Saharan African peoples and states. The lines of conflict have correlated with tribal affiliation and social hierarchy, not race in the American sense, and even these lines are often blurry. External actors such as Qaddafi and now Algerian and other international jihadis have also exploited these conflicts to project their own influence, but their agenda has never been racial subjugation. The reductionist interpretation, using Western notions of racial politics and slavery, misleads analysis on the situation in Mali. It dates to the 19th century when the phenomenon of Arab slave raiding was hyped to justify European colonization and rally support for Christian missionaries. However, slavery was rampant across southern Mali well into the French colonial period, and “black” Africans held slaves. In fact, the “Bambara Empire” mentioned above was built largely on a slave economy. Moreover, for Saharan peoples, the American notion of skin color is not a determinant of social status or identity. One can have “noble” status with black skin, or "inferior" social rank with light skin. Using misplaced racial divisions to explain Africa’s problems can misguide activism and policymaking. I recommend readers consult “Mali: Beyond Counterterrorism” by two thoughtful experts with extensive research experience in the region and deeper connections to its people.