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At a conference for his peers this month, John Nkengasong showed images that once haunted Africa, with a magazine cover declaring it “The Hopeless Continent.”
He then 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 relations. But as director of the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Nkengasong has helped guide all 54 African countries into an alliance praised for being better than some richer countries, including the United States.
Former US CDC official, modeled the African version of his former employer.
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It pains Nkengasong to see the struggle of the US agency. In an interview with The Associated Press, he did not name the president of the United States, Donald Trump, but cited “factors that we all know.”
While the US is approaching 200,000 deaths from Covid-19 and the world is approaching one million, Africa’s rise has leveled off. Its 1.4 million confirmed cases are far from predicted horrors.
Antibody tests are 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 of the coronavirus in Nairobi, Kenya.
“Africa is doing a lot of things right, the rest of the world is not,” said Gayle Smith, former administrator of the US Agency for International Development. She has watched in awe as Washington looks inward rather than leading the world. But Africa “is a great story and it has to be told.”
Nkengasong, honored by the Gates Foundation on Tuesday (local time) with its Global Goalkeeper Award as a “tireless advocate of global collaboration,” is the continent’s most visible storyteller. The Cameroon-born virologist insists that Africa can cope with Covid-19 if given a chance to fight back.
Early models assumed that “a large number of Africans would just die,” Nkengasong said. The Africa CDC decided not to issue screenings. “When I looked at the data and the assumptions, I was not convinced,” he said.
Health experts point to the young population of Africa as a factor why Covid-19 has not taken a higher price, along with the quick closures and the later arrival of the virus.
“Be patient,” Nkengasong said. “There are many things that we still don’t know.”
He warns against complacency, saying that a single case can spark a new wave.
As Africa’s top public health official, heading an agency created just three years ago, he launched into the race for medical supplies and now a vaccine. At first, it was a shock.
“The collapse of global cooperation and the failure of international solidarity have driven Africa out of the diagnostics market,” Nkengasong wrote in the journal Nature in April. “If Africa loses, the world loses.”
Domingo Alamba / AP
A teacher checks students for fever at the Lagos State Model School in Lagos, Nigeria.
Supplies have slowly improved and African countries have performed 13 million tests, enough to cover 1% of the continent’s population. But the ideal is 13 million tests per month, Nkengasong said.
He and other African leaders are haunted by the memories of 12 million Africans who died during the decade it took to reach the continent with affordable HIV drugs. That must not happen again, he said.
This week, more world leaders than ever are gathering online for the biggest global effort since Covid-19 appeared, the United Nations General Assembly.
If Nkengasong could address them, he would say the following: “We must be very careful that history does not register us on the wrong side.”
Mulugeta Ayene / AP
John Nkengasong walks in front of the organization’s headquarters in Ethiopia.
African leaders are expected to say the same. “The Covid-19 pandemic has shown that we have no choice but to depend on each other,” Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo said at the meeting on Monday.
Nkengasong urges African countries not to wait for help and rejects the image of the continent holding a begging bowl. The money is there, he said.
Acting on that idea, Africa’s public and private sectors created an online shopping platform to focus their bargaining power, launched by the African Union to buy directly from manufacturers.
Governments can find and buy N95 rapid test kits, masks and ventilators, some now made in Africa in another campaign backed by heads of state.
Impressed, the Caribbean countries have joined.
Jerome Delay / AP
Graves fill the Olifantsveil Cemetery on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa.
“It’s the only part of the world that I know of that really built a supply chain,” said Smith, the former USAID chief.
When the pandemic began, only two African countries could test for the coronavirus. Now everyone can.
Nkengasong was surprised by the amount of information that is “not translated” to member states, which is why CDC Africa offers online training on everything from safe handling of bodies to genomic surveillance.
“I look at Africa and I look at the United States, and I’m more optimistic about Africa, to be honest, because of the leadership there and doing my best despite limited resources,” said Sema Sgaier, director of the Surgo Foundation, which produced a Covid-19 vulnerability index for each region. She spoke even as cases from Africa were on the rise weeks ago.
Brian Inganga / AP
Nurses caring for coronavirus patients participate in a Zumba dance and fitness class in Kenya.
With Covid-19 vaccines the next pressing issue, African countries held a conference to insist on equitable access and explore manufacturing to end their near-total dependence on the outside world.
They began securing late-stage clinical trials that have long been conducted outside of the continent, with the goal of landing 10 as soon as possible.
Nkengasong said Africa needs at least 1.5 billion doses of vaccines, enough to cover 60 percent of the population for “herd immunity” with the two doses likely to be required. That will cost around US $ 10 billion (NZ $ 15 billion).
The World Health Organization says Africa should receive at least 220 million doses through an international effort to develop and distribute a vaccine known as COVAX.
Themba Hadebe / AP
A health worker collects a sample to combat the spread of Covid-19 in South Africa.
That is welcome but not enough, Nkengasong said.
Your next hurdle is how to distribute doses across the vast continent with the worst infrastructure in the world. Less than half of African countries have access to modern sanitation facilities, he said.
The effects of Covid-19 are “devastating” for Africa, from education to economies to fighting other diseases. Nkengasong plans a major conference next year to pressure countries to significantly increase spending on health before the next pandemic.
“If we don’t,” he said, “something is terribly wrong with us.”
