Coronavirus – Lessons from Senegal and Malawi

Introduction

While the invisible enemy continues to ravage the world as its primary geography, halting and reversing the best policies and plans, there is wonder that even the most powerful in the world have been contained for a while. Considering that this is not the first global pandemic human history, it is conclusive that Europe and North America decline is formalised. The emerging picture paints positive experiences from Senegal and Malawi devoid of neo-colonial machinations.

Hollow Media

Since coronavirus advanced ruthlessly into Europe and North America with its multiple star generals lethally attacking defenceless families and communities, the resulting shock and awe is felt most by outsiders caught up in an unexpected display of weakness of the supposed most powerful and most advanced parts of the world. The shock is driven by elevated error placing democracy, free-market and questionable Christianity as the recipe for virulent accumulation and monstrous domination. History is not linear and this is an important lesson for all nations across time. There is time for everything. Empires must rise and fall for others to rise and fall. 

So the western media in sudden shame and embarrassment at the domestic collapse of their governments have consistent deflected attention by insulting and humiliate Africans. Most by-lines anticipate doom and gloom for her peoples, relishing how coronavirus will decimate, poverty will build skyscrapers as a result and development will be reversed forever. Not debt cancelation for Africa. Wishes do not translate to reality. Sadly many Africans at home and in diaspora swallow these poisons hook, line and sinker. Pity their children who may inadvertently suckle the poisons. Good comes from Africa!

Senegal

This country on the western tip of Africa has prestige and pedigree. There is no stain of questionable military intervention since her independence. Her representative governments have sustained since their first president Leopold Sedar Senghor ruled in 1960. He was a champion of Negritude. His line of succession has continued by various ruling and opposition groups hence blunting the need for imported or evangelised brand of democracy.   

When the crowned poison arrived Dakar, there was no panic rather resources were allocated to join fight. Among the measures deployed by the government of President Macky Sall is the prescription of anti-malaria chloroquine to only those who show symptoms of coronavirus. This therapy is not applied to those with full blown infection. This position was attacked viciously in France since Paris led the anti-chloroquine campaign instead of focusing energy on protecting and saving her vulnerable population. Dakar defended her position robustly including demand for Africa’s debt cancellation, Paris is too weak to press action.

Why? Since medicine and doctors have become geopolitical, a clarification is necessary. Besides anyone can offer a sad opinion including recommendation of disinfectant (orally). There is peer-reviewed science on the role of chloroquine on coronavirus. The problem is thus: Europe and North America pharmaceutical firms no longer produce chloroquine since related diseases/infections have disappeared. Besides the profit margin of production is slender. Current major producers are India, China, Brasil and other member of the Global South. Support for chloroquine mean massive cash transfer out of Europe and North America. So Senegal held her line and won. Senegal makes Africa proud!

Malawi

This is a bastion of common sense in the southern region of Africa. Another nation untainted by misplaced military usurpation. Along with Taiwan, South Korea, Sweden and Nicaragua, she legally objected to lockdown. Of course, it is expected that lockdown is an unreconstructed and uncritical universal tool for stemming coronavirus. Lilongwe advanced a contrary narrative. When the government imposed lockdown probably without emergency powers, citizens objected by lodging a court appeal. 

The government failed to make her case and her lockdown policy was suspended for constitutional interpretation. The critical point is the government’s inability to explain how the vulnerable will be protected during lockdown. At the time of writing, with the lockdown suspended, the government has responded with public health directives and cash payment to the most vulnerable. 

The message is clear. The rule of law works in Malawi, constitution is respected by Malawians and common sense is operative in the land. There is no need for foreign intervention or international humanitarian assistance. The gullible position that Africans are incapable of managing their affairs with credibility, honesty and integrity has once again fallen. Of course attention always focus on the cancerous so-called giants whose foundation are no stronger than quicksand. Malawi makes Africa proud!

Conclusion

Coronavirus outbreak is global but the patterns of infection, mortality and recovery are non-uniform in time and space. Different communities and peoples address it based on experience and unique circumstances. Geopolitics can still play but its full spectrum application is modified by domestic pressure and internal centrifugal forces within the global powers. Within this context Senegal and Malawi’s mature and legal responses can be maximised for the dignified, honourable and excellent peoples of Africa.

Coronavirus Expressions and Geopolitical Outcomes

Introduction

2019/2020 Coronavirus outbreak may become the most insightful event in the last 150 years. While it is an invisible entity with limited ability on its own to act and operate, its vectors and agents in humanity have played significant roles in its thriving enterprise. The result will take time to fully emerge considering that coronavirus is not fully understood by the so-called advanced and developed countries. Our concern is to highlight state expressions leading from history and the emerging patterns of geopolitical power distribution.

Appetiser

Coronavirus has garnered much attention for a single reason, which is the concentration of infections and mortality in the Global North. This geographical space have 3 distinct parts with a single continental isolation of North America and the contiguous continental mass stretching from Europe to Asia. These techno-economic hotspots include New York – Toronto area, European Union radiating from Berlin and the Asian conurbation nucleated from Shanghai.  These areas are all north of the Equator, apparently the container of all the great powers and emerging powers. Coronavirus is running riot in these areas and seem unstoppable in specific areas under various governments.

Uncommon Cold

The first cases of coronavirus were mistakenly reported as a type of flu or pneumonia. Only when peer-reviewed empirical analyses confirmed its specifics did it become apparent that a new kid has arrived the infection block. It has been highlighted that common cold is lethal with high mortality per annum i.e. over a spread of time, coronavirus seem different. Based on infection rate alone, the speed is almost like a rapid-fire offensive. Of course infection rate/mortality rate relationship is complex, preparedness and response initiatives play an important part towards containment and reversal. 

Triumphs

As the world gets more interconnected events in a single location have higher tendency of wider impact and reaction. However the events of the past seem to have prepared the ground the current diverse reaction of countries in advance. A trend has been on the run in the last few decades and the results appear to have been misread or misinterpreted especially by the western world. 

In 1991 USSR collapsed which opened the door wide for hubristic triumphalism in the West which refused to close. In 2001 aeroplanes flew into New York causing much casualty and led to United States pushing the envelope of military dominance through war on terrorism among others. In 2008 the neoliberal economic model driven by Washington Consensus collapsed and stood still. In 2020 coronavirus unleashed its offensive with lethal revolutionary zeal simultaneously in many countries.  

In this 30-year run reaction aggregates presented binary behaviours in the West and East. Washington DC and her remora allies in the West projected uncritical and triumphalist disposition devoid of comprehensive awareness and far-reaching amendment. The interpretation is reduced to apparent magnificence of democracy and uncontested free market economy. In the East including Russia, representation in governance is tighter with restricted market economies in place. In a sense the economies are servants of the state rather than private interests. Overall, the East has limited global military ambition considering the cost and resource intensity. 

Boom

When the crowned poison i.e. coronavirus in Latin, arrived new patterns of response emerged. Despite all the decades of war against terrorism, shows of force in counter-terrorism, various policies of alert and emergencies by various western/NATO states; only confusion reigned and later blame game. If you add democracy and open market in the mix, then effective leadership took a walk in the park. The only countries with 5-digit mortality rates are United States, United Kingdom, Spain, France and Italy. It took coronavirus to reveal the West as the bastion of failed governments. Quite a strange performance! Something is wrong with politics in these countries.

Apparently Asian countries rose to the occasion not so much that they possess much of the wealth, democracy and free market economies. Vietnam, Singapore, South Korea, Laos, Cambodia, India, Japan and China took the outbreak serious to swiftly contain and decline its threat. These governments acted with tact, effectiveness, reliability, confidence and focus. They displayed acute awareness, rapid implementation, effective monitoring and dynamic feedback mechanism. Apparently United Kingdom and Spain retorted to hand clapping and pan hitting as viable solutions. Lack of organisation, lack of protective equipment, lack of effective supply chain and lack of critical medical tools abysmally trailed the so-called advanced countries. It is a woeful performance. This is an important lesson for the Global South.

Values

It is contestable that one of the logical conclusions of western enlightenment is atheistic materialism enthroned by communist Russia/USSR. There is a stark contrast between the West and the East in terms of culture, spirituality as a viable interiority and sustainable sociological foundations. There is a gruesome assumption that Europe and North America are Christian or that they thrive based on Christian values. These geographies are no more Christian than the moon has Igbo as its official religion/theology. 

The socio-cultural foundation of these geographies have not only evolved but strongly moved away from enduring immaterial truth. Secular humanism with its offspring of materialism is the religion without a permanent altar and priest driving virulent individualism and de-communitisation.  Living focused on select tribes of elite and powerful interests who interlocked into the state. Elite is the state and the state is the elite. It is poignant that as coronavirus took its toll, organised religions in the West are silent in the various states except the isolated voice of Pope Francis ringing from Rome. In the United Kingdom, there are no calls for prayer, fasting, redemptive sacrifice and fraternal solidarity. 

In essence it became apparent that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a subtle shift allowing for its effects and programmes to seamlessly meander into Global North minus Japan conscience as the preferred way of life as prophesied by Our Blessed Mother Mary in Fatima Portugal 1917. The West has no place for the sacred, the profound and the supernatural. Of course this is not suggesting that coronavirus outbreak is a reward for de-christianisation. 

Rather it is the case that absence of solid moral or spiritual foundation allows certain weakness to thrive because the justification for timely effective action disappeared into the purse of private profit. There is an overwhelming lack of positive interiority in Europe and North America. It would have been imagined that a continent that bore the brunt of 2 global wars would have become a bastion of population protection in emergency.

The lessons and policies developed by the same advanced countries where modified and exemplified in Asia to successfully combat coronavirus to the extent that South Korea held a credible general election. In essence Asia has shown viable leadership and unquestionable authority. By so doing, they have displayed the compass for future confidence and positive outcomes. It must be testified that most Asian countries have very enduring underlying social and cultural foundations upon which colonisation added with minimal removal. 

Of course they are not majority Christians and are not averse to it, the collective worldview is not strictly materialistic. There is a dominant thread of immaterial consciousness freely accessible and unthreatened in the public space. One would have expected that post-war Japan would have shed her core traditions and cultural foundation rather they accentuated a transformation and modification of accepted foreign values to their dynamic taste over time. 

Conclusion

The clear lesson is that irreversible change has arrived on the back of coronavirus. To all intents and purposes the West’s decline is evident and factual. Apparently not so much from external attack rather from the age-old internal weakness, poverty of leadership and lack of nuanced authority. The next inevitable stage will be facing the consequences which could be a cocktail of reappraisal, recovery and revolutions.