posted by Tanya Schwarz
Last month, the Independent shared Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s letter calling for the international community to act on the Ebola outbreak. She said:
The time for talking or theorizing is over. Only concerted action will save my country, and our neighbours, from experiencing another national tragedy.
Yet, some have called into question the role of international NGOs and the Sirleaf administration in the crisis. Sisonke Msimang, in “‘There is no Ebola here’: What Liberia teaches us about the failures of aid” for Africa is a Country:
Ebola has certainly foregrounded the reality of Liberia’s non-existent health system but the failure of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s government to contain Ebola is emblematic of much larger problems of governance, leadership and trust…..
The Ebola crisis in Liberia has also shone a spotlight on the faults of the international development system that has propped up Sirleaf’s political leadership. In many ways, one could argue that Ebola serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of ignoring cronyism in countries where a government that is friendly to Western governments is in place. Liberia is one of the most dependent countries on Earth: 73% of its gross national income comes from aid agencies and Monrovia, its capital city, is crawling with aid agencies. There are literally hundreds of international NGOs with offices in the city, and in addition to the 800 million the country receives in foreign assistance each year, the UN spends an additional $500 million annually on maintaining a peacekeeping force.
So one might have expected that the easiest place to contain Ebola would have been Liberia. There are already 7500 UN troops on the ground who would be able to mount the kind of logistical effort necessary to reach homes and communities with chlorine bleach, to transport the sick and to ensure stability should panic spark violence. The reality has been the opposite. From day one, the handling of the Ebola outbreak has been a study in the dysfunction of the aid system.
Meanwhile, Uli Beisel, in her piece for The Conversation, titled “Why Ebola wasn’t stopped by huge investment in African healthcare,” highlights the fact that NGOs and the international community have, in recent years, “focused on specific single-disease interventions.” Consequently,
West Africa’s Ebola epidemic painfully shows that this patchy logic of highly focused and time-bound projects has significant shortcomings. Healthcare infrastructures cannot be circumvented when one aims to improve healthcare sustainably. Well-functioning infrastructures are flexible and adaptive. They are able to change gear and respond to shifting disease landscapes. Just like the harvesting of rubber and the production of gloves, they are rooted in history and configured in specific political economies.
Finally, U.S. citizens are worried about the spread of the disease in their country; however, Brandon Brown, for the OC Register, says: “Don’t let Ebola obfuscate the big picture.” Brown points out that there are other health issues that are much more pressing in the U.S. And, in her article “Ebola’s villian and victim” for Pambazuka News, Amira Ali criticizes Western media narratives of Africans and Ebola. She argues:
Varying Western mainstream media styles of reporting on Ebola confirm how narratives are spaces of domination. The African Ebola patient is classically “othered” and portrayed as a villain and perpetrator, while the American Ebola patient is depicted as a victim.