Since the Ebola outbreak sweeping West Africa began to develop into the menace it currently is, among those most critical of Africa’s response efforts have been virologists and scientific experts well acquainted with the virus. Oyewale Tomori, an African virologist who ran the World Health Organization’s (WHO) efforts against Ebola in 1995, is no exception.
In a speech this week, Tomori, who currently serves as the president of the Nigerian Academy of Science, attacked the governments of Africa for allowing corruption and financial mismanagement to hinder efforts to curb the virus. The continent, he alleged, was “swimming in an ocean of national apathy, denial, and unpreparedness.”
Tomori expanded on his comments to Science Magazine, arguing that not only were corruption and mismanagement to blame, but a lack of trust in native-born African experts with experience in handling uniquely African challenges was also to blame. “African leaders have little or no respect for their experts and would rather act on advice from external sources,” he explained, leading to a situation where foreign aid workers “become the experts on Africa’s problems, not the Africans. This is why I am angry with Africa.” On Ebola, he added, “Ebola is Africa’s problem. We should have put something in place.”
Ignoring native experts and relying on foreign aid have left Africa “underdeveloped, totally and completely unprepared to tackle emerging pathogens.”
Tomori had especially scathing words for the WHO’s African regional division, which he argued should be in charge of fighting the outbreak, “not Geneva, not Washington, not New York.” African governments, he added, were also to blame:
People say African countries are poor. But it’s not poverty. It’s misuse of what we have. As we are talking, with all the crises that are going on, the presidents of our countries are still traveling in the best of conditions. Some will come to New York in their private jets, although their national airlines collapsed years ago; in addition, they will bring along a long retinue of private, personal, and public assistants, all lodged in the best hotels.
Tomori ended the interview on a pessimistic note, suggesting that few will remember the lessons this outbreak had to teach by the time a new health threat surfaces. “Ten years from now, people will have forgotten that there was Ebola and we will be back to where we started,” he lamented, noting that “there will be millions of scandals about how money was misspent and so on.” He predicted that the approach will be to “focus on those and move on.”
Tomori is not the only virologist who has criticized the African response to the Ebola outbreak, which may have taken as many as 15,000 lives so far. German virologist and Ebola expert Heinz Feldmann, who worked in Liberia helping relief efforts, called Liberia’s airport screening procedure a “disaster,” stating that he personally saw temperature screeners let passengers aboard while writing down temperatures impossible for a human body to register.
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