EBOLA: ONE MORE REASON TO BEEF UP OUR RESEARCH

This week it was announced that deaths due to Ebola has hit the 2,400 mark. President Barack Obama labelled the crisis a “global security threat” and committed funds and manpower to battle the latest outbreak.

It would not be lost on many that it has taken more than six months for the leader of the free world to acknowledge the danger.

The conspiracy theorists have been having a field day. They find it strange that a disease whose previous outbreaks have been characterised by jungle or rural set ups, in west Africa reared its ugly head in the urban settings.

They also wonder at the speed at which it has spread across borders. And finally that there were doses of a trial anti-Ebola drug available conveniently to heal two US doctors and UK paramedic.

It’s possible that these theories would not stand up to much scrutiny and that they have got innocent and logical reasons to explain them away.

But what is not under contest is that no drug has been created to battle the deadly virus, which was first isolated almost 40 years ago in 1976.

"The reason this is, is a reflection of the low profitability associated with such a drug by the big pharmaceuticals, the relatively few deaths attributed to it and the lack of capacity to develop a drug by the populations most likely to suffer Ebola attacks – namely poor African countries...

The five biggest health killers in the western world are heart disease, respiratory diseases, stroke, cancer and liver disease. In Africa on the other hand it is Tuberclosis, AIDS, Malaria and water borne diseases.

The pharmaceutical industry is driven by private capital. This means that for them to research and develop a drug a business case has to be made. So you find most of the research is driven towards western ailments and less towards diseases that affect the world’ poor.

The US National Cancer Institute reports that $4.9b has been spent per year for the last six years on cancer research, while it is estimated that to get at least 500,000 doses of an Ebola vaccine within the next nine months can cost $25m.

In addition over four decades it is estimated that only about 4000 people have died from the hemorrhagic fever, a number that does not help in making a case for a possible vaccine’s viability.

The bottom line is that for the big pharmaceutical companies who have the resources – financial and human to research and develop drugs for Ebola or any other diseases that affect us, it does not make financial sense to get involved.

Which brings us full circle to our own responsibility as Africans.  Ebola and several other diseases are our diseases, by virtue of our climate and proximity to nature. They are our problem. It does not take a rocket scientist to work out that as a continent we need to invest more into research and development for these diseases that are uniquely ours...

In fact state subsidies of research – medical or agriculture would be money well spent. And it is not for lack of money that we do not get involved in such worthwhile endeavour, but for a lack of leadership on the continent to identify our problems and come up with solutions to them. We have the finances and we can develop the man power to push such a project.

The African has shown himself to be resilient to conquest, disease and poverty but that resilience should not be taken for granted. We need to start thinking strategically if we as a continent are to rise to our full potential. Medical research is as good a p lace as any to start.

REALIGNING THE STATE WITH THE PEOPLE’S ASPIRATIONS

What is corruption? Corruption is the employment of public goods for personal enrichment.

Or maybe we should add, employment of public goods for personal, family and friends’ enrichment.

By this definition corruption goes beyond stealing money, but will include employing company facilities – using official cars to ferry charcoal or official computers to do private consultancies or official time to do private errands.

To complete the definition we might add, corruption is the employment of public/company goods for personal, family and friends’ enrichment. And you can be sure we have not covered all the bases.

Corruption comes from a misalignment of ambitions between the government officials and the public or between the employees and shareholders or clients. If you can align those two ambitions, corruption need not exist. I think.

"The theory is that governments are in place to improve the welfare of their people, be it in terms of improved security, services and infrastructure. Generally governments are, or should be, in the business of creating a conducive environment for their people, to not only survive but thrive...

It is not automatic.

For government to execute its mandate, its bureaucracy needs to one, appreciate the end goal and two, make their own personal ambitions subservient to this overarching goal.

Without the latter it will matter little if everyone understands the former.

So under what circumstances do personal greed override the well-meaning intentions of the government?

It progresses slowly but increases in pace as more and more people are roped into the scam.

It starts when the bar of what is considered corrupt is raised. One minister famously complained that he had only eaten a few hundreds of thousands of dollars when others had eaten more. That the press should stop witch-hunting him!

Proceeds on to when public officials get away with more and more without getting caught. When we hear official so-so and the other have stolen billions of shillings it rarely is it the case that they did it in one fell sweep. Often times the stolen billions are the cumulative effect of years of “hard” work.

And then when the bosses start co-opting subordinates in their shady deals.

The story is told of former Zaire now Democratic Republic of Congo president Mobutu Ssese SSeko. Whenever he wanted some money from the central bank he would send his personal assistant with a note for say $10,000, the personal assistant would trot over to the central bank, but only after adding a zero to the request to make it $100,000. The central bank governor would unlock the vaults,  but only after adding his own zero to make it $1,000,000.

So at the end Mobutu pocketed his $10,000 (maybe even tipped his PA $100!), the PA got $90,000 and the central bank boss got $900,000. Makes you wonder whether Mobutu was truly the richest man in Zaire.

And finally the institution becomes a machine for the promotion of private enrichment for its officials. It may even hire out its competence to people outside.

Of course the logical conclusion to all this is that eventually the government is captured, it forgets its original raison d’etre and becomes a free-for-all-but-the-people eating spree.

By this time even inserting your most upright citizens to cause a clean-up is an exercise in futility, as the “eating” networks are so pervasive and coordinated that the most righteous individual will soon be subsumed by the sheer magnitude of the racket.

And the people?

Well they will get a few crumbs when the officials charge down to the village in government monster four wheel drives or to pay fees in decrepit schools, in a bad state because they do not get enough funding for the government or a few contributions for weddings, whose standards have been blown out of all reasonableness by the example of these thieving officials' own parties.

Actually the worst thing that can happen is not that the government becomes a machine feeding off the people’s sweat for the enrichment of the few. The worst thing that can happen is that the whole population – the thieves and victims, slowly but with increasing pace accept this state of affairs as the new normal.

When your brightest minds clamour for government jobs over the private sector, where the jobs are more enriching – in the sense of professional development and advancement you know all is lost.

Thankfully that last part has not happened in Uganda. Not yet!

KEEPING THE FAITH IN OUR COUNTRY

If you have been watching the news you probably cannot help but wonder what is going on in this country and whether there is any hope.

But then again, if you have not been watching the news it’s probably for the same reason.

In the privacy of our homes or around a beer, we engage in besting each other with the most shocking stories of corruption, government and company incompetence and dare devil boda bodas.

Our expressions go from open mouthed shock to tearful laughter and finally to the thousand-mile- stare of befuddlement.

"Thankfully or not, we Ugandans don’t stay depressed too long...

I have a friend who supports a soccer team which has fallen on hard times for what seems like for ever. After every outing of his team, he always has a logical answer for why they performed the way they did and despite the loss the future is bright for the stragglers.

He cannot understand why I don’t share the same passion for his team, which is actually our team. I chose to save my emotional energy for more profitable endeavour, I tell him.

For the majority of us we have one country and we will sink or swim with it. Just because we do not have a Uganda flag sticker on our bumpers or don’t know all the stanzas of the national anthem, does not mean we are any less patriotic than the next guy.

We work, we pay our taxes, we obey the law and we invest to make this country a better place for our children and their children’s children.

Patriotism? A love of one’s country as opposed to nationalism, which is the belief that your country can do no wrong. It is possible to be patriotic without being nationalistic. After all nationalism is the last resort of the scoundrel.

Patriotism is a personal endeavour whereas whether you are a nationalist or not is often decided for you, often by the government of the day.

So it might be fashionable to write this country off.  To throw your arms up in the air and give up. To mutter under your breath at the unfairness of the system and to vow on your mother’s grave, to fly out at the earliest opportunity and stay there. Whichever way you think, you will not be solving anything for yourself or your country...

Even worse are our cousins abroad who, regale in the TV footage of demonstrations being dispersed with teargas or click their tongues at the latest scandal or jeer at flooding at clock tower or kyambogo. 

They see these as what is wrong with “home” and why they would rather stay put in their rented wardrobe of a flat, with their double shift lifestyle and affected accents.

Good luck to them in their new found home country.

So what to do when the bad news is like a heavy downpour beating you down, keeping you down, threatening to kill your spirit?

In a strange, masochistic way we like this deluge of bad news.

Why?

Because like our cousins abroad, it justifies our mediocrity, our unwillingness to reach deep and become all we and our society can become.

So because there is corruption or the public transport is not ideal or because your neighbours’ children are running around butt naked, therefore we make no effort to improve ourselves. It is therefore okay to be worse than average human beings.

You cannot improve your environment if you cannot improve yourself.

As you might have guessed this tirade was prompted by a whiner, who I did not have the presence of mind (blame it on the Guinness) to respond to adequately.

So to Mr Whiner.

This is our country, your country. Our obligation is to be the best we can for this country whether it means sweeping our patch better or putting in that extra hour of homework or slogging away at our business, despite the hard economic times.

Even those who face up to a system that they think is unjust and the ones who face them down, are working to make this a better country, the best way they know how.

As in life, there are no guarantees. You do the best you can and hope for the best, even if you  know that by some coincidence of fate even your best effort may not be enough and everything can be blown up to hell.

It is true our county is a mess in so many ways, if you look.

Who is going to fix it?

"Because if we don’t, no one will do it for us. And if we leave, we will be fixing someone else’s mess wherever we go – that is assuming we can lose our whining ways....

The problem of criticising is that it gets in the way of doing things and as Robin Sharma says, “Critics are nothing more than dreamers who got kicked down and didn't have the guts to get back up” … it doesn’t reflect very well on you.

WE SHOULD NOT WASTE AL SHABAAB’S CRISIS

Last week terrorist group Al Shabaab lost its leader Muktar al Zubeyr “Godane” to an airstrike launched by the US, throwing the group into a crisis that the region must take advantage of to ensure peace and stability in the future.

Al Shabaab, meaning the youth, is an offshoot of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) who were routed by the Ethiopian army in 2006. The ICU were a group of sharia courts that came together to form a rival administration to the Transitional Federal Government.

Al Shabaab has previously pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda and under Godane, has sought to spread its brand of terrorism around the region, with deadly attacks in Kenya and Uganda.

Godane, who had a $5m bounty on his head, had purged many of his lieutenants and analysts think that it will be some time before the group is back on its feet.

This week the group announced a successor Ahmad Umar, who it can be expected will unleash more of the same. 

For the region who are the terrorist organisation’s first line of attack the unsettling -- however temporary, of the group is an opportunity that cannot go begging.

"The obvious thing would be to step up military operations in the short term. Put the group under intense pressure and hope to weaken them severely by death or defections of their fighters. Some observers have suggested that many of the rank and file are not in the fight out of any ideological conviction but see it as a source of livelihood. This tells you something about the desperate economic situation in the country...

This last point is where long term efforts have to be targeted. A resuscitation of the country’s economy is the only sustainable way to deny these terrorist organisation the foot soldiers to promote their deadly agenda.

But for the economy to have a chance peace and stability has to be restored to the country, which for more than a quarter of century has not had a coherent government. This is easier said than done as Al Shabaab is not the only group opposed to the seating government.

The African Union Mission Somalia (AMISOM) work propping up the government is a step in the right direction. War situations are often fluid and it would be foolhardy to put a definitive time frame to the exit of the foreign troops, but it is imperative that they work themselves out of the job by training law enforcement agencies to keep the peace but also the critical bureaucracy to run the war torn country.

The Somali people are the best people to sort themselves out and maintain stability. We should not lose sight of the fact that AMISOM is only there to nurture that process.

An even longer time initiative would be to resolve the issues that lead to the popping up of terrorist groups around the world. At the heart of the issue is the economic inequalities prevailing in the world that mean that for certain populations there is no hope for betterment of their living standards. This desperation feeds very well into the agendas of anarchist groups like Al Shabaab.

"So a regional force might pummel Al Shabaab and leave them for dead in the sands of Somalia, but soon another group, maybe even more ferocious, God forbid, will rear its head to take their place if the underlying issues are not tackled...

As long as these global inequalities persist, that lead to unfair political arrangements, there will always be a terrorist eager to be recruited.

Some circles may rejoice at the taking out of a major pillar of world terrorism, but those in the thick of things know that Godane’s demise may only offer momentary respite before its back to business as usual.