Ebola's threat: India Shutting the door on Africa

Kama ilivyo kuwa kwa Marekani, India nayo ilikuwa na imepanga kuwaalika Maraisi ya Afrika yoote kwa mpigo (isipokuwa Botswana wao huwa hawawendi) huko nchini India, lakini wamebadilisha uamuzi wao kwa kuongopa kupelekewa Ebola (isipokuwa Botswana na nchi za A.Kaskazini wao huwa hawahudhurii)!

Hivyo wanasubiri mpaka hapo mwakani wakati labda chanjo itakapokuwa imepatikana na wote kuchanjwa kwanza ndio waruhusiwe kwenda India kwenye huo mkutano!

Kwa habari zaidi soma hapo chini!

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IN RECENT years India has made renewed diplomatic efforts to reach out to Africa. Manmohan Singh, India's former prime minister, visited the continent for six days in May 2011, promising $5 billion of loans on easy terms. Indian investors, like their counterparts from China, have a strong interest in winning access to immense natural resources in Africa, including oil, gas, coal and diamonds.

Africa, potentially, offers a decent market for Indian firms, which have grown adept at "frugal innovation", that is making products that are both cheap and attractive, which might suit an emerging middle-class consumer in Africa as easily as the one at home. Indian telecom firms, for example, have expanded in Africa-while in turn India might learn from Africa about mobile-banking.

A reasonably large number of Indians-or people of Indian origin-call Africa home, notably in large cities of southern and East Africa, such as Durban, but also in West Africa. In turn, over 10,000 African students attend Indian universities. Such links are an opportunity for India to engage in what diplomats call "people-to-people" ties.

So it counts as a blow, whatever officials might claim, that the biggest-ever India-Africa summit, scheduled to be held in Delhi, early in December, was last month scrapped by India's government.

Unlike other summits, when India has engaged only with selected African leaders (typically 16 or so), leaders of all the 54 countries in the African Union were to be invited to this one.

In addition, the summit would have involved parallel business and media events, and involved some 1,000 people. Though in theory the event has only been postponed until next year, no provisional date has been set.

Relations between India and some of its African residents have not been rosy in the past year. After a Nigerian was stabbed to death in Goa last November, some 200 fellow Africans blocked roads in protest in the tiny Indian state, even as locals accused the foreigners of being illegal immigrants and drug dealers.

Then in Delhi, under the brief and illiberal administration of the Aam Aadmi Party, a state minister orchestrated bullying and intimidation of migrants in one district of the city, where African women were accused of working as prostitutes. Finally, in September three African men in the Delhi metro were set upon by a racist mob.

They took shelter by climbing atop a police control post.

None of that encourages friendly ties, but it might at least be set aside as the actions of an ugly, ill-educated minority, not official policy. Is it more troubling that Indian officials said they were scrapping the December summit because of the risk of Ebola being brought from Africa to India?

That depends on how seriously you take the chance that it could happen. On the face of it, the people least likely to carry Ebola are presidents, prime ministers and isolated members of Africa's elite, who would have made up the delegations. No one in New York told Africans to stay away from the United Nations General Assembly, for example. And most obviously, Africa is not a country but a big continent.

Three small West African countries are suffering from Ebola: Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. Pretoria (South Africa's capital) and Nairobi (Kenya's) are each more than 5,300km from Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, and seem hardly more at risk of infection than anywhere else on the planet. That is the equivalent, in Asia, of Indian politicians being uninvited from some international meeting because a disease had struck in Pyongyang or Phnom Penh.

In fact, says India's ministry of external affairs, there have been no official complaints from African delegations over the cancelled summit (though there are press reports of grumbling diplomats). The decision was co-ordinated with the World Health Organisation and the African Union, which reported that meetings within Africa have been called off for the same reason. "We don't see it as a concern", says a spokesman for the ministry when asked if there was any backlash.

He adds that India is making contributions to relieve the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, where over 4,000 people so far have died of the disease. By promising $12.5m India ranks, he says, as one of the five most generous countries in donating help.

What of other measures India is taking to guard against Ebola arriving on its shores, given its spread in a few isolated individuals to Spain, America and elsewhere? In most of those cases the sick are health workers (either returning from offering care directly in West Africa, or those who cared for infected patients who had fallen ill on their return). Since India does not have many aid workers in West Africa, nor large numbers of people travelling back and forth to the region, its risk appears low.

A widely quoted figure, that there are 45,000 Indians in West Africa, is potentially misleading. The vast majority of these are in Nigeria which has successfully contained Ebola, so far, leaving only some 5,000 Indians in the rest of West Africa, says India's foreign ministry. In any case, many of these are in effect dual passport-holders, "people of Indian origin", who are not especially likely to travel to India in large numbers.

Unless Ebola took hold in Nigeria, in other words, India does not look notably at risk of importing it.

As in other countries, India has started screening passengers who arrive from West Africa, checking for fever and other signs of illness at Delhi's international airport and others. It is unclear how effective such screening is likely to be (since it can take weeks for an infected person to show symptoms), but such measures are at least a sign that the authorities have taken notice.

Some experts say the possibility of Ebola arriving in tropical, relatively poor and densely populated South Asia is a particularly dreadful scenario. Peter Piot, a Belgian microbiologist who helped to identify Ebola in the 1970s, told the Observer newspaper this month that he is especially worried about the state of public health in India as "doctors and nurses in India, too, often don't wear protective gloves.

They would immediately become infected and spread the virus." Others have suggested it would be a problem that India has only two facilities capable of testing for the virus. Moreover the prevalence of malaria, dengue and other fever-inducing illnesses in India could make it especially difficult to isolate those who might show early onset of Ebola, which has similar symptoms.

Judging the balance between taking measures to protect against Ebola and avoiding unnecessary damage to trade, engagement and diplomatic ties with Africa will be a thorny task for India's policymakers. The government looked clumsy postponing the December summit on the basis of its fear of Ebola, though that one decision may not prove too costly. In general, trying to isolate Africa will not help prevent a pandemic.

Instead, doing more of what India has begun doing-donating funds, equipment and expertise to support the anti-Ebola effort in West Africa-will be useful. It might also be the best possible measure for protecting India itself: the sooner the rest of the world helps to stop Ebola where it is now prevalent, the less the risk of its spreading uncontrollably elsewhere.

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Source: Economist

Ebola's threat to India: Shutting the door on Africa | The Economist

Te te te...
Rafiki yangu alienda hosp nchi fulani
Cha kwanza wakamuuliza kama anatokea west Africa...
Wana haki ya kuchukua tahadhari...
But it increasingly feels bad kuwa mwafrika ukiwa ulimwengu mwingine...

Kuna mkutano mwingine nchi fulani wa kuhusu kufanya biashara Afrika...

mgeni rasmi rais wa Liberia...

Kila siku napata e mail za kukumbushia ku register (kwa discount maana ni wa kulipia)

Nikajiuliza hata bure siendi...
Huyu mama (Rais wa Liberia) si atakuja na delegation yake...
Kuna usalama hapo kweli...
Na wazungu nao wanapenda sana ku take risks....