Africa's Post-Lockdown Carnage

In early 2020, as South Africa was being locked down, I wrote:

There is not enough evidence to lock down a country which quite simply cannot be locked down, and the attempt of which may destroy millions of livelihood…

Something has gone very wrong.

There is some darkness at the heart of all of this. I cannot begin to fathom it.

Not only can SA not lock down. We shouldn’t be doing it. Stop this before it is too late. The risk factor now outweighs the slim chance of health benefits.

I was wrong to think there would be any health benefits, but I think I was trying to give the counter-position some kind of credence.

Well, now Toby Green at the Persuasion substack has reckoned with the lockdown fallout for Africans any rational person could see coming.

And it is ugly:

In mid-2021, UNESCO estimated that an additional 9 million children were pushed into child labor as a result of the pandemic. School closures correlated with increases in early marriages: in Uganda alone 4.5 million children abandoned education as teenage pregnancies and impoverishment soared. Meanwhile, the informal economy has yet to recover three years later, as recent evidence from Senegal makes clear.

On the level of national economies, foreign debt has become the overriding concern. Recently, with Ghana taking on a fresh $3 billion of debt and countries across Africa scrambling to find creditors to service existing debts, the Financial Times has asked in a headline, “Is Africa’s Debt Cycle Unbreakable?” And yet, only a few years ago, publications like The Financial Times and The Economist widely touted the catchphrase “Africa Rising,” looking to the continent’s growing middle class as a sign of optimism for the future…

All of this abruptly ceased in 2020, as Africa plunged into a recession and at the same time was encouraged to spend unprecedented amounts of money on Western biomedical measures to contain a virus which was not a major health concern for most Africans. Indeed, Tanzania, where then-president John Magufuli rejected lockdowns, was unique among African countries in that its economy actually grew in 2020.

This was entirely predictable. Bear in mind, as Green notes, the inflation now ravaging the poor in Africa did not begin with the Ukrainian war. It began a year before, in the wake of lockdowns.

It was acknowledged by African leaders that their policies would damage the economy but that it was nonetheless necessary to save lives.

Did they honestly believe locking people up in shacks would magically save lives?

Did they believe the certainty of destroying millions of jobs, replacing them with perhaps a grant of a handful of dollars per month, could possibly be outweighed by the tenuous (to say the leats) benefits of fake and pseudo-scientific ‘social distancing’?

I cannot believe anybody could be that stupid, but who knows.

As Green recounts:

As soon as lockdowns began across Africa, I heard from friends on the ground about what this meant for daily life: harvests lost in Angola, Ghana, and Gambia because people couldn’t go to the fields; people beaten if they went out onto the streets in Senegal to try to find a way of getting some money to eat. As one Nigerian colleague put it to me, Covid lockdown policies could be expected to work in a Nigerian context for only about three days. Instead, in many places across the continent, they were prolonged throughout 2020, fueling a socio-economic disaster.

Even if leaders believed in what they were doing (which is highly unlikely), why did they persist when disaster struck?

Why did these leaders continue to follow marching orders from first-world entities such as the WHO?

Perhaps they wanted continued access to the great and good of China, Europe, and the US. Perhaps they were bought and paid for. Perhaps they were concerned by the mysterious fate of the Tanzanian president. Perhaps they were brainwashed themselves by a corrupt global media.

The great tragedy for me throughout this debacle is that the great benefit of living in Africa has always been the sense of freedom that results from government weakness and a general disdain for western political correctness.

Covid altered that completely.

Green believes massive debt forgiveness is now owed to the people of Africa.

Perhaps. But their leaders, many of whom continue to allow insane western experiments in their country, must be held accountable too.

That remains unlikely, for now, in our media-governed world in which almost all elites have the same blood on their hands.