Forty years on from HIV to Covid, Africa is still holding out for alms

It is about 40 years since fishermen at Kasensero landing site on the northwestern shores of Lake Victoria began falling sick – and dying – of a strange new disease. At first it was chalked down to witchcraft and the green-eyed monster of envy.

Tanzanian rivals across the shores were not happy with how well locals were doing, and had sent invisible “African ninjas” to bring bad luck, and death. Then non-fishermen began dying. Then traders. Then truck drivers. Then doctors and nurses, reverends, teachers, politicians, musicians; old and young; women and men.

Not even the Tanzanian medicine men, famed in folklore from Mwanza to Zanzibar as capable of delivering pain and suffering remotely, had this much power. In fact, even they started dying. The new disease was quickly named “silimu”, a corruption of the way it left its victims emaciated or slimmed at the end, having sucked life out of them. By the time doctors gave HIV its proper name and explained the Aids it caused, thousands were dead. Millions would follow.

It is a different world 40 years later. A lot of the stigma has subsided. While a vaccine and a cure remain elusive, treatment has advanced so much that people living with HIV can have long, healthy and productive lives.

This relative success against HIV has many fathers (and mothers). There are those, like the musician Philly Bongoley Lutaaya, who died openly so that others could live peacefully and privately without stigma. There are millions of invisible health care workers, counsellors who cycled down village paths delivering hope and medicines, and many continue to do so today.

Even political leaders, including our own Mzee Yoweri, had the foresight to deal with the problem head-on when other leaders hid their heads in the sand.

But this story is double-sided. If you receive anti-retroviral drugs in a Ugandan health facility it is likely they were donated by the American government. If they are (cheaper) generic drugs, they probably came from a pharmaceutical plant owned by an Indian entrepreneur.

There are hundreds of (poorly funded) African scientists, including in Uganda, doing remarkable things in the search for a cure or a vaccine but it is more likely that the breakthrough, when it comes, will come from outside the continent.

HIV/Aids was the most serious threat to African lives in the last 40 years but we outsourced our agency to others. We invested in military hardware against enemies who might never come, and ignored the enemy within. We mastered the workarounds for end-user certificates to smuggle lethal weapons but our intelligence agents wouldn’t “borrow” to bring home for reverse engineering a drugs active pharmaceutical ingredient even if it was leaking from a test tube in their shirt pockets. 

Cuba, a small-small Island state of 11 million people, was able to develop a fairly effective vaccine against the virus while some countries are running around in the dark looking for expensive mice ‘trained’ in international private schools.

Countries small enough to be departments in ministries in other countries go around parading their excellencies, their parliaments, their VIPs but cannot put together a factory or the science to produce vaccines? We even have to borrow to buy medicine!

Regimes that can sniff out and snuff out the most harmless dissenting thought even before it is fully formed cannot get their people in a line to receive the donated vaccines? What are we on?

We donate our resources, including skilled and talented scientists, to the outside world cheaply then import finished goods back in expensively then kill ourselves while trying to steal whatever little surplus is created. Our real pandemic is dysfunctional politics. We can ask developed countries to donate surplus vaccines to us because it is the right thing to do, not out of a self-entitled sense of moral indignation. They mostly donate them because they will expire if unused, and they need us to import stuff from China so that the Chinese can import stuff from them.

What we really ought to be doing is asking why we have allowed ourselves to settle into a state of permanent poverty and dependence on people called Bill, Melinda and Gates. What are we doing for ourselves? On the face of it we have largely wasted the 40 years of the HIV/Aids crisis. We shouldn’t waste Covid.

Mr Kalinaki is a journalist and poor man’s freedom fighter.

[email protected]; @Kalinaki