The devastating harms of the lockdowns that African countries imposed in response to a contagion that made little impact on the continent’s mortality are still being felt as Africans now face a decade or more of austerity, write Hassoum Ceesay and Toby Green in UnHerd. They focus in on one country, The Gambia, the smallest country on the mainland, to get a closer look at what this means. Here’s an excerpt.
When The Gambia announced its first Covid lockdown in March 2020, the country was already fragile. Following years of President Yahya Jammeh’s dictatorship, the democratic Government installed under President Adama Barrow in 2017 had ushered in an era of hope. There was, for instance, a noticeable drop in Gambian youth’s attempts to cross the Sahara and the Mediterranean to reach Europe. Yet the country’s pandemic response has erased those gains, and also dealt a severe blow to Gambians’ confidence in its newfound democracy.
In March 2020, as many African countries entered lockdown, The Gambia’s main market at Serekunda closed for six weeks, in accordance with WHO advice. Yet late March is when Gambians buy seeds to prepare for planting, in readiness for the rains — and the unilateral closure of markets meant that seeds were widely unavailable. A transport shutdown also meant that, in those rare cases when they did have seeds, people could not take them to their villages for planting. Even when public transport restarted, several weeks later, social distancing requirements meant that buses were only allowed to operate at half capacity. As this was uneconomic, many buses did not run at all.
Meanwhile, anyone who did manage to sow crops then had difficulties in harvesting, since social distancing protocols meant that no more than two people could work a plot at one time, where usually the whole family is involved. When food was finally taken to market, the forced impoverishment of the population meant that few could afford to buy it and much went to waste: the UN estimated on-farm losses of 50% in Africa in 2020.
The aggregated effect of The Gambia’s Covid response was a massive reduction in farming revenue and in available food. In effect, these were policies guaranteed to cause hunger and malnutrition — and to stoke food price inflation through the destruction of stores and harvests. Food inflation quickly grew in 2021, long before the war in Ukraine, and although in The Gambia it declined from 18.7% in December to 17.49% at the end of January 2023, food prices remain much higher than pre-pandemic levels.
At the same time, and as in the rest of the world, the Gambian government threw money at COVID-19. Donor advice on hygiene saw all public institutions forced to buy large plastic vats and gallons of hand wash and disinfectant. This, and the costs of implementing Western biomedical surveillance regimes (such as quarantined hotels, case tracking and surveillance), was paid for by taking on new debts: the Gambian Government deployed a 500 million Dalasi ($10 million) emergency response fund — a vast sum for a country with a GDP per capita of $772. This was financed by a World Bank loan of the same value, and by an IMF loan of $21.3 million.
Meanwhile, Gambian tax revenues fell by half in 2020, owing to the economic shutdown, meaning that debt repayments stacked up even higher. This is money that The Gambia does not have: the country is beset by poverty and malnutrition, with a median age estimated as under 18 years of age and a teacher’s monthly salary of less than £50. It was frequently said by many in the capital Banjul that “we could have fed the country for 10 years for the amount of money that we spent on COVID-19”.
Gambians themselves protested vociferously. Some tried to break into Serekunda market to continue working, and others — when a mask was demanded — asked who would pay for it. But the question remains: why did Gambian politicians implement these scandalous policies? The truth is that creditor pressure from the EU and other Western embassies, from the World Bank and the WHO, made it almost impossible to do anything else. …
All of this could take decades to fix. Austerity has been forced on the country by external creditors and their incessant demands for information and compliance to protocols that, to most Gambians, were useless — and where COVID-19 was far from the greatest health threat they faced. As elsewhere around the world, vast levels of corruption were involved with the effective printing of money that went with the Covid response. Meanwhile, international solidarity collapsed, as Western activists appeared far more concerned by the political landscape in their own countries than by the effect of these policies on African lives — about which many remain reticent to this day.
Worth reading in full.
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The distress signal may be a bit too subtle for many non-sailors!
Lost on this lubber, matey.
I thought you were dying, with your 100+ medical procedures per day?
The upside down Union Flag.
Point taken but here is a random Google for Union Flag, ie the flag is supposed to be the main point of interest not some background error.
Sounds like a bit of a face-saving apologia for shit-for-brains and elastic-for-spine Johnson and journalists like Nelson from an essentially Tory perspective. Nothing more.
A bit f.ing late to recant now!
They are both guilty of terrible, cowering, judgment.
No – it’s not ‘the scientists‘ : it’s that cabal of bad scientists given the loud hailer by Johnson’s government and Nelson’s media. Too late for apologies and excuses now.
As for Starmer’s opposition – it has, indeed been utterly pathetic – but the ratio of the minority of MPs on either side who have seen some sense is roughly proportionate. There is no winner in this competition of discredited politics and constitution..
The key word is Opposition. It is the duty of the Loyal Opposition to keep the worst excesses of HMG in check. Starmer has singularly failed in that duty.
One might surmise that Sir Forensic looks forward to inheriting a permanent state of temporary emergency, and exploiting the Politburo Powers to complete any odd quirks and remnants of the Revolution left unimplemented by then.
Totally agree. I have been an active Labour Party member for longer than I care to remember. I’ve tramped the streets, minuted countless tedious meetings and served as a local councillor. In short, I’ve put my money where my mouth is.
I am of that generation who has known those who actually put their lives on the line to oppose the extinguishing of humanity and democracy, and gave myself and others a start in life that they never had. The contrast with the present is hard to bear as fellow citizens metaphorically welcome the resurrected ghosts of Goebbels and Mengele.
I’m realistic about the messiness of the political process and what it entails. even when it was something as egregious as Blair. Personally, I was dubious about Corbyn as a leader – but recognized that, despite all the lying propaganda about him (foreshadowing the Covid assault), he represented an attempt to break away from the establishment’s slimy grip.
But now?
Like the entire political and constitutional picture, the Party is massively corrupted – a process which, indeed, started in the Blair years, whence we’ve ended up with a PLP that is largely beneath contempt in terms of its lack of grasp of fundamental democracy, basic integrity and intelligence. Starmer is an establishment placeman, slotted in as an alternative for when Johnson and the Tories eventually implode.
This constituency is narrowly held by Labour after some years of a LibDem MP. The ward is in LibDem hands. I profoundly dislike the hypocritical LibDems. But I shall not be supporting Labour any time soon, given the MP’s lazy incomprehension of the Covid issue, and the Party’s total irrelevance to the proper democratic process.
I don’t think I’m alone.
I’ve never found Fraser Nelson a convincing speaker. Complete mystery how he’s risen to be editor.
Another strange journalist is Freddie Gray who has yet to understand the nuances of American politics.
“ Scourge of the sceptics’ cause, the rock on which all our carefully crafted arguments founder. “
Very simple solution to that. We work collectively to move the polls by taking part in them.
Which is what the other side have done.
I haven’t been sent a yougov poll for some time now.
Anyone who favoured ‘a 3rd lockdown’ is no sceptic. We don’t need the Alexander Johnson of 2019 back – he is the one who has got us here in the first place. I would prefer the Hague or somewhere similar.
There has quite clearly been some form of globalist coup over the last 18 months, to 2 years that first installed Johnson in place for just such an eventuality as this then removing the only opposition leader capable of opposing (and no I didnt vote for either) and are now orchestrating things not only in Westminster but across the western world.
The ‘polls’ are simply there to convince the populous that what is happening is what we people really want. They are there to influence not reflect public opinion.
This tory lite drivel is exactly why the govt can get away all this because it seeks not to answer serious questions but to divert and distract. Portraying Johnson as some sort of victim in this hostage to fortune is gut wrenching. He has 2 choices – he accepts the role he was given and the role is carrying out which he clearly is willing to do vaccine passports and all or he resigns.
If there is indeed more to it than that an honourable gentlemen of the past who found himself in such a situation would have retired to the drawing room with a bottle of whisky and a revolver.
‘…the belief that we still live in a liberal state whose laws safeguard our basic freedoms from Government overreach.’
That belief disappeared with the first lockdown, queues outside supermarkets, shortages of essential items, government by diktat, the airwaves dominated by regime apparatchiks redolent of Soviet dominated Eastern Europe.
Deliverance will not come from within Britain, or even within Europe.
One of the leitmotives of this global weird out has been the peripheral role of Europe, and European states including this one.
Compare and contrast:
‘Have you noticed that the good guys are on the verge of winning the great struggle, certainly intellectually but also politically and culturally? It’s become nearly impossible for the lockdowners even to muster salience. Their statements on TV and writings in newspapers have become sheepish, hedged, pointlessly verbose and insulting – all signs of weakness when there is essentially no case left to make.
We can all sense it: we are almost done.’
https://www.aier.org/article/the-final-push-to-restore-freedom/
‘The Coronavirus Act came in to force in March 2020 at the start of the pandemic with ministers pledging to use the measures “when strictly necessary”.
The law gave the government wide-ranging powers unlike others seen before – from shutting down pubs, through to detaining individuals deemed at risk as part of efforts to contain the spread of the virus.
MPs voted by 484 to 76 to extend it – 36 Conservative MPs rebelled, by opposing the legislation. Twenty-one Labour MPs also voted against it.’
BBC 250321
Merkel, Macron, Von Der Leyen, Johnson appear to be in a constant fit of the vapours.
Whereas lockdown zealot Biden is rarely heard, the double mask a minor contributory factor.
The United States, a business, not a country, is leading us out of this idiocy. What happens in the U.S. never stays in the U.S.
On 06 May we have our own opportunity to show some leadership…..if any embers still flicker in this dripping wet, moribund, now unsceptred, grosser reich.
Great post. Especially:
What happens in the U.S. never stays in the U.S.
Pithy, and true.
Great post, said far better than I was trying to say above. We have weak and feeble governments controlled by unelected globalists whose tentacles have reached deep within government.
it started in earnest with the Clintons and Blair. It had been seeping into all other institutions ling before that. Now those aged players are leaving the stage. Boris, is a chancer and nothing more. There shouldn’t even be any liberals in a Conservative Party. Libertarians yes, but no Liberals.
Boris missed his chance of greatness when he rudely denounced President Trump. Every free thinker and conservative across the world understood then, that Boris was for big state bureaucracy and continuing the Globalist takeover. If he had been astute he would have backed the MAGA movement and taken the UK forward with those same policies of UK first on a wave of Brexiteer fortune. He didn’t. He chose to stay with the old men and women who were still fighting to contain and break Western Democracy. Just one small insight of the strength of populism would have made Johnson a Churchill and kept his facade in place.
He needs to go and in his going the Tory Party needs to be infected with true Conservatism again. Whether it will, I doubt. The young Republicans in USA are taku g over the Republican Party. They are recalling the RINOs and deselecting them. Trump is now the Republican Party because he puts his people above the Globalists and they know he is genuine. How different it could have been for Johnson if he had been genuine.
“Just one small insight of the strength of populism would have made Johnson a Churchill and kept his facade in place.”
Dream on. ‘Populism’ is the problem – not the solution. Johnson is a populist. How the f. do you think he got elected in the first place, suspended from a wire and waving a toy Union Flag?
Idiot spoiled child Trump ditto.
It seems apparent that no nation is ruled by the elected. There seems to be a strong Deep State, NGO control of globalists who have bought into the idea that they want everyone living by the same bureaucratic mantra. It is very noticeable that throughout the West the politicians who slip through on major support from the voter, get damned, smeared and even have their elections stolen by this cartel.
The UK voted to step away from this ghastly narcissism but were duped by those they thought they had chosen to lead us to a better future. For any British Conservative government to be supporting left wing socialist governments throughout the West (which Boris has done) is anathema to small c conservatives.
On top of this The Spectator has veered very much to the globalist mantra over the last two years. Many of their set pieces have been against the nation state and supporting globalism. They have been particularly sneering of those very subscribers who kept them going in the lean years.
cancelled my subscription two years ago when they supported amnesty for illegal migrants
Yes, I cancelled my subscription when they wouldn’t report fairly on the American elections in 2016. The dross that Freddie Gray came out with was shocking.
Reposted from Today’s Update forum:
Another thoughtful and interesting piece by Will, with more than a hint of passion in his writing (something that has been missing ATL for a while). He concludes:
What happened, wonders Fraser, to the liberal Boris who was elected in December 2019? We need him back.
I think this is wrong. It’s clear to me now, as I think it was apparent to those (Max Hastings for example) who’d previously seen him close up, that ‘the liberal Boris’ was always a sham – just an impression he created for his Telegraphand Spectator audiences while he pursued self-interest.
No, we don’t need ‘Boris’ (how I hate that word) back. And it is hopeless to look to Parliament – our supposed guardians of law and liberty – for any help. As I write, the top comment on the Fraser Nelson article goes:
All that it takes for EVIL to prevail is for good men (women & MPs) to stand by and do nothing.
Evil has prevailed today in parliament and our MPs should be ashamed of themselves. With a few (76) exceptions they have proven themselves to be mostly cowardly unprincipled scum…
I can see this ending in only two ways: mass civil disobedience, or economic collapse. Of these, mass civil disobedience is the preferable. And it doesn’t need overwhelming numbers: merely enough, and that won’t be as many as might be supposed.
Cromwell, 1644:
‘I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else.’
Sceptics can with conviction rally round that.
Yes. Those who think that Johnson was ever anything than what you see now are seriously deluded. He was always a lying narcissist looking after No.1.
Similarly the deluded souls who still think that the similar narcissist-plutocrat – Silver Spoon Trump – offered an alternative to the inherent corruption.
Time to take off these blinkers.
Quote by Fraser Nelson in his article:
He [Johnson] has “started to tell friends that he was let down by his own liberal instincts …”
I find this quote terrifying. That is the mindset of a man bent on authoritarianism, who never had any liberal instincts (as opposed to platitudes), whose inner being had always been seeking an excuse, and whose mind was always set on self. Of such stuff the worst of tyrants are made.
I’m reminded of Macbeth:
… For mine own good / All causes shall give way: I am in blood / Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more / Returning were as tedious as go o’er …
We didn’t need “Boris” in the first place!
I always saw him as a barefaced bullshitter. Those ridiculous staged scenarios, like the bulldozer and the polystyrene blocks, or the cringeworthy milkman act, infantilised his audience and gave clear indication of what was in store for those who would vote for him.
Unfortunately the time was right for him to ride into power on the very effective slogan to get Brexit done.
They should never have let him out of that fridge!
Another idiot realizing belatedly that you can’t trust the government with enormous, unconstitutional powers: there is a good reason that we had a convention that the government wouldn’t do these sorts of things – because in the absence of said convention, they would!
Either you think we’re a liberal democracy through thick and thin, standing by our convictions that the divine and proper right of Man to freedom is inviolable despite inevitable pain. Or we are not, and these things are but the capricious gift of whoever is in power. Any support for lockdown and it’s associated arbitrary violations of human rights at all put you in the second category, you can’t then appeal to any ‘freedom’ – you’ve given up that in the name of health security! And more fool you.
Sadly this government has terrorized its own population, reflecting back it’s own fears.
Point of order, we can’t have unconstitutional powers as we don’t have a constitution.
We can bleat on to the contrary, but as we’ve seen over and over again recently, custom, habit, and unwritten rules are the chocolate fireguard of protection against despotism.
It’s long past time that we had one, but, my God, can you imagine what this Politburo Parliament would come up with?
Exactly. This crisis of delusion and reality has been brewing for a long time.
Note that it was the Spectator that helped to set the ball in motion in 2017 offering a platform to the director of the global vaccine alliance (GAVI), Seth Berkley, to call for vaccine criticism to be removed from so media. My written evidence (as UK editor of Age of Autism) to the DCMS Committee on Fake News noted this matter and warned of consequences:
“The view of Age of Autism is that having great bureaucracies working on behalf of governments and corporate interests deciding what is true – or even machines operating algorithms to decide it – is a prospect little different from the world of George Orwell’s 1984. It is troubling in an era when the mainstream media cannot be relied upon to provide reliable information that attention and suspicion is being diverted to other sources on the internet. The internet is presently a chaotic place, but that is infinitely better than the alternative which would be information controlled on behalf of governments and global corporations, which could never be held to account….
“In this regard it is disquieting to look at the global campaign by vaccine lobbyists which reached these shores this summer advocating compulsory vaccination, having scored recent successes in Australia, Italy, France and parts of the United States. The British Medical Association jettisoned its traditional opposition to compulsory vaccination [4] – dismissed only a few years ago by a former chairman, Hamish Meldrum, as “Stalinist” [5] – and called for the matter to be discussed. Just a few days before an article appeared in the on-line Spectator by the CEO of GAVI, a global agency promoting vaccination, calling for “anti-vaxxers” to be excluded from “social media”[6]. It must be emphasised that anyone remotely critical or informed about the vaccine lobby and its products, is placed under the general pejorative label “anti-vaxxer”: it is the vaccine/pharmaceutical lobby that polarises the debate – anyone who is not in favour of their entire open-ended agenda is subject to opprobrium and ad hominem attack. Complex health issues are being reduced in the mainstream arena to “Four legs good, two legs bad” type arguments.
“Hot on the heels of this a Guardian editorial appeared calling for vaccination to be made compulsory because “antivaxxers” (who are all apparently very privileged people like Gwyneth Paltrow) were gaining influence – the comedian John Oliver was held up as an authority on “antivaxxers” and what bad people they are. Further, this was illustrated by a picture of demonstrators in Italy, who were in fact demonstrating in large numbers not against vaccination but against compulsory vaccination: without Italy’s new laws there would be no demonstrations at all, nor were most of the people in them anti-vaccinationist in any literal sense [7]. It could be said that this was both manipulative mis-reporting and an inappropriate way to deal with such a serious issue…”
http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/digital-culture-media-and-sport-committee/fake-news/written/73097.html
No one seemed to understand how central the “anti-vaccine” trope was to a totalitarian agenda or if the did it was with malevolent motives. Before August 2019 I had never heard a British politician use the term “Anti-vaxxer” but actually the debut was Boris Johnson speaking at the United Nations General Assembly.
https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3099/rr-5
One has to conclude that this hate rhetoric was always central to his agenda.
It seems improbable that Johnson was ever pursuing anything but the globalist agenda. Note his sudden commitment to GM on entering Downing Street in July 2019:
https://childrenshealthdefense.eu/children-health/deregulating-gmo-obscene-farce-of-the-modern-british-state/
There is no compulsary vaccination in France.
Yes that is where Johnson revealed himself. No one could pretend that this illiberal man is anything other an authoritarian after that speech.
We’re not fucking lemmings, Boris. We don’t need government action to protect us from dangers. We all manage to recognise a fire as dangerous, we don’t need a bungling government to rescue us, make it illegal to have any hot objects in our house and to come and “isolate” us in a facility to “protect” us from a minimal risk of future fires. Nobody is out here walking into fires because we can’t possibly recognise danger ourselves and protect ourselves without government input. Idiot.
“We’re not fucking lemmings, Boris.”
Errr … well, you may not be. And I’m not. But ……
“Opinion polls show support for vaccine identity cards, curfews, border closures, the works”
Which opinion polls? YouGuv?
I’ve still yet to hear a cogent argument why the Mandarin Empire wouldn’t have long since captured any online polls in the West, and be pushing their agenda on us through them.
They’re too stupid to think of it? Too incompetent to do it? Lack the teeming manpower? They draw the ethical line not at genocide, but at poll meddling?
Start mentally substituting in “WuGuv poll” and see if that alters your perspective on what the Great British Public claims that we want.
All the YouGov polls are showing at the moment is the effectiveness of the government’s campaign of fear.
Yes – don’t blame the weather vane because you’d prefer another wind.
Is that the same Yougov founded by the Minister for Vaccination?