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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Well doesn’t this just give further confirmation that the whole Covid Inquiry is a pure ruddy farce? You can’t simultaneously demonstrate evidence, or publicly conclude, that the Covid response was inappropriate while you reward the architects and supporters of it with bloody knighthoods! The fact there’s an ongoing investigation ( and you don’t need super powers to foretell the conclusion ) but they’ll make like the entire scamdemic response was totally justified and those responsible for implementing the restrictions get treat like the bee’s knees anyway…Utterly mental.
Just when such expletives are direly needed!
I’m only thinking it and not putting it in writing!
It never stops does it? The rubbing salt in our wounds. The laughing in our faces, because the joke’s well and truly on us. Only in Clown World would people who require punishment due to playing their part in committing crimes against humanity and the immeasurable, needless damage and misery they are personally responsible for, get rewarded instead. How much more proof do we need that they hold us in total contempt? Reward the criminals and punish the innocent, the ones who don’t play along…Get the f**k out of town, this is just sick, in my opinion. A huge ”up yours!” to the general public, is what this is. Anyone would think they’re deliberately goading us..
Totally sick.
But it also reveals the establishment for what it is. A completely self serving, self preserving organism that feeds off the population.
The organism needs the population to be full of NPCs who just have no clue what’s going on. That’s what this and the ridiculous enquiry and all the other self-congratulating antics are for. To keep up the population of confused, zombied NPCs.
I have just posted something similar Mogs but I hadn’t read the comments prior.
Great post. Completely
agree.
Just catching up on the Crown and am reminded of the picture of the Queen sitting alone at Prince Phillip’s funeral. That is enough to remind me of the madness of lockdown.
Promises made at the time for services to re-writing science. Scum
And another one……
‘When William was our king declared
To ease the nation’s grievance,
With this new wind about I steered,
And swore to him allegiance;
Old principles I did revoke,
Set conscience at a distance;
Passive obedience was a joke,
A jest was non-resistance.
And this is law, I will maintain,
Until my dying day, Sir,
That whatsoever king shall reign,
I’ll be the Vicar of Bray, Sir.’
He’s another one who talks about epidemics growing exponentially which is contrary to:
1840, Farr’s Law. Infections follow a bell curve
1927, Kermack-McKendrick. Due to logistic growth
1928, Wade Hampton Frost. Infections remain inside the epidemiological triangle
It’s like he’s too incompetent to perform a literature review
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/356519001_Behaviour_booster_vaccines_and_waning_vaccine_protection_modelling_the_medium-term_dynamics_of_SARS-CoV-2_transmission_in_England
Excellent. Thanks.
The three most important ‘virtues’ of the elite establishment are covidism, greenism and wokism.
The honours system is weighted accordingly.
I lost faith in its integrity years ago when Lenny Henry was knighted for being black. Probably the least funny comedian (maybe with the exception of Little and Large) of our age.
Try watching a few minutes of Eddie Izard. That guy is so unfunny as to be ridiculous. Talk about Emperor’s New Clothes.
May the deaths of the people he participated in causing come to visit him each night whilst he tries to sleep.
I recall that at one stage this expert recommended that schools should remain closed until all children had been “vaccinated”.
Just shows he knows even less about virology/immunology than he does about epidemiology – if that be possible.
Who would you believe, this man or the likes of Prof Carl Heneghan….
Got to keep the illusion going therefore honour a man who should be on trial. Those of us who know this for the farce it is will have to grind our teeth but in reality the honours system is just a cheap fairground show anyway. An exposed weak monarchy giving away meaningless titles and medals to keep the pantomime going, pantomime dames and cardboard knights.
Amanda Blanc racist aviva boss gets a gong!
A quick word about Professor John Edmunds – twat
…and a f*ckwit!
Awards such as this, and the one to the head of Aviva, show this government’s true colours – pink with green weins.
So this useless, firkin clown gets a knighthood for doing his job – extremely badly obviously.
Our motto is Never forget, Never forgive.
Their motto is clearly…
‘ Rub their noses in it. Let’s keep reminding them.’
Also note that Javid, that man who picked up the baton from Hancock and forced people who worked in care homes to take the experimental injections or lose their jobs, lets not forget these people do the work that very few others want to do, and at minimum wage, and Javid forced them to take a failed dangerous product or lose their livelihood. I wonder how many have died or been seriously injured as a result, how many found it impossible to make ends meet, and this Man is given an honour! What next a Nobel prize and a Knighthood for the Hamas leader for services to mankind?, An immoral, barbaric Government who care nothing for human life but very much care for themselves. I just hope that one day they receive justice for the suffering they have inflicted.
Brilliant. Thanks
Great response to this Peeps ! I can’t really expand on your succinct Comments about this Cretin ! He is another of the Shameless Charlatan’s ruining our world
Well done – the Honours List has truly hit the buffers! I thoughbt Starmer’s comment on it being a slap in the face for working people a trifle ironic – remind me why was he awarded his?
That’s an easy one, Bella!
For being the Gaffer of the Crown Prosecution Service, who remained blissfully “unaware” of the activities of Jimmy Savile and the child gang rapisrs of the Religion of Peace.
That “ignorance” must have taken some effort on Sir Kneel’s part and, of course, was duly rewarded.
As others have noted, the award to Edmunds is not only a deliberate slap in the faces of all those harmed by HMG’s ludicrous but malicious ‘following” of “The Science” that HMG had picked in the first place. It is also confirmation that the entire Honours system has been thoroughly perverted.
Even in this latest listing, I am sure that there are many who have tirelessly done their duty or used their talents in the service of the British people.
But being the recipient of an honour given also to scum like Edmunds is now putting those so honoured in a group similar to all those who had Frequent Fliers benefits on Epstein’s Lolita Express.
If I had been so honoured (zero chance of that), my medal would be returned by Tuesday morning’s first post.
The lunatics haven’t just taken over the asylum they’re outside building even more. This man is clearly deranged I just hope he can live with the knowledge of all those lives he’s ruined, school children’s education and mental health, business closures, deaths due to a lack of diagnosis, suicides, family breakdown the list goes on. Frankly I hope he rots in hell. Sorry but anger doesn’t even cover my feelings of contempt for this scumbag.
Failing upwards. Another FU to the British public award!