Ebola, Sirleaf’s letter and where we lost it

President Johnson Sirleaf’s Ebola-provoked ‘letter to the world’ which was broadcast over the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) at the weekend is indeed a most agonising piece of composition. But is it really breaking news? Or to put in less arcane terms, why did West Africa, Africa and the world let its conscience get so dulled that Madam Sirleaf has literally been compelled to, like the Syro-Phoenician woman, pick up the begging bowl over a fight that we all ought to have naturally embraced from the onset as our own also? Coincidentally, Sirleaf’s letter came on the eve of Nigeria’s celebration of her WHO-sanctioned Ebola-free status. And Nigeria and Nigerians cannot by any shade of imagination be faulted for exhibiting plain relief that the Ebola scourge is safely outside our borders. Interestingly also, it took a flight from Liberia to take the virus from the distant pages where Nigeria had placed it for almost all of four decades to the hard, solid, streets of Lagos. And when it came - along with the gnawing reality that Ebola could be just an inch away - many Nigerians lived in fear and trepidation. Handshakes, hugs and other social niceties were curtailed, people looked over their shoulders and age-old habits and practices were vigorously reviewed. The Nigerian, almost everyone knows, can really be loud and gregarious. Ebola was changing who we were! So give Nigerians a break. They just want to be who they are: good, old Nigerians – who not long ago were adjudged the ‘happiest people in the world!’ Equally Nigerian also is the current disputation over who should take the largest share of the credit for killing the elephant. Is it the trackers who corralled the beast into a dead end? Or the slinger who hurled pelts at the massive animal as it ran around in circles? Or the lancer whose spear finally pierced the hulk’s jugular? Pray who killed the elephant? While Ebola’s exit from Nigeria is itself no mean achievement, there is also a sense in which it may not be the best to celebrate too loudly. Overall, the elephant has not fallen and the owners of the farmland where the battle is fiercest have practically no weapons with which to stave off the debilitating assault from the rampaging beast. See how President Sirleaf herself put it: ‘There is no coincidence Ebola has taken hold in three fragile states – Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea - all battling to overcome the effects of interconnected wars. In Liberia, our civil war ended only eleven years ago. It destroyed our public infrastructure, crushed our economy and led to an exodus of educated professionals. A country that had some 3,000 qualified doctors at the start of the war was dependent by its end on barely three dozen…. To her credit also, the hard-fighting President does not leave us without defining an exit path: ‘This fight requires a commitment from every nation that has the capacity to help – whether that is with emergency funds, medical supplies or clinical expertise…From governments to international organisations, financial institutions to NGOs, politicians to ordinary people on the street in any corner of the world, we all have a stake in the battle against Ebola. It is the duty of all of us, as global citizens, to send a message that we will not leave millions of West Africans to fend for themselves against an enemy that they do not know, and against whom they have little defence….’ This then should be where our current ‘victory’ should then be routed. Unlike in the beginning when Liberia was being bashed for ‘bringing Ebola to us,’ the truth is that we should rather focus on thanking God for his little mercies even in the face of our affliction in this saga. For the fact that unlike in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone where the virus came in through multiple animal sources in largely poverty-stricken and illiterate rural populations, it was to Nigeria’s best-resourced city, Lagos that our single entry-source, Sawyer came...for Adadevoh and the team at First Consultants…for the American Centre for Disease Control…for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation…for the Federal and State ministries of Health…for the medical and para-medical volunteers…for prayers…for the Nigerian press…for citizens who drank salt and recovered…for schools that were shut, opened and shut again…for everything! That done, we next must engage the core failing that made this possible, and this namely is the almost wholesale demise of the values that made it possible for us to communally fix problems like Ebola in times past. No matter how inconvenient it is, the Ebola challenge graphically demonstrates how low we have sunk as a people in the critical areas of communal vision, charity and pan-African brotherhood. Time was when this same Ebola-besieged sub-region and continent - which is today at the risk of postponing all of its inter-state sporting events no thanks to the Ebola panic - had leaders like Nkrumah and Murtala Muhammed who would insist that the independence of the countries which they were presiding over was meaningless without securing freedom for other fellow Africans. That was when people had something to spare. Sadly now, we are so besieged that we only live for ourselves. And this for this correspondent is the core challenge of the Sirleaf letter even as it calls us back to the bigger truth that it is in giving that we get; that it is in helping others that we are helped. This is African, this is good. And if the rest of the world joins in, it truly would be the more the merrier. But at the moment, let us commend the Lagos and Federal Governments for offering to help practically in Liberia. And here is hoping that this truly is the beginning of the resurgence of Ubuntu.