Channels TV interview with Charles Chukwuma Soludo, Member of Economic Advisory Council and a former Governor and chairman of the board of directors of the Central Bank of Nigeria.
In your article, were you trying to get health workers and economists on the same page?
The intent of the article was probably to challenge us to think a little differently. It is a continent that has, if you like, in the medical term they call it pre-existing conditions. This is a continent (Africa) of about 1.3 billion people with already hundreds of millions of them unemployed, hundreds of millions of them in extreme poverty and with millions of them dying out of other diseases but infectious and others in a year.
As we speak probably about 3000 children died every day out of malaria, in Nigeria, for example, we are said to have about 100 million cases of malaria per annum with over 300,000 death every year. That means approximately a thousand persons die of malaria every day and approximately about the same number of HIV, we do not know those that die of typhoid and all of those other diseases.
For a continent being buffeted with all these, if you like almost like living on life support and very importantly the government do not have the resources to be able to feed and fend for the people the way that the others do.
In this kind of situation where the people are facing almost a normal time without the pandemic- an existential threat that the issue of livelihoods and saving lives; people actually miss the point that where the government does not actually have the resources to do this and given the linkage between people’s nutrition and their immune system and their capacity to even withstand pandemic or diseases or infection as it were that issue of saving livelihood is not just another objective
but is a critical, if not the most important instrument for dealing with the health challenge.
So they are seeing it as either; Oh! We deal with the health and then we deal with the economy and their livelihood. Unfortunately, in the circumstance in which we are can’t really separate the two. Even livelihood is actually a key component of the health protocol if you understand.
I have been saying this as a lay n man, that there is a link between nutrition and immune system, and between the immune system and the capacity of individuals to survive viral infection will depend on their immune system. The data is out; that more than 80 percent of those infected do not need hospitalization, they have mild symptoms, why, because of their immune system, it has also to do with demographics, it has also to do with those with pre-existing conditions.
Again, this data is out from both the WHO and experts from the medical team, what we are saying is that, take this numbers, take these statistics- only 5 percent of those infected actually did get on to the critical condition. If you look at the death rate so far, that is actually where it is; age matters, Africa is different from the rest of the world, only about 3 percent happen to be above 65 years of age in Africa the rest of the world have about 20 percent of there about.
Those 65years old and above are the most vulnerable than the youthful African population with a median age of 20 years old. The median age of the rest of the world-Europe, America and the rest is about 45 years old or thereabout. Every day, I talk about saving lives comprehensively, hundreds of millions are already on life support, if you take out their livelihood and the government have no resource to be able to feed them appropriately as a lain man, their immune system gets compromised and in my thesis, is that you are probably going to be having a large number of deaths due to the inappropriate response rather than the actual diseases.
Therefore for my thesis is that in the fear of death, without thinking it through we might be afraid of death but our responses might end up actually leading to mass suicide as it were.
My article was a call for us to begin to think of this not either-or. Not in the form of-oh! When you finish dealing with the health then you come back to the economy, No.
If you have a long term lockdown without an exit strategy, you are going to make the problem many times much worse.
Looking at how African leaders have responded to Covid-19 how do you access immediate and consequent success?
So when you come into a situation and you see other people running, your first response is to run, but after you have run for three minutes, you have got to stop and say, hey why am I running? Am I running in the right direction, is running the right thing to do or should I confront it? I think that is the way much of Africa has responded-lockdown, get on to social distancing and get on to hygiene, those basic protocols but the result has been interesting so far, Africa with 1.3 billion people have reported 34,000-35,000 infections with deaths of about 1,500. We want to safe all lives, every life is important, we don’t want to lose any but having 1000 and putting it in context, 1500 relative to 231, 000 or about 240,000 death around the world, Africa has done comparatively well, and that is only 4 percent of the total infection death per rate in Africa, so far in terms of number, but regrettably
Also, of a region where like a said 3000 children die out of malaria every day but in Nigeria, a thousand died out of malaria alone not to talk about the multiplicity of others like typhoid, tuberculosis, HIV and the rest, in that context, Africa has done relatively well in terms of numbers.
I congratulate them, for realizing that you can’t lock down the people, so the steps they have taken so far so good and my expectation is that as we go on especially places where there is lockdown realize they can’t actually do that, you will kill much more people than otherwise.
So Africa can respond basically in a mixture of orthodoxy and innovation, a large number tock with the WHO template, we know that nobody has all the answers. For everybody around the world, it is a trial and errors mechanism.
Africa is been projected as the next epicentre of the world in regards to the virus outbreak, is it that a danger?
The point is that being the epicentre of COVID-19, regrettable that would be but already Africa is already the epicentre of diseases and death, so let’s be clear about that, people are dying in tens of thousands from malnutrition, disease and so on and so forth.
The question is not whether you are going to be epicentre or otherwise.
The question is how do you respond to it, at least one response pattern is shown to constitute mass suicide, the question is how do we minimize the effect of that. You can’t lock the people down without feeding them, that will compromise their immune system and the certain death with already millions unemployed with hundreds of millions living in extreme poverty and by the way, I am very delighted, yesterday somebody sent me a quote credited to the Lagos state commissioner of health, to the effect that again the single most important thing to fight this virus is the immune system and the quote talked about the link between nutrition and immunity, therefore, whether you get an epicentre of a million or hundred million people getting infected by that, it is not the number that is the issue, it is the number that will die. Ghana now has about 2000 plus confirmed cases with 17 death. We have over one million malaria cases in Nigeria with over 300,000 death.
Malaria kills in a year more people than COVID-19 has killed in the entire world put together. The point is for us not to have a very narrow view just focusing on COVID-19, I am saying you need to look at the entire health, saving lives comprehensively in Africa, because there are already hundreds of millions at risk even without COVID-19. Therefore you are in your panic to respond to COVID-19 that you don’t gain inadvertently then kill millions of people that would have otherwise rescued. So we start first by saying, it is not an either-or.
If you realize that securing people’s livelihood is central to their capacity to have nutrition, to have basic immunity to fight this. We could have targeted isolation, I don’t know what that may be, the experts may think. All I am calling for is a different way of looking at it, look at the problem comprehensively, maybe those with pre-existing conditions, we might isolate them differently and maybe the use of face masks, many states in the country already encourage that.
After Ghana eased their lockdown, their confirmed cases doubled, if it’s the same in Nigeria what do we do?
So what is your option? Your option to go back and lock the people? My thesis is; the scenario that Africa faces means you don’t have an easy choice, hundreds of million are already in danger. Millions are dying out of other diseases. So Ghana has over 2000 cases of infection, that is my problem with communication, the communication world is communicating fear. Rather than hope.
Ghana has 2000 plus cases with 17 deaths, what we do not have is actually the number of people who died or whose lives are at risk as a consequence of the disruption of their livelihoods. In Africa, because the government cannot feed the people, ca not give them something to eat and therefore boost their immune system, therefore, their livelihood which gives them a source to be able to feed, to be able to give them a fighting chance for their immune system is an integral part of their health protocol, and for Ghana, I wish we have data about the number of people during their lockdown or prospectively whom you disrupt their livelihood and therefore their ability to even eat.
How many lives you are losing, those who have typhoid and those who have a dozen of other ailments, whose immune system simply collapsed and they died, and you said they died out of malaria but, no, it is because of the response to other pandemics that aggravated the situation, we don’t have the data.
All I am saying is that if you are faced with this volume of health challenges, is everything it is not just COVD-19. Ghana has huge other issues. The question is what is the best way to save on the average, comprehensively more lives?
And the best way is the middle of the roadhouse, we focus so narrowly on the pandemic without realizing that is it just one of the 10 or 12 or 13 other pandemics, somebody said there is already hunger virus, malaria virus, and tuberculosis virus and so on and so forth.
This one, yes, we need to understand it, we need to deal with it and I think we are beginning to evolve some sensible means- Madagascar is dealing with it with its own herbs and it claims no single death yet, Senegal found with 3D printing is developing ventilator and means of testing.
No question about it, we should continue to invest in expanding our health facility, in expanding testing capacity, in enforcing the protocol of use of face marks and hygienic hobbits. In any case, try to enforce extreme lockdowns in an extended period of time, first of all, it is not possible, people are going to revolt you are going to have social chaos in your hand if you do that because being lockdown means certainly you will die. Hundreds of millions of people will die and that was what you condemned them to. That is what I talk about being Africa of death and then end up committing suicide.
So you are left between that and guiding the people through some common sense structures, life is learning by doing and the whole world is also learning by doing, so let’s face it.
What balance would you be recommending to African leaders?
Securing livelihood in the context where the government does not have the resources as in the rest of the world to pour hundreds of millions to the private sector, small and medium scale business to keep them alive and give welfare packages like In America about 30 million people are trying to claim unemployment benefit and the western world with the general welfare system. So they are not worrying about whether to eat or not. What they are worried about is that lockdown is restricting their movement in our case, disruption of livelihood, it is about whether the guy is going to eat tomorrow or die that is what it means in our own case.
So trying to separate it in terms of health, economic and the rest is a wrong characterization that is my thesis. My opinion is that you need to simultaneously deal with the two because the economic component; the fact that his livelihood is not disrupted means that he is going to eat tomorrow means that his immune system will be guaranteed to some extent, to have a fighting chance, because even in the old model of total lockdown, cases continue to increase and it would have continued to rise because you are not able to totally enforce the lockdown, it is impossible. Secondly, a social endowment in which we live is such that social clustering is actually the norm for a large percent of the poor because they live in a very large group and cluster in accommodation and so on and so forth.
So my point is it is not an either-or, we have to understand that guaranteeing our people’s livelihood is the most important component of the health protocol. If you disrupt their livelihood millions are going to either starve to death or get their immune system compromised and then die through other diseases as the case may be, so you need to have a balance. I think that is what much of Africa is trying to do now. They saying: Hey, we will liberalize this so people can be able to get access to what to eat and then we implement a set of protocol to keep them relatively safe.
