Why the Ebola
Crisis is a Rule of Law Problem:
As I write this, the World’s largest outbreak of Ebola continues
unabated. International health
organizations are predicting that the death toll will continue to rise
exponentially, the economic impact on West Africa is beginning to be discussed, and the United States is (literally) sending in the Marines. And as normally happens, the blame game on who
is responsible for letting it get so out of hand has begun.
But most current discussions continue to miss a key
point. The Ebola crisis is a terrible
case study about what can happen when you combine a deadly communicable disease
with serious gaps in governance and the rule of law.
It’s important to point out that West Africa, and Liberia
and Sierra Leone in particular, has been the recipient of an enormous amount of
foreign assistance.
As Liberia and Sierra Leone emerged from their brutal civil wars, the
international community poured resources into the countries. Governmental structures were restored, security
forces re-trained and re-equipped, and essential services of every type were
reinstated. Supposedly. I’d like to also point out that when donors
in West Africa talked about objectives and risks, the threat of pandemic was
always high on the list. But honestly,
from my own experience in Liberia, it was really more of a block that was
checked: “Yes, of course we've considered the threat of pandemic . . .”
So what has been the result of all that foreign aid? Well, we now have a public health crisis with global implications that
West African governments have been completely and utterly unable to
manage. It’s one thing to build and
equip a hospital or clinic; it’s another to build a public health system that
can manage it – capably and accountably. It’s one thing to train doctors and nurses; it’s
a different development challenge to train health care professionals who can
adapt to crisis and change, and oversee government performance of emerging public
health care needs. It’s one thing to train and equip government
security forces to respond to national security threats; but training them to
be credible first responders during a national health and safety disaster requires another
set of skills and a different mindset regarding roles, responsibilities, and public information.
These are core governance and rule of law issues, but what has been evident to
date that governments in the affected countries were not equipped to respond in
a responsible, credible, way. Nor were
they trusted by their own people to do so.
Rural populations have either ignored government warnings and advice, or
refused to even believe it. Corruption
and incompetence have created such an extreme level of mistrust between the
government and the governed that in some parts of the affected countries, people
would rather die than follow a government directive. As for efforts to contain the spread through
measures such as airport screening at point of departure? Well, despite pouring
hundreds of millions of dollars into re-building critical transportation
infrastructure and customs and border capacity, there is not enough oversight
in these countries to ensure that screeners adhere to the standards, and no assurances that they are even enforcing them equally to all passengers.
If we are going to play the blame game, or more positively,
if we are going to assess what type of capacity building is needed to contain
Ebola and prevent future pandemic, we owe it to ourselves and the citizens of
the countries we help to take a hard look at how we are building governance
capacity. Top down capacity building
that will strengthen the host nations’ ability to manage and respond to crisis
is key of course, but we have to also look how the level of accountability that
we donors demand of the recipient governments; the checks and balances that they
are required to build into their systems and enforce; and the means and methods
governments have at their disposal to credibly communicate critical information
to the public. Bottom up capacity
building – focused on community engagement on public health and safety -- has
to be an equal part in the assistance equation as well.
Building trust and confidence between the government and the
governed is fundamental to maintaining the rule of law, and enforcing the rule
of law is critical in times of crisis and uncertainty when governmental control
is key to controlling the spread of a disaster.
As we look to the future of assistance in Africa, and ways in which we
re-calibrate our response, we have to be realistic about the role that weak
governance has played. Although governance
development is hard, and its results are less tangible that training, building,
and equipping, it has to be the priority.
Otherwise, as the current pandemic has illustrated so tragically, most
of the technical assistance is for naught.
