Canada restricts visas
Canada has joined Australia in suspending entry visas for people from Ebola-stricken countries in West Africa in an attempt to keep the deadly disease away. Canada has not yet had a case of Ebola. Canadians, including health care workers, in West Africa will be permitted to travel back to Canada, the government said.
JOHANNESBURG – The head of Africa’s continental body did not get to an Ebola-hit country until last week – months after alarm bells first rang and nearly 5,000 deaths later.
Pledges to deploy 2,000 African health workers have remained largely that – promises.
No African countries are on the United Nations list of contributors to fight the epidemic.
Ebola did not even figure on the agenda of a session on peace and security at the Pan-African Parliament in South Africa last week – more than a month after the U.N. Security Council declared the Ebola outbreak a “threat to international peace and security.”
Angry legislators from Sierra Leone and Liberia got up to protest. “They said as far as they are concerned, nobody wants to talk about Ebola,” said Jeggan Grey-Johnson, a governance expert who watched the session.
“They said countries like Liberia feel totally abandoned by the rest of Africa and shut off from the rest of the continent,” he told The Associated Press.
With few exceptions, African governments and institutions are offering only marginal support as the continent faces its most deadly threat in years, once again depending on the international community to save them.
South African mining magnate Patrice Motsepe on Tuesday announced he has donated $1 million to the fight against Ebola in Guinea, where the outbreak started.
Motsepe’s gift, the largest donation by far from any African individual, came after the World Food Program lashed out at China’s billionaires, saying their contributions lagged behind their companies’ huge economic interests in the mineral-rich region. Motsepe’s office said his company has no interests in any of the countries where Ebola is raging out of control – Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. China’s government has sent many health workers and given more than $8 million with a promise of $6 million more to the U.N. Ebola fund.
“Ebola is first and foremost our problem,” the president of the African Development Bank, Donald Kaberuka, told a business forum in Brussels in October. “Before relying on international aid, we must first encourage Africans to take action.”
The African Development Bank is the second-largest institutional contributor to the U.N. fund to fight Ebola, second only to the World Bank, having given $45.4 million and promised an additional $17.4 million. In addition, it has given loans and grants individually to the most affected countries.
By contrast, the African Union has made an “uncommitted pledge” of just $700,000. Africa’s equivalent of the Organization of America States, it is the body many believe should have taken the lead from the start.