Introductory remark for a panel of the 66th Session of the ACHPR – Making human rights priority in response to COVID-19 and planning for post-COVID19
The COVID-19 pandemic, as a bio-medical public health issue poses grave threat to health and life. It is most infectious. It causes serious illness. It is also deadly.
Its arrival and spread on our continent have been slow. Yet, its spread and the speed of the spread on our continent is gaining alarming pace.
With no vaccine to treat it, COVID19 continues to pose one of the most serious threats to the health and life of people. The rights to health and life are at stake.
But the fact that COVID19 is highly infectious and deadly does not by itself alone poses a threat to health and life. What has made COVID19 vicious is the conditions of vulnerability affecting the majority of people on our continent – poor health systems, absence of social protection, structural inequalities and pervasive poverty.
The masses of the people on our consentient lack access to basic health care services. Millions live in highly congested spaces. They live a life striped off dignity with no access to water, sanitation, education and decent housing. The vast majority of people on our continent, mostly women, depend on the informal economy based on performance of daily economic activities as petty traders of goods and services and daily laborers.
For all these categories of people hand washing, sanitizing, social distancing and self-isolation are not possible nor the possibilities of getting health care in the event of infection. Many have no home to shelter. No food stockpiles to remain confined in their homes. No regular income to avoid hunger and starvation.
COVID19 laid bare the failures of our economic and social policy making, the dangerous fragilities of the structure of our economies, the inability of the prevailing model of economic development, with its focus on GDP growth, to deliver for the wellbeing of the masses of the people and the weaknesses of our systems of governance, including the abusive institutional culture of security institutions in the name of upholding law and order and the appetite of some in government to pocket resources meant for fighting the pandemic.
With states adopting COVID19 response measures following the footsteps of other countries in the world, we have come to witness the emergence of a wide range of human rights issues affecting large number of people, most particularly the most vulnerable among us. People are forced to face insecurity not only from the lack of access to the conditions that make it possible for them to protect themselves from the virus but also from the human rights violations and abuses resulting from the COVID19 response measures and how those measures are enforced.
In the context of these structural socio-economic and governance fragilities and weaknesses, the various COVID19 response measures have exacerbated existing conditions of vulnerabilities and inequalities and created new dimensions of social, economic and political inequities.
We have received reports of people losing their lives due to excessive use of force by security forces, unable to have access to life saving services including access to health care and facing hunger and starvation.
With gender oppression exacerbated during the pandemic, women and girls have come to feel the full weight of the structural violence of patriarchy as they face unprecedented spike in GBV and sexual violence and as their reproductive work burden sharply increases.
The socio-economic impact of COVID-19 and its response measures continue to result in severe deprivations of the social and economic wellbeing of many people across the continent. The result is that tens of millions of people are being pushed to extreme poverty. Many more lose their jobs and sink into poverty.
The youth who account for the sizable portion of the population of the continent now face a bleak prospect with very limited or no socio-economic opportunities. With economies of the countries of the continent facing recession, millions of people facing loss of jobs and livelihoods, the impact of COVID19 can have catastrophic consequences for human rights.
Also affecting people on the continent and people of African descent are racism and inequitable international trade relations. As countries resort to hording and protectionist measures of limiting the market sell of medical supplies relating to COVID19, Africa has experienced restrictions of access to diagnostic test kits and therapeutics. There is concern that Africa may once again be put at the end of the que when vaccines are discovered if such vaccine is not discovered and produced on the continent.
Amidst all of the foregoing, the climate emergency continues to rage on across the world and on our continent. Countries have been affected by severe whether events including flooding, cyclones and parts of the continent continue to experience expansion of desertification destroying livelihoods and increasing inter-communal tension over scarce resources, and the locust invasion destroying crops and sources of food, exposing millions of people to food insecurity and starvation.
All of the foregoing show that we are, to quote from the last report of the UN Rapporteur on poverty, Phillip Alston, at an ‘existential crossroads’. As we respond to COVID19 and plan for a post-COVID19 order, we cannot afford to underestimate the gravity of the challenge we face. Indeed, what we face is a generational challenge. What we face is the defining human rights issue of this era – deepening inequalities, pervasive and expanding poverty, racism, sexism and gender oppression, the democratic governance crisis and the climate emergency. Whether and how we respond to these issues could prove to be the litmus test of a success for building back better and achieve a just system of democratic governance in which gender oppression is defeated and a human centered paradigm of economic development in harmony with nature.