The United States Assistant Secretary, Bureau of African Affairs, Ambassador Tibor P. Nagy, in a telephonic press briefing with reporters on COVID-19 in Africa and the U.S. response, speaks on African countries welcoming Chinese doctors, medical supplies to help deal with the COVID-19 pandemic on the continent, U.S. assistance to the continent and others. Excerpts:
Chinese doctors and medical supplies to help deal with the COVID-19 pandemic on the continent
Well, again, countries are sovereign. Countries can decide who they are to deal with and in what manners. Our asking and urging is for transparency, full transparency from all donors, whether it regards assistance on COVID or whether it regards debt alleviation or aid programs in general.
The United States of America, we are very focused on providing assistance across the board, making sure that the material we send is of the highest quality. So again, the only thing I would say is pick your partners as you will. We totally support sovereignty and freedom of choice. Just make sure that you’re making a wise decision.
The impact of defunding WHO in Africa now during this pandemic
Yeah, that’s also a very good question and thanks so much for that. In fact, I think the term defunding is not the correct way to say that. What the United States of America has said is that we are undertaking a 60 to 90-day evaluation of the World Health Organization’s response during this COVID emergency.
And as Secretary Pompeo himself had said basically, he said with respect to the WHO, we know they had one job, a single mission: to prevent the spread of the pandemic. So that did not happen. It was not the first time of failure, so that is in effect what we are doing. And as we have been the largest single funder of the WHO, it’s our responsibility, the government, to look after the interests of the U.S. taxpayers who have been funding that to the tune of $400 to $500 million a year.
So again, I would say that the correct term is not defunding, it is stopping funding during the evaluation process.
Support towards research
Yeah, thanks very much for the question. Unfortunately, I can’t give you dollars and cents as to what the specific components of that are, because the funding that we’re making available is basically across the board from A to Z. So it includes medical supplies, medical equipment, the ventilators. Of course, it involves supporting research, it involves medications, it involves supporting healthcare professionals, institutions, and on.
And of course, here’s the important part: Again, with the United States, it’s not only the CDC, health and human services, other government health agencies that are involved in this, but the hundreds and hundreds of U.S. universities, because so much research is done through universities. We have a number of the U.S. universities that have very strong partnerships with African universities, with African labs. So, this really is – it’s a whole-of-world approach.
And I have also seen with interest some of the reports concerning some of the potential treatments to alleviate the illness. And of course, those have to be looked at very carefully with a scientific analysis, but everybody is going as quickly as possible. But rest assured that significant funding is going to the research. And I said, we have people from the CDC throughout the African continent who are working and collaborating very closely with their host country counterparts, through the U.S. embassies, through the host country governments, to make sure that there is a full flow of information in both directions. Over.
The total U.S. contribution in Africa in response to the COVID-19 pandemic
Okay, that’s a great question. And it seems like I should be able to just give one number for that, but that would be a little bit simplistic. I think that I said in my remarks that the above and beyond funding that we have made available to Africa, specifically for the COVID emergency, has been $247 million. $247 million. But we have to also remember that the annual U.S. aid to Africa is $7.1 billion out of which $5.2 billion goes to health alone. And that we have given – as I said in my introductory remarks – incredible amounts of money to Africa over the last 20 years, and much of that money went to things like helping African countries build up their health systems, training African health workers.
So the money we’re giving now, yes, I believe it’s quite generous, but we have to also see that in the light of what we give aside from that, which also is helping African countries prepare for this kind of an emergency. Like I said also, for America it’s not just the government that gives; it’s our private sector. For example, I’ve been reading report after report of how much individual U.S. companies that are engaged in Africa are also contributing to this, or our NGOs, our faith communities, our churches in the United States tend to be extremely generous and very altruistic in doing work in Africa.
So, while the – for example, total U.S. Government response to the COVID – very generous. $2.4 billion. But if you add to that American private sector, American NGOs, and the American faith-based community, that number gets kicked up to $6.5 billion. So, it’s almost three times as much. So, the United States – and this is the people of the United States – are I think being about as generous as they can be in helping the globe confront this horrendous, horrendous emergency.
The rise of Boko Haram in Nigeria
Boko Haram was just a small movement, and because of the way the Nigerian Government initially responded to it, it grew into a – into a very serious threat, not just to northeast Nigeria, but to surrounding countries.
So, we know that the insurgency in northern Mozambique and Cabo Delgado is in an isolated part of the country. It is most remote from Maputo. It’s also a part of the country which has different linguistic and cultural and societal patterns from much of the rest of Mozambique, and it also borders Southern Tanzania, which on the other side happens to be the most remote part of Tanzania. So, our embassy, along with some partners, are engaged fully with the Mozambican Government to discuss the best ways to respond to that insurgency to keep it from becoming the type of threat that Boko Haram has become in Nigeria.
Now, as far as how we go about selecting those four countries, I’m not going to get into the sausage making on that, but rest assured it is a very intense, deliberative process between the State Department, USAID, other U.S. Government agencies, because as you can imagine, the needs are always going to be much, much, much greater than the available resources. We, the American people, will be as generous as we possibly can be, but there is no way that we will be able to meet every single need everywhere. Even all of the international community working together is not able to meet every need everywhere.
That’s why I have said so many times in my public remarks that the way to make sure that we achieve a prosperous, stable Africa, especially for all of these millions and millions of new young people who are coming on the scene and will be looking for good jobs, is to really get serious about attracting the kind of foreign direct investment, which has enabled other parts of the world to progress from poverty to prosperity. And hopefully, one of the things we’re looking at specifically to Africa are the types of programs and policies that we can engage with on the continent so that coming out of this pandemic, Africa can look to a much brighter future.
Post-Coronavirus era
Obviously, we are just in the early part of examining what the various policies are that we can pursue in that regard, because it will be absolutely in the interest of everybody that, as I said when Africa comes out of this, to be able to get on the road to prosperity as quickly as possible. African economies coming into this, some of them were the fastest-growing economies on Earth. Obviously, this is going to have a devastating economic impact on the entire continent, so the question going to be coming out of this: How can we work together to get back on the road, first, to economic recovery, then on the road to economic prosperity?
The G20 has made its initial first step. I know that various international institutions, international partners, are in very close deliberations on potential next steps, what can we do next. And here, I want to go back to some of the introductory comments I made about the critical importance of transparency. Africa has a number of bilateral debtors around the world and it will be very important for all of those countries that hold African debt to act together, to act in a very transparent way as to how they will address the debt so that it is not opaque, it’s not done under the table, but it’s done so that everybody can see what is truly involved in these kind of transactions.
U.S. willingness to collaborate and fund research and development of local African vaccines for COVID-19 and other infectious diseases
Yeah, and I think I’ve touched on that before because, as I said, the United States has extensive, extensive ties across the African continent – institution to institution, country to country, university to university, lab to lab. We have U.S. personnel from CDC, from Health and Human Services, other U.S. labs, around the continent that they are undertaking very close collaboration with their African colleagues, and the research is going back and forth. They are accelerating; normally, the type of research that would take quite a long time, much more extensive tests, are being accelerated so that the world could get a vaccine as quickly as possible.
So yes indeed, this is going on all over Africa. And who knows what – where a solution might be found. The important thing is that these things have to be tested properly and then we’ll see where it goes. But I can assure you that there’s just incredible collaboration because of the number of countries that U.S. health programs have impacted. Somebody asked about countries. For example, our PEPFAR is active in 50 countries. Our President’s Malaria Initiative is active in 27 countries. We’re doing maternal and child health in 25 countries. We have global health security, global disease detection, in 32 countries; immunization and polio eradication in 30 countries; tuberculosis 25 countries; field of immunology training in 70 countries. We do biomedical research worldwide, Feed the Future and Food for Peace in 60 countries.
And I think it’s important to mention the food aspect because we’ve talked about the medical devastation of COVID. We’ve talked a little bit about the economic devastation of COVID. Now let’s look at parts of East Africa, which are not only being – suffering from COVID, but they also have locust infestation. Some places have now excessive rainfall and flooding. And we all know full well that this will lead to hunger in the future, unfortunately, so some countries will obviously need emergency food assistance. And there again, I think we can count on the United States as the one country in the world which can literally come up with hundreds of thousands of tons of food relief – I don’t think anybody else can – and get it on the scene very quickly. That’s one of the other that we’re looking at or looking ahead into the future.
So together, together, we will resolve this. And when Africa comes out of this, the United States will be there so that we can really move forward. And hopefully, the future will be brighter because we will take a systematic approach to really working with each of the countries to make them able to get back on the road to recovery. And as I said, my dream is not just recovery but onward to prosperity after we get out of this.