Critical Reflections and Timeline Analysis of West African
Leadership Response during the Ebola Outbreak in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra
Leone
By
Kenneth Nwabudike Okafor
From a West African perspective, it is really
difficult to refrain from finger pointing in the face of a diseased and
proliferating tragedy which is now firmly classified as world's worst Ebola
epidemic, since the haemorrhagic disease was identified in 1976, wracking
Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone in the sub-region. On October 23, headlines
chronicled Ebola berthing in Mali via a 2 year-old girl! Dramatic reports tend
to portray a region-wide affliction, but 3 out of 17 is minority. Before going
any further our hearts and prayers go out to the families who have lost loved
ones and in particular to orphans which have become created by the virulent
Ebola virus disease (EVD). Post-mortem scrutiny (even when carried out
mid-crisis as this one) are often unpleasant and unpalatable as can be; yet
they may be (must be?) carried out in order that invaluable lessons and
insights might be gleaned from even the worst of calamities, if not for
anything else, to forestall future pitfalls. This should be norm. That said,
this is a mid-catastrophe evaluation in the stead of a post-mortem and it will
not be sugar-coated.
On many levels, there are invaluable lessons which can
be distilled from this outbreak. The fact that West Africa and its leadership/
public institutions are wont to avoid this routine/pathway as norm is part of a
wider malaise of leadership deficit, governance defects and a complete lack of
accountability which disfigure and misshapen the sub-region, and the larger
continent and its citizenry in every sense.
In the shambles
of obviating long-term planning, there is enough evidence to conclude that no
West African state has a feasible, well-conceived and adequately funded
disaster preparedness and emergency management strategy/action plan and
emergency operations plan for any kind of disaster/emergencies. Ordinarily,
disaster preparedness and emergency management strategy/action plan should have
multiple stakeholders and thorough support - government has responsibility to:
develop, test, and refine emergency plans; ensure emergency responders have
adequate skills and resources and provide services to protect and assist
citizens. Community preparedness: roles and responsibilities: key priority in
lessening the impact of disasters; critical that all community members take
steps to prepare and effective when addresses unique attributes of community
and engages whole community. an emergency operations plan includes: 1) assigns
responsibility to organizations and individuals; 2) sets forth lines of
authority; 3) describes how people and property will be protected; and 4)
identifies personnel, equipment, facilities, supplies, and other resources.
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UPDATE FOR NOVEMBER 2014: The Ebola virus has claimed more than 5,000
lives
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But
then you see West Africa is such a place that if you suggest a collective plan
for future disaster, someone might accuse you of negativity and wishing people
bad luck. This esoteric but unreasonable point of view in the end proves
precarious and fatalistic, since it kills strategic thinking and anticipatory
planning which is part of the foundations of modern governance better
practices. West Africa could not contain Ebola because they had not even made
plans to contain endemic malaria. In Nigeria, you cannot find one single
community with a standing community emergency response team and/or trained
first responders. The upshot is that disease and disasters catch people
unawares at every turn.
In this analysis, we would consider the West African
leadership/public institutions’ aggregated response to the EVD outbreak. In
this instance, leadership and leadership response is appraised from the point
of view of both the individual theory and the institutional theory of
leadership. The premise of this analysis considers leadership as "a process of social influence, which maximizes the
efforts of others, towards the achievement of a goal. (Kruse, 2013)" Additionally, the leadership response appraised considers
both the leadership and management functions; management's main function being "to produce order and consistency through processes,
such as planning, budgeting, organizing, staffing, and problem solving", while leadership's main function being "to produce movement and constructive or adaptive
change through processes, such as establishing direction through visioning,
aligning people, motivating, and inspiring."
The one indisputable fact
which stands as a veritable indictment for the failure of West African (and
indeed African) leadership and public institutions is that this current EVD
outbreak thrives and flourishes because of a combustible patchwork of the
dearth of crisis management leadership, effective crisis management
capacity/experience, infrastructure deficits, weak to non-existent
instructional capacity, inadequate manpower base, technology deficits and aggravated
poverty (on top of years of political upheavals, violent conflict and
full-blown Civil Wars) which if not prevalent could have foreseen individual
West African states coping more efficiently in the face of a rampant epidemic.
CONTINUE READING HERE
Kenneth N. Okafor is a development planning
specialist, essayist, founder and creative director of naijagraphitti blog.
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