Members of the Fofah family peek through the door as they observe quarantine at home in Takila Road in Freetown.

Reuters/DPA/Addis Ababa

 

The African Union (AU) raised $28.5mn yesterday from the continent’s wealthiest individuals and firms for a fund to fight the Ebola outbreak ravaging three west African nations.

AU officials and business executives gathered in the Ethiopian capital to launch the emergency response fund said the money committed would be disbursed immediately.

AU Commission chairwoman Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma said the business executives were responding to an AU plea for a continent-wide response to the Ebola epidemic, which she said required urgent action.

“It was a very successful meeting,” Zuma told reporters. “They (business leaders) ... bring different skills to this response.”

“This is a unique initiative,” said AfDB president Donald Kaberuka. “I salute the business people for bringing the competence of business to deal with this epidemic.”

“Our immediate concern is to respond to the appeal for 1,000 health care workers,” Strive Masiyiwa, chairman of Econet Wireless, an African telecoms operator, told reporters. “We have also received considerable contributions in kind, which may well ... exceed what we have received in cash.”

“This is not about big business,” he said. “It is about Africans contributing funds for a response to additional health workers.”

India’s Bharti Airtel and another telecommunications firm from Switzerland also agreed to join the campaign to bring in contributions from India and across Europe.

“We want to give everybody across the world a chance to help us overcome this challenge,” Masiyiwa said.

South African businessman Patrice Motsepe praised the roundtable for mobilising business leaders, who he said had been slow to respond to the outbreak because they weren’t engaged at the earliest opportunity.

Motsepe, the chairman of African Rainbow Minerals, said that his firm would contribute $500,000 immediately and pledged $1mn afterwards.

“We are here to confirm that Ebola is a big challenge,” Motsepe said. “The negative perception it is creating is a concern to all businesses throughout Africa ... we will defeat it.”

Ebola has killed 4,950 people of the 13,241 infected since the outbreak started earlier this year, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), mostly in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.

While countries from the United States to China and Cuba have deployed resources and health personnel in a UN-led aid surge, fast-growing African states and institutions have faced questions about the level and speed of their own contributions.

The AU and the African Development Bank (AfDB) will guide the legal set-up of the new fund, which will be administered by a board of trustees drawn from corporate Africa.

At the meeting, African telecoms firms also agreed an initiative to provide a platform for their customers to give at least $1 each, with the potential of reaching 700mmn mobile phone users, he added.

The platform, which will use one short code across all networks, is expected to be ready early next month.

Mustapha Sidiki Kaloko, the African Union’s Commissioner for Social Affairs, said the priority was to secure transport for the 1,000 extra health workers required.

“If somebody could help us with the transportation of the workers to Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea ... that would be very, very helpful to us,” Kaloko told Reuters after the meeting.

The commissioner said they had 103 health workers on the ground but the number could go up to 2,000 by the end of December.

 

Liberia rights commission calls for compensation for quarantine shooting

 

Liberia’s human rights commission has called on the government to pay compensation to the family of a boy shot dead during a protest over Ebola quarantine in August, saying officers had not fired in the air as they claimed but directly on the crowd.

The West African nation’s rights watchdog condemned the deployment of soldiers and armed police to quell the protest in the West Point neighbourhood of Monrovia.

Residents took to the streets after the government quarantined the waterfront slum of 75,000 people following an attack on an Ebola holding centre.

Liberia has been the country hardest-hit by the worst outbreak of Ebola on record, which has killed nearly 5,000 people since it was detected in the remote forest region of neighbouring Guinea in March.

The Independent National Commission on Human Rights (INCHR) urged President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to make a public apology to the family of Shaki Kamara, who died after being shot in the legs after protesters had tried to break out of the quarantine.

“A bullet shot in the air cannot fall from above and shatter somebody’s legs, especially a person standing up as was Shaki Kamara’s position,” read the report, dismissing the army’s version of events. “The INCHR ... strongly recommends monetary compensation to the family, with the amount to be determined by the government in collaboration with the inter-religious council.”

The report noted that the president had ordered military top brass to penalise officers involved in the August 20 shooting.

The commission urged the Liberian government to improve the desperate living standards in West Point and other poor Monrovia neighbourhoods by providing proper housing, health centres, public toilets and schools.

The rapid spread of Ebola had caused panic in many parts of Monrovia as infection rates accelerated in August but the government and the World Health Organisation (WHO) noted this week that the pace of the epidemic in Liberia appears to be in decline.