DI S PATC H E S | AF RICA
Africa’s coming rough years
Robert I. Rotberg
T
he years 2020 and 2021 were tough and worrying years for Africa and Africans. Will 2022 prove better and more life sustaining? The COVID-19 pandemic set Africa’s development back in 2021 by at least 10 years, according to the World Bank. In addition to soaring case rates everywhere, but especially in South Africa in 2021, 48
foreign exchange earnings plummeted as purchasing of raw materials slowed, especially by China, and the world price of petroleum fell dramatically, recovering only in mid-2021. Tourism largely vanished, cutting the incomes of such countries as Mauritius, Botswana, South Africa, Kenya and Tanzania. Incoming remittance amounts fell dramatically because of declining employment and falling incomes in Europe and the Gulf States. The pandemic
Vaccination rates in Africa were rising at the end of 2021 from extremely low levels to about 11 per cent overall, and 28 per cent in southern Africa, but then the new Omicron variant hit South Africa and Botswana hard, spread to neighbouring Zambia and Zimbabwe and quickly
reached Europe, the Americas, and well beyond. Barring the potentially devastating impact of the new mutation and others possibly to follow, Africa is poised in 2022 to receive inoculation materials and life-saving pharmaceutical pills from the United States, Europe and India. It will also begin manufacturing vaccines and pills under licence, with patent restrictions removed. Both instruments should improve Africa’s ability to overcome the coronavirus’s destruction and to avoid economically paralyzing lockdowns, border closings, traffic restrictions and the like — unless a new catastrophic virus or mutation follows Omicron. In addition to the COVID-19 perils, Africa suffers immensely from the prevalence of malaria almost everywhere, from yellow fever and dengue fever in parts WINTER-SPRING 2022 | JAN-JUNE
NEIL PALMER (CIAT)
In 2022, climatic alterations will continue to descend mercilessly on Africa. Rain will fall erratically on farmers, such as this Kenyan woman, who cannot grow crops and earn their livelihoods without the traditionally regular monsoons from the east and the warming of air and downpours that follow the movement of inter-tropical convergence patterns from the west across the middle of the vast continent.
