This is a retrospect on North Africa and the Sahel region, for the week ending 24 April. The review, which focuses on the latest on Covid-19 in the Maghreb, Egypt and the Sahel, is presented by MEA Risk analyst Arezki Daoud. The transcripted text is below. You can also listen in:
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TRANSCRIPT:
Specific to the top northern part of Africa, the month of April and parts of May will see a continuation of the lockdowns in all countries. For Algeria, the authorities extended the lockdown until 29 April. For those wanting to travel there, all international flights and ferries are suspended, and land borders are closed. There are still flights, but they are focused on repatriations. There are also chartered flights being organized to bring back Algerian citizens stranded abroad, but repatriated Algerians will be subject to a 14-day quarantine at special sites. There is a curfew, which is total in the province of Blida, although it is beginning to ease, and partial, between 3 pm to 7 am for nine affected provinces and from 7 to 7 for the rest of the country. All public gatherings in Algeria are suspended until further notice (including religious prayers) and that would be most likely a big challenge during the month of Ramadan.
In Tunisia too, there is a general lockdown in place until 4 May. The current curfew is between 8 PM and 6 AM. Likewise, all flights to Tunisia are suspended, except in cases of emergency and other similar cases. And in Morocco, the lockdown has been extended until 20 May. Flights to and from Morocco have been suspended, with some exceptions. Border crossings are closed, including the ones at the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, but if you are a national of the Schengen area or EU a citizen in Morocco, you can transit into Spain provided that you can show that you are returning home. Domestic and inter-city travels have been suspended, including domestic air travel. Public gatherings are banned.
In Egypt, authorities extended on Thursday, 23 April, a night-time curfew through the month of Ramadan, while announcing the gradual easing of other measures. The partial curfew will remain in place from 9:00 pm to 6:00 am and will run until the end of Ramadan.
Because of these tough lockdown rules, countries are struggling to put forward containment policies that are glitch-free and so now they are looking to reverse some of these rules, despite the virus continuing to spread. But it is clear that measures taken so far have been more than an inconvenience, and utterly disruptive. That was the case this week for the hundreds of Tunisians stranded for weeks on the Libyan side of the border who have not been allowed to cross into their country. The Tunisian authorities came under intense pressure to allow them in, but the border point of Ras Jedir experienced chaotic scenes with people stranded there, with some reporting as many as 1,300 people struggling to join their homes in Tunisia.
Now it is clear that the emergence of the Covid-19 virus has exposed the weaknesses of the countries not just in the public health sector, but it amplified all other problems whether they are issues of governance, economy, civil rights and anything else you can think of. One of the hardest hit areas is Libya and Tripoli in particular. Ironically, and although the country may have relatively low infection rates, as 49 people have so far tested positive for coronavirus in the country, the population is struggling with toughening lockdown measures, a curfew, and a civil war. People can only go out from 7 am to noon for such things as essential shopping. And if you have a car, driving is now banned. Now staying home has been a huge problem because Tripoli and large swaths of Western Libya are experiencing severe water cuts since 6 April and electricity cuts as well. Limited shopping hours are allowed in the morning and without driving, but most Libyans have not received government salaries and pensions for months, making their situation extremely precarious as we enter the month of Ramadan.
As the crisis continues, obviously hospitals have been on their highest alert across the region. Most countries have mobilized their military hospitals as well, whether it is in Blida, the epicenter of the Covid-19 in Algeria or in Morocco where the military has been preparing for a scenario of mass influx of patients. Doctors, nurses, and other medical staffs across the region are on Covid-19 time and less focused on other health problems. We are seeing expanded bed capacity, and in many cases, there is excessive reliance of the chloroquine to cure patients, even though the drug is not officially deemed effective.
There are some positive initiates in the region. In Tunisia, engineers have created a web-based platform that scans lung X-rays and evaluates whether patients are likely to be suffering from the virus. They want to make the tool available for free and say that the technology provides a “90 percent” reliability rate for the probability of infection. Of course, the technology has not been fully tested, but still, we should congratulate the young engineers behind it.
In Algeria, inmates at 30 prisons have been mobilized to make personal protective equipment. This is a good initiative to keep the relatively large inmate population occupied and busy. Sewing workshops that employ these inmates in some 30 prisons are trying to produce thousands of masks and protective suits for medical personnel. Authorities say inmate will take part on the voluntary basis. The Algerian authorities say there are no confirmed cases of the COVID-19 among the 58,000 inmates living in the country’s 150 prison facilities. But there have been growing reports that the virus is already in Algerian prisons.
In fact, Morocco, which has a very similar socio-economic profile as Algeria, nearly 200 cases of coronavirus infections have been reported in the Ouarzazate jail, among staff and inmates. Morocco’s prisons are home to 80,000 inmates.
In Egypt, we note that doctors and nurses there have been facing some sort of backlash from their neighbors and the general population, a situation that is the opposite in other countries, where the medical professionals are now treated like royalties. The mistreatment of doctors and nurses in Egypt is a real problem, coming from people who are fearful of catching the virus. Egyptian doctors and nurses are living an intense period similar to their colleagues around the world: they work long hours, they are facing skyrocketing caseloads and of course all of that while working in high-risk environments. Dozens of doctors have been affected and several of them have died.
Meanwhile, Governments in the region have been taking advantage of the pandemic to repress and send people to prison often on bogus charges, and often for a simple facebook post. Let’s start with Algeria where dozens, perhaps hundreds of citizens are stuck in prison for having taken part to the Hirak movement calling for democracy. The government has been using a pretty clever but evil and repressive tool called the pre-trial detention that allows the political police to keep people indefinitely in jail while awaiting trial. The problem is that the court system is not working due to the health crisis, so many people arrested during the course of 2019 are stuck between a rock and a hard place. But even if the courts were working, it does not matter. Accused people in Algeria are not even properly represented by lawyers as it happened to opposition leader Karim Tabbou. He showed up before a judge who rendered his sentence without the presence of a single defense lawyer.
Now Those held in Algeria’s filthy prisons in these circumstances include young women and men, the sick, the elderly and of course everyone else. The Algerian police and the gendarmerie, which are clearly two instruments of repression, continue to arrest people over anything and everything, defying common sense and showing the regime’s unwillingness to appease political tension. The regime has also enacted a new law this week that criminalizes “fake news”. The problem is that the government will use that law to crack down more on the media and anyone who has an opinion. No one in the Algerian government managed to define in clear terms what ‘fake news’ means. And so a judge in the payroll of the political police will decide what such term means, and will likely send their authors to prison. Now the country is in political turmoil. There have been arrests of top officers of the country’s intelligence services, and once again the military structure remains highly destabilized by a regime dominated by a permanent clan warfare. Speaking to analysts at MEA Risk LLC, the long-term outlook for Algeria looks grim. The political instability is likely to magnify with the country witnessing the sources of its hard currency revenues completely evaporate. On the 21st of April, the Sahara Blend, Algeria’s crude oil, experienced a drop to less than $12 per barrel. An unbelievable fall of more than 80% from the same day in 2019, when the Sahara Blend was priced at more than $74. In addition to the violent attack of the coronavirus, the political fights, and an economy in chaos, the Hirak movement is by no means over and so when you look at 2021, assuming the pandemic is brought under control, it gets really hard to see a bright light for the regime and Algeria in general.
In neighboring Morocco, it is not any better. Civil rights are being trampled by the authorities who are now using technology to track the movement of citizens. The police in Morocco have started using a mobile app developed by the police authority known as the DGSN, allegedly to track violators of the lockdown. The app identifies the whereabouts of users as they cross checkpoints and uses national identity card numbers to perform cross-referencing. The King has apparently pardoned a few thousand inmates to prevent the spread of covid-19 in the overcrowded prisons, but the police arrested more than 53,000 people for breaching the curfew. So on the one hand we release 5,000 prisoners, but then on the other hand, we arrest ten times as many. Brilliant!
As for the Sahel region, the pandemic in itself, as a public health problem, has caused very little to no harm. Niger is probably the hardest hit but with just 662 confirmed cases as of 23 April, followed by Burkina Faso with 609. It is true that these countries have extremely limited testing capabilities, but we have not witnessed the type of scenes that we are seeing in places like Ecuador, where bodies are found in streets and inside houses. Of course no one really knows how this will evolve, even though there is evidence that the virus does not like heat and where else would you find more heat than in the Sahel. But other- non-health related issues have bubbled up recently that are making the region even more destabilized. Niger in particular is witnessing growing unrest and riots, with people getting angry at the very brutal confinement measures imposed on them.
Several cities experienced riots over anti-coronavirus lockdowns, and religious and conservative groups have taken to the street to protest the banning of collective prayers. The district of Lazaret in the capital Niamey saw some of the most intense riots, where cars and buildings were torched, and hundreds of people arrested. As in the case of its northern neighbors, Niger is in complete freeze, with border closures, a state of emergency, a curfew, the closing of mosques and schools and people forced to stay indoors. The first protests were recorded in late March in the town of Mirrya, in the center of the country, with protesters destroying cars and burning buildings. The riots extended to the west, reaching the Tahoua region. Then there has been a spike in unrest in the capital Niamey more recently where many neighborhoods rioted.
Setting aside the coronavirus-related problems, the Sahel continues to struggle with an upsurge of militancy and political instability. In Mali, there was the final round of legislative elections on Sunday, 19 April, that were characterized by allegations of vote buying and intimidation. In the center and the north of the country, voting was particularly violent with armed gangs intimidating voters. Jihadi groups issued threats to attack voters in an effort to sabotage the election.
Mali also witnessed the usual violence against civilians. At least 12 people were killed this week in a gunmen attack on several villages in Mopti, located in central Mali. The attackers stole hundreds of heads of cattle.
Elsewhere, in Burkina Faso, the security forces were accused this week of executed 31 unarmed detainees of Fulani ethnicity in the northern town of Djibo, some 120 miles from Ouagadougou. Rights groups say their murder, which took place on 9 April, happened a short while after they were arrested. And in Chad, the government reported the deaths by apparent poisoning of 44 suspected Boko Haram insurgents while they were being held in a Chad prison. No one in the Chadian government could explain how 44 of the 58 Boko Haram suspects died. An autopsy on four of the victims showed severe asphyxiation.
So in general the Covid-19 crisis has largely dominated life in the region, with the more pronounced impact in the north. In the south, that is in the sahel region, the Covid-19 crisis is there but less problematic than in the north. This week’s problems have amplified the other sources of crises: political, economic and social, and as these issues persist and grow, the region faces a very difficult outlook.
Finally, for those of you who began the month of Ramadan, I want to wish you a spiritually rewarding month. And for all of you, please stay safe and remain positive. Thank you for listening and goodbye.
