Africa

COVID-19

France and SA working on plan to help Africa deal with coronavirus pandemic

France and SA working on plan to help Africa deal with coronavirus pandemic
French President Emmanuel Macron (L) welcomes South African President Cyril Ramaphosa (R) during meetings of African leaders, on the side lines of the G7 summit in Biarritz, France, 25 August 2019. EPA-EFE/FRANCIOS MORI / POOL MAXPPP OUT

The plan will be led by Africa but France has become involved in order to try to provoke a massive global response. 

President Cyril Ramaphosa and French President Emmanuel Macron are leading an effort to win global support for a comprehensive action plan to help Africa cope with the coronavirus pandemic.

They are approaching the IMF, the World Bank, other international banks and national governments to support the plan, which includes considerable health support as well as debt relief and concessional loans to enable African governments to weather the economic impacts, which are expected to be large.

No dollar figure has been publicly put to the plan but it is “aligned” with the African Union’s appeal to the international community on March 26 for a $100-billion package of measures, France’s ambassador to South Africa, Aurélien Lechevallier, says. The AU itself has also said the plan aligns with its appeal. The ambassador suggested Ramaphosa would outline the details of the plan soon. 

The coronavirus pandemic arrived in Africa later than in other regions but is gaining momentum. The AU announced on Monday that 9,457 people across Africa had tested positive for the virus infection in 51 countries, 442 had died and 848 had recovered. 

Lechevallier told journalists in a video press conference from Pretoria on Monday that Macron had strongly supported Ramaphosa when he appealed for international support for Africa at a G20 virtual summit on March 26 just after the AU Bureau summit which had agreed on the $100-billion appeal. 

He said Ramaphosa and Macron had further discussed the plan in a telephone call on April 1 and then Macron had participated in a second teleconference of the AU Bureau on April 3, which Ramaphosa, as AU chairperson, had convened, where Macron outlined the plan. 

Lechevallier said the plan would be led by Africa but France had become involved in order to try to provoke a massive global response. The plan had four pillars. 

The first was to boost African health capacities, including by allocating some of the funds of the Global Fund against HIV, malaria and tuberculosis and the Gavi global vaccine alliance towards fighting the coronavirus. 

The second pillar of the action plan would be a massive economic stimulus package where the World Bank, the IMF, regional development banks and other international financial institutions would immediately waive interest payments on loans to Africa and also provide them concessional loans. 

He added that the Paris Club, which coordinates and manages government loans, would also be meeting to consider what debt relief individual countries could provide.

The third pillar of the action plan would be a humanitarian response to the most affected communities including food aid and logistical support. This would be led by the UN, especially the World Food Programme. 

The fourth pillar of the plan was to organise global scientific coordination, led by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the AU’s Centre for Disease Control, which would ensure that tests, treatment and vaccines when these were available, were allocated fairly to all regions, including Africa. 

Lechevallier said AU health and finance ministers would be meeting to discuss the plan and a virtual summit of AU leaders with France and other development partners could later be held to take the plan forward. France was connecting the AU to the European Union, which would probably issue a financial package to help Africa by the end of the week. 

And he said that South Africa and France would also be engaging China, which was an important creditor to Africa, to come aboard the plan as well as pushing the IMF, World Bank and the UN for their participation. 

He added that France was also pushing for an unprecedented virtual summit of the so-called “P5” – the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (France, US, China, Russia and the UK) – to try to resolve the differences among them which have so far prevented the council from agreeing to a resolution which would enable the council to take the lead in dealing with the pandemic. 

The UN Security Council remains paralysed on most global crises, mainly because of irreconcilable differences between its three permanent Western members on the one side and Russia and China on the other.

The council has been unable to agree on a common approach to the coronavirus crisis either, mainly because the US has been insisting on including language in a resolution which would suggest that China was responsible for the pandemic because it initially tried to cover up the eruption of the virus in Wuhan, Hubei late last year. 

Lechevallier said France agreed with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres that the coronavirus pandemic presented a threat to global peace and security and so warranted the leadership of the highest international body entrusted with maintaining peace and security, the UN Security Council.

France believed this was not the time for playing blame games and using the Security Council as a platform for global competition but for mobilising a strong global response to the pandemic. He said he believed a summit of the P5 countries had never been held before. It would demonstrate to the world that the UN was united in fighting the pandemic.

Lechevallier also strongly condemned the widely-circulated remarks of two French scientists on television last week suggesting that vaccines against the coronavirus should be tested in Africa “where there are no masks, no treatments no resuscitation,” as Jean-Paul Mira, head of intensive care at Cochin hospital in Paris put it. 

“A bit like as it is done elsewhere for some studies on AIDS. In prostitutes, we try things because we know that they are highly exposed and that they do not protect themselves.”

The doctors’ remarks were widely condemned as racist and Lechevallier also strongly condemned them and said they did not represent his government’s view. He said his government believed vaccines should be tested all over the world, including Africa, to see how they worked under different conditions. 

He also said that French companies were working with the South African government to manufacture ventilators – expensive machines that are used to treat patients badly affected by the coronavirus but which are becoming increasingly scarce as the pandemic explodes. DM

Gallery

"Information pertaining to Covid-19, vaccines, how to control the spread of the virus and potential treatments is ever-changing. Under the South African Disaster Management Act Regulation 11(5)(c) it is prohibited to publish information through any medium with the intention to deceive people on government measures to address COVID-19. We are therefore disabling the comment section on this article in order to protect both the commenting member and ourselves from potential liability. Should you have additional information that you think we should know, please email [email protected]"

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