In his address to the 76th World Health Assembly at the Palais des Nations in Geneva on May 22 2023, World Health Organisation director-general Tedros Ghebreyesus warned that the world needs to prepare for a deadlier outbreak than Covid.
Confident that it is not a matter of “if” but “when” the next pandemic will emerge, Ghebreyesus said the world “must be ready to answer decisively, collectively and equitably”.
Call it a Pandemic Readiness Response.
While the world appears to exist in a state of what some have dubbed “polycrisis”, Ghebreyesus said: “The threat of another variant emerging that causes new surges of disease and death remains. And the threat of another pathogen emerging with even deadlier potential remains.”
In a world of overlapping and converging crises, an effective architecture for health emergency preparedness has to be nimble enough to address emergencies of all kinds
Pandemics are far from the only threat we face, he said. In a world of overlapping and converging crises, an effective architecture for health emergency preparedness has to be nimble enough to address emergencies of all kinds.
“We cannot kick this can down the road ... If we do not make the changes that must be made, then who will? And if we do not make them now, then when?” he asked.
It’s a pertinent question because South Africa’s government did some things right in response to Covid, even if it dropped many economic and social balls too. For our political leaders not only failed to tap into the wider bank of wisdom in our society, beyond just business and economists, but the government also failed to see the wider pandemic outside the narrow parameters of health and the economy.
Our weakness, suggests Ghebreyesus, is that we embrace the culture of firefighting, instead of seeking to prevent fires from starting in the first place.
Research conducted by the Centre for Social Justice at Stellenbosch University, along with other agencies, confirms as much. Data reveals that wealthier communities were exponentially better equipped to deal with disruption, making them far more resilient in times of crisis.
Socioeconomically fragile communities, the data shows, experienced a gamut of problems — disruption to their food supplies, education, their general economy and their social fabric.
A young person I chatted to on the sidelines of a recent conference of investment advisers lamented: “My clients live on a week-by-week basis — many are defaulting on rent.”
There are many others in this situation. As is well known, many students dropped out of the education system for financial reasons, or an inability to plug into the digital education which institutions pivoted to.
The inequity impact endures even today, underscoring what happened during Covid. For example, with schools closed and parents absent, teenage pregnancy and gender-based violence spiked, as we had predicted in April 2020.
Mix in the triple crisis of climate change, and environmental degradation, growing inequality plus Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and it’s little wonder that countries around the world are falling further away from the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals
Mix in climate change, environmental degradation, growing inequality and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and it’s little wonder that countries around the world are falling further away from the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
According to UN secretary-general António Guterres, the number of people living in extreme poverty today is higher than it was four years ago. Inequality is spiking and so are mental health challenges.
This means that, should we be hit with another black swan event such as Covid, it’s almost certain that mental health, already a challenge, will become a pandemic.
In 2020, I wrote that “a multidisciplinary Covid advisory forum could help, and needs to be established urgently. That structure should include lawyers, educators, sociologists, psychologists, social workers, statisticians, economists, development experts and others.”
It is clear that handling a pandemic by relying only on medical and economic experts is not enough. A key challenge, then, is achieving real infragility.
Three years later, Ghebreyesus has observed that “many of us continue to carry grief in our hearts ... the pandemic has taken a heavy toll on mental health.”
This illustrates, eloquently, that the link between violence, economic fragilities and mental health challenges cannot be overstated.
What it means for South Africans right now, in our parlous social and economic state, if government won’t act on fire prevention, we the people, must consider establishing a People’s Commission on Disaster Readiness.
Social injustice, after all, was one of the principal factors that led to World War 1, and the subsequent rise of Europe’s demagogues. We ignore this imperative at our peril. Unless we want to see the establishment of a People’s Commission on Dictator Readiness, we cannot leave this job to government alone.
* Prof Thuli Madonsela is the Law Trust Research Chair in Social Justice at Stellenbosch University and Thuma Foundation founder and Thuma Foundation founder
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