Ebola in the DRC: more than 5,300 dead, and an epidemic that is anything but natural

According to Al Jazeera, the Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo has killed more than 5,300 people. The strain involved is Bundibugyo, which has spread to Kenya and Uganda, while two suspected cases in Nigeria tested negative. That is what we know. The rest of the dispatch is thin: we have here neither the timeline, nor the breakdown by province, nor the details of the health or vaccination response. We will not pretend to know what we do not.

These thousands of deaths are first and foremost people, families, perhaps health workers, whose names we do not know. This must be said before any analysis, and said plainly.

What follows is our reading, not a fact established by the dispatch. A virus passes from animal to human by chance; it becomes a catastrophe of this scale through choices. Congo is one of the richest countries on the planet in subsoil resources, and one of those where people still die of diseases that robust health systems contain. This contrast is hardly mysterious. Dependency economists have explained it for a long time: countries shaped to supply raw materials and cheap labour to the centre of the system end up with roads that run from the mine to the port, not from the hospital to the village. Debt, debt servicing and conditional loans lock this position in place, and cuts to health budgets are one of its ordinary consequences.

Kwame Nkrumah wrote about Congo that under neocolonialism, foreign capital serves "exploitation rather than development" (our translation, Neo-Colonialism, introduction). The formula is worth applying to this epidemic: when investment extracts without building, it leaves behind zones where testing, isolating, tracing contacts and treating patients becomes a feat. We have no data here on the funding of Congolese health care; that is precisely what should be demanded. One must also look at local elites: independence without social transformation often left the colonial state apparatus in the hands of new managers, in no hurry to fund public services.

There remains the question of vaccines and treatments. The dispatch says nothing about their availability against Bundibugyo, and we will not invent it. But the history of African epidemics teaches a rule: research follows solvent markets, and poor populations receive doses last, if they receive them at all. It is by the speed and fairness of distribution that this crisis will be judged.

The spread to Uganda and Kenya is a reminder, finally, that borders stop undocumented travellers, not viruses. Northern capitals are usually alarmed when a suspected case appears on their soil, not when thousands of people die in Kinshasa or in the East. The negative test in Nigeria is good news. It tells us nothing about causes. Those are political and financial, and they have addresses.