Ebola Has Killed 4,690 Africans and We Still Have No Vaccine

Nearly 4,700 people are dead. Most of them are in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where this outbreak was declared on 15 May. They were mothers, fathers, health workers, and children. And for this particular strain, Bundibugyo, there is no approved vaccine and no specific treatment. Not one.

Now the virus has crossed into Nigeria, the most populous nation in Africa, home to more than 200 million people. It is the first Ebola case there in more than a decade. Nigeria's health authorities did not catch it at the border. They caught it after a woman had walked through two private clinics and a hospital, carrying a virus that was already in her blood. How many others did she meet in those days? Nobody knows yet. That is the question that should keep every African minister awake tonight.

Here is what the record shows. The patient returned to Abuja on 3 October. She developed symptoms on 6 October. She went to one private health facility, then another, before being admitted to hospital on 11 October. She was not diagnosed until 16 days after she arrived. The World Health Organization says 44 contacts have been identified and are being monitored. Think about that number. Forty-four people tracked because a woman got sick and the system around her was too slow to notice.

Then comes the contradiction that should trouble every citizen. Jean Kaseya, director general of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, says she spent two weeks in Kampala and never set foot in the DRC. Uganda's health ministry says she travelled to eastern Congo on business and only passed through Uganda. The WHO representative in Nigeria says the travel information supplied to the global body mentioned Uganda but no other country. Three official accounts, and they do not agree. When the paperwork cannot agree on where a virus started, the virus wins. It moves while bureaucrats argue over the map.

The scale is staggering. Through Wednesday, the latest figures show 9,735 confirmed cases and 4,690 deaths. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes this as the second-largest Ebola outbreak on record. Eight DRC provinces are affected. Kaseya says there are still 65 to 70 new cases every day, and many are appearing in communities rather than in tracked chains of transmission. That means people are getting sick without anyone knowing how they were infected. Kenya has recorded nine cases, including one death. Uganda is tracing around 140 people. This is no longer a Congolese emergency. It is a continental one.

Eastern Congo is also a region where Rwanda's army and its M23 proxy have waged a war of aggression that has uprooted millions. Rwanda's soldiers and their auxiliaries have made that territory harder to govern, harder to reach, and harder to protect. Where armed groups control the roads and families flee into the bush, surveillance collapses first. Ebola does not care whose flag flies over a town. But the war determines how quickly a village learns that someone has died, and whether a health worker can get there in time.

Now the money. The international community has raised $962 million for this response. Kaseya told a briefing in Kinshasa that the Congolese government had no information about roughly $700 million of it. He insists he never said it was embezzled, and he says he has no suspicions. We accept his word for that. But hear what seven hundred million dollars means in a country where a nurse may go months without a salary and a district clinic may lack gloves. A government that cannot account for money entering its own borders is not sovereign in any meaningful sense. Kaseya himself said that African sovereignty means governments know everything coming into their countries. He is right. Now the ledger has to match the words.

We have been here before. The West African Ebola epidemic of 2014 to 2016 killed more than 11,000 people in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. The world promised never again. Here we are again, a decade later, with a deadlier strain and no vaccine on the shelf. Africa keeps being told to trust the process, and the process keeps producing reports instead of results.

Yet there is proof that Africa can beat this disease when its institutions do their job. In 2014, a Liberian-American finance official named Patrick Sawyer collapsed in Lagos after flying in from Monrovia. Nigeria moved fast. Its health authorities traced his contacts, isolated the sick, trained the staff, and kept the outbreak from spreading across a city of more than 20 million people. Nigeria was declared Ebola-free in October 2014. That was not luck. That was competent institutions, transparent reporting, and leaders who treated a crisis as a test of competence rather than an opportunity for press conferences. Minister Muhammad Ali Pate has a template to follow. Use it.

So here is what must happen. Nigeria's Ministry of Health and the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control must publish, every week, the status of all 44 contacts, the clinics where the patient was seen, and the infection-control records of those facilities. Every private hospital in the country should face a binding duty to report suspected Ebola cases to public health authorities within hours, not days. Private clinics that failed to isolate a febrile patient should be investigated and held accountable under the law. Governments that share traveller data with each other should do it through standard protocols, not through diplomatic goodwill.

The African Union must treat Kaseya's ministers' meeting as a deadline, not a photo opportunity. It should demand a public, line-by-line audit of the $962 million, with the results published before the next pledging conference. The Africa CDC must be given the independence to report funding gaps without fear. And the continent must invest in its own diagnostics, its own manufacturing, and its own vaccine trials. A continent that imports its medicine and waits in line for its vaccines will always be the last to be protected and the first to be blamed.

We, the citizens of this continent, must demand these things loudly. Ask your MP what your country is doing about contact tracing in your town. Ask your state health commissioner whether the private hospital down the road has an isolation ward. Ask the AU why the ledger is still missing $700 million. Do not accept "no cause for concern" from anyone who cannot show you the numbers.

Ebola has killed nearly 4,700 people, and the next one may be your neighbour. Our answer cannot be another communiqué. Demand the audit. Demand the data. Demand that the people in charge of our health answer for every dollar and every day. The virus is moving faster than our excuses. It is time our institutions moved faster than both.

Based on reporting by RFI