Martin Forum speaker talks politics, challenges of Ebola
Ernest Danjuma Enebi said a key part of responding to any crisis is engaging with local organizations.
Enebi is a campaign engagement manager for Africa Responds, a San Francisco-based grassroots organization that mobilizes Africans and friends of Africa to support locally rooted organizations at the frontline of the Ebola response.
He spoke at the Martin Forum program entitled “The Politics of Ebola” where he shared his experiences with working in the Ebola crisis in West Africa.
Dr. Bill L. Smith, director of the Martin Institute and Program in International Studies, right, and Ernest Danjuma Enebi, campaign engagement coordinator at AfricaResponds.org discuss the politics of ebola in Africa 7 p.m. Tuesday in the Vandal Ballroom in the Bruce Pitman Center (formery SUB).
One of the topics Enebi and Bill Smith, director of the University of Idaho Martin Institute, addressed was whether West African countries were prepared for the Ebola outbreak. Smith said while the African nations were used to watching for outbreaks and containing them in rural areas, the current outbreak jumped into crowded conditions in urban centers, which the governments in the region were not prepared for. Enebi said he thought since the last outbreak happened long ago in rural settings, it was hard for anybody to imagine the scope to which the disease would grow.
Enebi said the recent wars in the region also had an effect.
“A lot of the countries where it actually broke out — New Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia — Sierra Leone and Liberia are countries that had been marred by civil wars on and off for the last 20 years,” he said. “Where the infrastructure to handle something like this had been degraded to nonexistence and so to that effect they weren’t necessarily ready.”
Enebi said the turning point of the Ebola crisis was when the disease came to the United States. Enebi said only then did more Western news organizations start covering the crisis, which developed more public interest and more funding to deal with the outbreak.
In talking about some of the problems in addressing the crisis, Smith said one of the problems was a divide between the government — which was trying to administer health services — and the people.
“Some more recent things in Guinea, for example, the government was cracking down on civil protests and things before the Ebola outbreak,” Smith said. “Kind of a legacy where if people saw government troops or government officials coming, they knew that they should distrust, mistrust, run and hide, and when you’re trying to contain an outbreak and you’re not a trusted agent, it leads to additional problems.”
Nathan Romans | Argonaut
Ernest Danjuma Enebi, campaign engagement coordinator at AfricaResponds.org, discusses Ebola issues at the Martin Forum Feb. 2
The Martin Forum is a series of lectures put on by the Martin Institute covering a wide range of subjects on international affairs and politics. The Martin Institute, UI National Society of Black Engineers, African Student Association and the Black Student Union sponsored the Politics of Ebola lecture.
Enebi said there was one action common to the hard-hit West African countries that made the Ebola outbreak somewhat bearable — international organizations collaborating with local organizations.
He said although most of the local organizations had few resources to offer compared to large, international ones, progress was made because they worked together.
“I kind of want to plant that seed of the right way to approach engaging with people, sort of understanding where they’re coming from and working with the systems they already have,” he said. “Yeah, they may not be up to par or up to standards of what you’re used to, or what is required to do your job, but actually community engagement, working with local partners, local organizations is absolutely important. I can’t stress that enough.”
Corey Bowes can be reached at [email protected]