Sierra Leone — On a recent sultry night, as the breeze stirred the palms and the waves gently crumbled against the shore, three women — Susan, Zenab and Tina — sat together at a beachside bar nursing bottles of warm beer.
The bar was empty. The streets outside were deserted, faint yellow light spilling out from the sheet metal shanties. No male clientele was in sight.
“It’s been slow and rough,” said Tina, who, like the others, declined to disclose her full name because of her line of work.
“Yeah,” said Susan. “It’s dead.”
Zenab stood up for a second to adjust her dress, which fit like a wet suit.
“Since Ebola,” she explained, “no guys come around. What are we supposed to do now?”
The personal hospitality business may be the most obvious sector of Sierra Leone’s economy that has been decimated by Ebola. After all, the main slogan in Freetown, the capital, these days is A.B.C. — avoid body contact.
A villager on a path used to cross between Sierra Leone and Guinea. Relatively unfettered passage among those countries and Liberia has contributed to an Ebola outbreak.
How Ebola Roared BackDEC. 29, 2014
Source of Ebola Outbreak in West Africa Might Be Bats, Study SaysDEC. 30, 2014
A health worker who contracted Ebola in West Africa was transferred from Scotland to Britain’s designated treatment center for the disease in London.
Ebola Patient Is Moved to London, and 2 Others Are Tested in BritainDEC. 30, 2014
But all across the most affected nations — Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia — Ebola continues to lay waste not just to immune systems but also to balance sheets. Tourism, agriculture, road construction, arts and crafts, diesel sales, tax collections, and just about every other slice of the economy, legal or not, are significantly down, costing billions of dollars in lost business and spelling years of increased hardship for an already impoverished region.
Freetown does not have a single working traffic signal, and now legions of the unemployed and youths out of school thicken the streets while foreign tourists stay far away.
Ebola’s nasty reputation as a contagious disease that can slither across borders and make people bleed from their eyeballs has become so oversized and onerous that it has managed to dent tourism across the entire continent.
“When it comes to planning trips, many people think of Africa as one country,” said Jan Beekwilder who co-founded SafariBookings.com, an online marketplace for hundreds of safari operators.
Mr. Beekwilder said safari inquiries on his site were down 25 percent since the outbreak began this year. And that includes trips to Nairobi and Cape Town, which are actually farther from the Ebola zone than London.
But the greatest, and most lasting damage, is being done right here in the Ebola zone. The latest figures from the World Health Organization show that more than 20,000 people have fallen sick with Ebola and 8,000 have died. Sierra Leone continues to be the hardest hit, with 30 to 60 new cases a day.
More than any loss of life or manpower, it is the extreme efforts to check the disease that are proving far more costly to the economies. Shutting schools, quarantining whole districts, sealing borders, canceling flights and banning public gatherings may have helped reduce transmission of the disease, but such measures have crippled trade. The shame of it is that Sierra Leone was growing at an impressive clip — before Ebola hit.
“A shock like this just brings a whole bunch of households back below the poverty line,” said David Evans, a World Bank economist. “It’s a huge setback.”
It is not clear how quickly Liberia, Guinea or Sierra Leone would bounce back even if the virus were stopped in its tracks right now. The World Bank predicts that Sierra Leone’s economy will contract in 2015 and that West Africa will lose at least $3.8 billion in economic activity. Farming is one of the biggest concerns. In some areas of Sierra Leone, agricultural production has dropped by nearly half because so many cassava and rice farmers were ordered to stay home for mandatory quarantines.
Already 500,000 people in the region have gone hungry because of Ebola, and that number could double by March. In the last two months, the United Nations World Food Program has distributed 22 million pounds of emergency food.
“It could be potentially devastating if it continues like this,” said Peter Smerdon, a spokesman for the World Food Program.
Of course, in every war or disaster there are profiteers. Ebola is no exception. The authorities in Freetown recently announced the arrests of “chlorine fraudsters,” men who were selling fake chlorine powder that looked like the stuff used to disinfect boots and hands. At the same time, security has become one of the few growth industries.
No comments:
Post a Comment