…Explains Why COVID-19 Vaccine Is Scarce
By
John Michael Ojo
The Director-General of the World Trade Organisation and former Nigerian Minister of Finance, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has given a list of actions that must be taken by African leaders and entrepreneurs for the economic development of the continent.
Okonjo-Iweala disclosed this while appearing as a guest speaker at the UBA Africa Day celebration alongside President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, World Health Organisation Director-General, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Managing Director of the International Finance Corporation (IFC), Makhtar Diop and the host, Chairman of UBA group, Tony O. Elumelu.
According to her, to catalyse the economic growth of the African continent, “Africa leaders must, first of all, solve the health problem, see the short- term economic policy, like how can we get more fiscal stimulus into our system ?
Okonjo-Iweala revealed that ” the developed countries are recovering very fast because they’ve been implementing a massive amount of fiscal stimulus. For the rich countries, 28 percent of GDP, the emerging market, 6.9 percent and for the poorer countries with about 2 percent.
” if we want to recover, Africans must invest not only in health but also in the economy.
“The good news is, all our Presidents like President Kagame have been pushing for SDR, Special Drawing Rights at the International Monetary Fund and $650 billion has been agreed and Africa will get $34 billion.
“We can use this to help implement more fiscal stimulus so that our economy can have the ability to recover.
“Of that, we should use some of the liquidity for the private sector.
“In the rich countries, private sectors have access to credit and liquidity, small and medium have been able to recover, we need to do that too. We need to look at how we can revive the service sector too,
” Many of our countries depend on tourism, some of our countries depend on logistics like aviation in Ethiopia. How to get these industries revived is very important, these are all in the short term.
“In the long term, we need to diversify our economy. We are too vulnerable to movement in commodity prices and we have seen it during the pandemic.
“The commodities we depend on have seen a lot of fluctuations, be it minerals, oil or gas.
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“The countries that are doing better are those that have more diversified economy. So we need to do that in the long term.
“And we must take advantage of the African Continental Free Trade Area, specialise some of our countries in production, trade more with each other and also more with the outside.”
The WTO DG also revealed that the scarcity of COVID-19 vaccine around the world was as a result of the actions of some countries that went against the initial plan of the World Health Organization to vaccinate a certain proportion of the society.
According to her, in order to ensure an equitable distribution and access by various nations to the vaccine, the WHO through its Director-General, Dr. Tedros, created an ACT-Accelerator to enable people to access vaccine therapeutic and diagnostic.
The idea according to the WTO DG was “to try and ensure equity of access. That the world should vaccinate 3 per cent of the people who are frontline workers and then the next 20 per cent of those who are vulnerable.
“If everybody did that, we would have had access in an equitable fraction.
“But some countries decided to do otherwise and vaccinated everybody. And we got into this situation with the scarcity of supply and inequality,” the WTO DG added.
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