SPECIAL GRAPHITTI ANALYSIS - Leadership Lessons from the On-going Ebola Virus Disease Outbreak (LONG READ)

Critical Reflections and Timeline Analysis of West African Leadership Response during the Ebola Outbreak in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone

By Kenneth Nwabudike Okafor

In a handout picture released by the British Ministry of Defence via Defence News Imagery on October 30, 2014 Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) Argus is docked at the QE2 dock in Freetown in Sierra Leone on October 30, 2014 offloading equipment and stores that will aid in the fight against Ebola. (AFP Photo)

From a West African perspective, it is really difficult to refrain from finger pointing in the face of a diseased and proliferating tragedy which is now firmly classified as world's worst Ebola epidemic, since the haemorrhagic disease was identified in 1976, wracking Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone in the sub-region. On October 23, headlines chronicled Ebola berthing in Mali via a 2 year-old girl! Dramatic reports tend to portray a region-wide affliction, but 3 out of 17 is minority. Before going any further our hearts and prayers go out to the families who have lost loved ones and in particular to orphans which have become created by the virulent Ebola virus disease (EVD). Post-mortem scrutiny (even when carried out mid-crisis as this one) are often unpleasant and unpalatable as can be; yet they may be (must be?) carried out in order that invaluable lessons and insights might be gleaned from even the worst of calamities, if not for anything else, to forestall future pitfalls. This should be norm. That said, this is a mid-catastrophe evaluation in the stead of a post-mortem and it will not be sugar-coated.

On many levels, there are invaluable lessons which can be distilled from this outbreak. The fact that West Africa and its leadership/ public institutions are wont to avoid this routine/pathway as norm is part of a wider malaise of leadership deficit, governance defects and a complete lack of accountability which disfigure and misshapen the sub-region, and the larger continent and its citizenry in every sense.

In the shambles of obviating long-term planning, there is enough evidence to conclude that no West African state has a feasible, well-conceived and adequately funded disaster preparedness and emergency management strategy/action plan and emergency operations plan for any kind of disaster/emergencies. Ordinarily, disaster preparedness and emergency management strategy/action plan should have multiple stakeholders and thorough support - government has responsibility to: develop, test, and refine emergency plans; ensure emergency responders have adequate skills and resources and provide services to protect and assist citizens. Community preparedness: roles and responsibilities: key priority in lessening the impact of disasters; critical that all community members take steps to prepare and effective when addresses unique attributes of community and engages whole community. an emergency operations plan includes: 1) assigns responsibility to organizations and individuals; 2) sets forth lines of authority; 3) describes how people and property will be protected; and 4) identifies personnel, equipment, facilities, supplies, and other resources.

But then you see West Africa is such a place that if you suggest a collective plan for future disaster, someone might accuse you of negativity and wishing people bad luck. This esoteric but unreasonable point of view in the end proves precarious and fatalistic, since it kills strategic thinking and anticipatory planning which is part of the foundations of modern governance better practices. West Africa could not contain Ebola because they had not even made plans to contain endemic malaria. In Nigeria, you cannot find one single community with a standing community emergency response team and/or trained first responders. The upshot is that disease and disasters catch people unawares at every turn.

In this analysis, we would consider the West African leadership/public institutions’ aggregated response to the EVD outbreak. In this instance, leadership and leadership response is appraised from the point of view of both the individual theory and the institutional theory of leadership. The premise of this analysis considers leadership as "a process of social influence, which maximizes the efforts of others, towards the achievement of a goal. (Kruse, 2013)" Additionally, the leadership response appraised considers both the leadership and management functions; management's main function being "to produce order and consistency through processes, such as planning, budgeting, organizing, staffing, and problem solving", while leadership's main function being "to produce movement and constructive or adaptive change through processes, such as establishing direction through visioning, aligning people, motivating, and inspiring."

The one indisputable fact which stands as a veritable indictment for the failure of West African (and indeed African) leadership and public institutions is that this current EVD outbreak thrives and flourishes because of a combustible patchwork of the dearth of crisis management leadership, effective crisis management capacity/experience, infrastructure deficits, weak to non-existent instructional capacity, inadequate manpower base, technology deficits and aggravated poverty (on top of years of political upheavals, violent conflict and full-blown Civil Wars) which if not prevalent could have foreseen individual West African states coping more efficiently in the face of a rampant epidemic.

Now one cannot but wonder what Liberian President, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf would be thinking, what she would be feeling in the face of what is the most challenging crisis of her presidency. Yet whatever her thoughts are, she surely must rue being in office during a second term (which she campaigned for not minding the charges of corruption and incompetence by the opposition) which would see her country men and women become decimated by a ravaging Ebola epidemic — her spiritual advisers certainly did not see this ill-wind coming. One can equally ponder what the Presidents Alpha Condé of Guinea and Ernest Bai Koroma of Sierra Leone might be thinking as well. All of them for conscience sake may ponder at some point or the other what they should have done differently in order to have overcome this epidemic.

Trucks seen aboard RFA Argus ready to be unloaded to help in the fight against Ebola in Sierra Leone 

On Sunday, October 18, Sirleaf made what must amount to, at least to the office of a Head of State, a desperate move. In an open and direct appeal, she said Ebola has killed more than 2,000 people in her country and has brought it to "a standstill," noting that Liberia and two other badly hit countries were already weakened by years of war. Sirleaf noted that the three hard-hit countries were already in bad shape when the first-ever outbreak of Ebola in West Africa began. Appealing for more international help, Sirleaf described the devastating effects of Ebola in a "Letter to the World" that was broadcast Sunday by the BBC.  "Across West Africa, a generation of young people risk being lost to an economic catastrophe as harvests are missed, markets are shut and borders are closed," the Nobel Peace Prize laureate said. "The virus has been able to spread so rapidly because of the insufficient strength of the emergency, medical and military services that remain under-resourced. There is no coincidence Ebola has taken hold in three fragile states — Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea — all battling to overcome the effects of interconnected wars," Liberia's leader said, adding that Liberia once had 3,000 medical doctors but by the end of its civil war, which ended 11 years ago, the country had just 36. …This fight requires a commitment from every nation that has the capacity to help, whether that is with emergency funds, medical supplies or clinical expertise ... It is the duty of all of us, as global citizens, to send a message that we will not leave millions of West Africans to fend for themselves against an enemy that they do not know, and against whom they have little defence," Sirleaf said.

If Sirleaf had intended her "Letter to the World" broadcast to be a rallying battle cry for mobilizing an international Calvary for dire need, the thunder was stolen away from her intentions by subsequent media revelations that Sirleaf’s own medical doctor son, Dr James Adama Sirleaf, would rather stay back in the United States than return to Liberia to assist in the Ebola fight. Surely, someone would think this is rank hypocrisy.

But Dr. Sirleaf himself has his reasons for his decision. He told news reporters, "The symbolism of me going there [Liberia] and potentially getting Ebola when I have a nine and a seven-year-old at home isn’t worth it just to appease people. I’ve made a commitment not to live in Liberia for many reasons, and I think my contribution means more [from outside the country]." And it is not as if Dr Sirleaf is not lending a hand, he is, only on his own terms. In 2007, Dr. Sirleaf co-founded the Health Education and Relief Through Teaching (HEARTT) Foundation to recruit medical specialists and residents to spend a month practising in Liberia and teach at its only medical school. HEARTT sent 70 doctors in 2009 alone to Liberia to train students. But HEARTT’s last team of four doctors left Liberia in March, just as cases of Ebola were surging. "I’ve lost friends to Ebola," he said. "I can’t see the wisdom in sending unspecialized American volunteers to face that risk."

One commentator had this to say of Dr. Sirleaf’s action, "Dr. Sirleaf’s decision speaks to the challenge of not only containing this epidemic but also of preventing the next one. Although Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone have sent scores of doctors abroad over the years, they depend on foreign doctors and public health ­experts to halt Ebola’s spread."

Before we get ahead of ourselves, let us step back and begin the analysis in earnest. There are six keys to unlocking the overall response to the EVD and the subsequent leadership stitch-up in this disheartening episode.

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Kenneth N. Okafor is a development planning specialist, essayist, creative director and Founder of naijagraphitti blog.