Africa’s first elected woman president, who stepped down four years ago, recognizes the errors in the initial response to coronavirus because they replicate the mistakes made when EBOLA hit West Africa in 2014 and killed more than 11 000 people.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf says her 12 years at the helm in Liberia – and particularly dealing with EBOLA – taught her that the crisis can only be saved with courage and concerted action.

The United Nations World Health Organisation, the United States government and her counterparts the Guinea and Sierra Leone defeated EBOLA together.

She’s confident that with solidarity, COVID 19 will also be beaten

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Of course President Donald Trump would back his Brazilian counterpart Jair Bolsanaro.

They both put the short-term political benefit of climate change  denialism above the long-term interests of generations too young to vote for them. And the man known as the Trump of the tropics showed at the G7 summit in Biarritz last weekend that he shares the American leader’s convenient incoherence.

Without regard for the ten other countries in the Amazon region, Bolsanaro refused to accept the $22 million from the group of seven richest nations on Earth to help fight the thousands of forest fires threatening the area known as the planet’s tree lung.

Then he said, he would take the money if French President Emmanuel Macron withdrew that statement calling him a liar and hoping Brazil would get a better leader.

Finally he cast aside the need for an apology and agreed to accept the G7 help, provided Brazil given a free hand to determine how it would be spent.

Macron spoke at the meeting he hosted of the need to address the fires raging around Africa’s rain forests which are second largest lung on Earth.

There was no reticence expressed by any of the five African leaders – President Cyril Ramaphosa included –  invited to the G7 summit.

They have yet to hear details, most importantly the magnitude of the help.

Experts advise against making too easy a comparison between  the fires in Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo showing up on  NASA maps and actually out numbering those in the conflagration in the Amazon basin.

The African fires are not actually in the rain forest. They are a seasonal phenomenon caused by farmers conducting slash and burn agriculture.

Denis Maclean of UN Disaster Risk Reduction   says the damage from fires is unacceptably high on both sides of the Atlantic. 

155000 square kilometers of rain forest have been lost  to fire in the last decade , commercial logging and palm oil cultivation in the past decade.

West Africa has lost 90% of its forest coverage in the past century.

Forest fires kill 300 000 people a year.

With population growth projected to increase fivefold by the end of the century, it impacts dramatically on the sustainability of the planet.

Any money directed to Africa should be used not only to immediately fight the fires but on educating people on their relationship with their environment.  

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He’s done it to boost local agriculture.

Tweeting through his spokesman, Nigerian President Muhamadu Buhari says don’t give a cent to anybody to import food into the country.

He maintains foreign reserves must be used to diversify the economy, not to encourage more dependence on foreign  food imports.

With more than 200 million people and a growing middle class, Nigerian are eating more and more beef.

They eat half the meat consumed in all of West Africa.

The current consumption of 360 000 tons a year is expected to quadruple by 2050.

The semi-nomadic Fulani herders supply all they  can raise, but Nigeria has to import beef to meet the demand.

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The deadly haemorrhagic disease broke out in a conflict zone and is barely contained within porous borders. Those fighting it fear what they call a perfect storm of infection.

The Ebola outbreak in the eastern DRC has become the second deadliest the planet has experienced with more than 400 deaths and hundreds more infected.

Desperate to avoid a recurrence of the West Africa  outbreak that killed more than 11 000 people  between 2013 and 2016, health workers are returning to their posts abandoned because of pre-election violence in Benni and Butembo.

Parallel contingency efforts are being  undertaken in Burundi, Rwanda, South Sudan and Uganda where some  Congolese fled to escape that violence. 

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The cuts represent the Pentagon’s shift from counter terror to great power competition with China and Russia.

The US Africa Command says the cuts to the 7 200 American troops on the continent will amount to less that ten percent.

Operations in Somalia, Libya and Djibouti – where the US has its only permanent military base in Africa – will remain the same.

But in West Africa, the tactical assistance to forces fighting violent extremist organizations  will be replaced with personnel providing advisory, assistance, liaison and intelligence sharing.

A deadly ambush that saw US soldiers killed in Niger last year has got the American public asking why they were in the first place.  

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