COVID-19 Pandemic at the Intersection of Ebola, Global Leadership, and the Opportunity to Decolonize the Political Economy of Sierra Leone

Abstract

Abstract The COVID-19 global pandemic has so far not resulted in apocalyptic deaths in Sierra Leone or other countries in the subregion, despite an exponential rise in positive cases. Western views of massive COVID-19-related deaths in Africa have largely come from colonialism and the long-held Western narratives of Africa as the continent of poverty, disease, backwardness, weak health-care infrastructure, and dependent bodies in need of foreign aid and “white” saviors. Sierra Leone was among the last of the African countries to record the COVID-19 disease, and along with Liberia and Guinea have a powerful Ebola experience that few countries in the world enjoyed. Yet, the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed serious weaknesses in its epidemic preparedness, health-care infrastructure, public health system, and the overall political economy. Why then have Sierra Leone and the Mano River Union (MRU) countries with Ebola experience not displayed global leadership in the face of the global pandemic? This article argues that the ineffective response to the COVID-19 epidemic in Sierra Leone, despite the country’s huge Ebola experience, may be linked to an entanglement among social, economic, and political factors within the political economy and deep, dense structural distal factors of slavery, colonialism, neocolonialism, and economic and cultural dependencies. These distal factors have largely dictated the approach and modelling of COVID-19 in Sierra Leone and other MRU countries.