A Look Back - Learning from Africa: Covid 19 - Politicization, Polarization, And Resistance, The Us and Africa

Abstract

Although declared an end as a global health emergency, the Coronavirus remains the most prominent international pandemic challenging the world in the 21st century; it exposed the unfortunate politicization of a devastating pandemic, resource weakness, inadequacies of the democratic system of governance, and the failure of the federal administrative system of the US. This paper argues that, unlike many African nations, partisan politics, politicization, and resistance to Covid-19 in America contributed to prolonged containment efforts and untold suffering resulting in over a million deaths from the Coronavirus. Contrary to expectations, the doom and apocalypse from Covid-19 on the continent did not happen as expected because most African governments took immediate and effective preventive containment strategies and applied lessons learned from previous epidemics to battle and contain the virus outbreak. But most significantly, their populations cooperated rather than resisted containment measures, resulting in fewer deaths and economic devastation. In the end, unlike many African governments, and despite America's technological dominance, America's political polarization, partisanship, falsification of scientific information, and cult-like control of the right-wing conservative group resulted in resistance to Covid-19 response measures and untold human catastrophe. It is significant to note that while there is ample research on the United States Covid-19 response and polarization, however, none of these studies were on a comparative analysis of the US and Africa with regards to Leadership, Partisanship, Politicization, Resistance, Cooperation, and Unification.