I’m honour-bound to mention the French president’s interview with my former employer, RFI. Africa being RFI’s beat, Emmanuel Macron told Christophe Boisbouvier that a moratorium should be declared on African countries’ debts to help them face up to Coronavirus.
The sum total of those debts has risen from 35% of GDP in 2012 to 90% today, he pointed out. It now stands at 365 billion dollars.
“Every year a third of what Africa exports in trade goes to service its debt,” Macron said. “That’s mad!”
The French president wants a “massive” cancellation of the debt. In the short term, he hopes that the G20 will decide on Wednesday evening that the interest should no longer be paid. He has to convince the Chinese, who hold 40% of Africa’s debt, as well as Russia, the Gulf states and private lenders.
The controversial Professor Didier Raoult also came up. He claims that the low level of Coronavirus infection in Africa at present is due to the high level of consumption of anti-malarial drugs, like hyrdoxochloroquine, which he is using along with azithromycine at his Marseille laboratory to combat Covid-19.
Raoult was apparently born in Senegal. “In Africa we all guzzled chloroquine when we were kids,” he has said.
Macron, who visited the professor for three hours last week, was cautious, given lack of conclusive proof that the treatment Raoult is advocating works and the doubts of many of his colleagues.
Raoult is a “great scientist” but his treatment has to be properly tested, Macron said. “It’s not a question of belief, it’s a question of science.”
As well as having interviewed pretty much anybody who is anybody in Africa, Boisbou is becoming a dab hand at interviewing French presidents. He interviewed Macron’s predecessor, François Hollande. A charming, “well brought-up” gentleman, he told me.
China’s ambassador to France, Lu Shaye, was “summoned” by Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian yesterday for a telling-off about a bizarre rant on the Chinese embassy’s website. The interview actually took place by phone, what with lockdown and all.
Needled by criticisms of the People’s Republic handling of the virus, the post lays into “media who consider themselves to be paragons of impartiality and objectivity, and experts and politicians of certain Western countries more concerned with slandering, stigmatising and attacking China than with thinking about how to contain the epidemic in their own countries and in the rest of the world”.
Pointing to various blunders in the handling of the virus in Europe and the US, the anonymous diplomat declares “I haven’t seen many reports or in-depth investigations in the big Western media revealing these facts.”
As it happens, the source for all these assertions seems to be the Western media.
One allegation is definitely not from that source, though. Unhappy about a letter signed by 80 French MPs calling for Taiwan to be allowed to join the WHO, the author accuses the Taiwanese authorities of racially insulting WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
With a flourish the author quotes a “cyber-writer” comparing “certain Western political and cultural elites” with the cuttlefish, which “when it is in danger, squirts its ink to blacken the water and takes advantage to flee”. A fair criticism – but not just of the West.
The French thought long and hard before reprimanding Lu, according to Le Monde. They don’t want a diplomatic spat to stop delivery of the millions of masks the country has ordered. And there’s also the African debt question to negotiate.
In 1968 a flu epidemic cost a million lives, the Swiss paper Le Temps points out. “Spanish flu” killed 20-40 million in 1918-20. Another two million died of “Asian flu” in 1957.
The world shrugged off these deaths, it says, comparing that reaction to today’s response to the Coronavirus.
“Back then people over 65 were considered to have escaped natural mortality,” medical historian Bernardino Fantini tells the paper. “While today even the deaths of the elderly are considered a scandal.”
By that reckoning, both my 95-year-old mother and I are dead people on leave, which is not very comforting.
We will continue to do our best to avoid catching the virus, nevertheless.
France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 15,729, up 762 in 24 hours. 32,292 people are in hospital, a rise of 179, and 6,730 are in intensive care, down 91. 28,805 people have been discharged from hospital.
