Credit: Actualite.cd
This has been a very slow news day, especially on the Ebola front. But Actualite.cd has this short, important report: DRC: Ebola must be defeated (Tshisekedi). The Google translation, lightly edited, and then a comment:
During an extraordinary meeting with experts from the Congolese health sector and some members of the government, the President of the Republic, Félix Tshisekedi, indicated that the Ebola epidemic in the provinces of North Kivu and of Ituri for nine months "must be defeated."
To do this, the president created a steering committee led by the prime minister.
"The ministers of finance and budget have been instructed to make the substantial resources available to the steering committee of response so that the experts have all the appropriate logistics," reports the communication service of the Presidency of the Republic.
Declared since August 1, 2018, the Ebola epidemic has already 914 deaths including 848 among the 1351 confirmed cases, according to the latest count of the Ministry of Health, which is no longer the direction of the response to Ebola.
This sounds significant for a couple of reasons (and I hope I've misread this translated report). The previous president, Joseph Kabila, was notable for his absence from the anti-Ebola campaign in Équateur, and then again in North Kivu and Ituri. He knew he was on his way out, and left Health Minister Oly Ilunga as the person in charge.
Felix Tshishekedi succeeded Kabila in large part because North Kivu and Ituri were excluded from the presidential voting, on the pretext that the outbreak made an election hazardous for voters. These two populous provinces are also known to be hostile to Tsishekedi, so he might well have been an also-ran had the outbreak never happened.
Now he's investing some political capital in ending the outbreak, and he appears to have demoted Ilunga, who remains head of the Ministry of Health; but the ministry "is no longer the direction of the response to Ebola."
Looking back at today's update from the MoH, Ilunga may have requested a takeover: "In his presentation, the Minister of Health insisted that, given the difficult security situation, this epidemic had gone beyond public health."
We will see how well Ebola can be fought from Kinshasa.
