Via Actualite.cd: DRC: Minister of Health Oly Ilunga resigns. The Google translation and then a comment:
In anger after President Felix Tshisekedi took control of the Ebola response, Dr. Oly Ilunga resigned as Minister of Health in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), denouncing the "prejudicial cacophony" of the response. against the epidemic.
Named in December 2016 by Joseph Kabila, Oly Ilunga announced in a letter sent Monday, July 22 to President Felix Tshisekedi, his resignation after the outbreak of Ebola declared almost 12 months ago has left more than 1,700 dead.
In power since last January, President Tshisekedi has taken control of the response since last weekend. "Drawing the consequences of your decision (...) and anticipating the cacophony prejudicial to the response that will inevitably result from this decision, I hereby submit to you my resignation from the functions of Minister of Health," writes Ilunga.
The President of the Republic will be assisted by a "technical and multisectoral" secretariat to be headed by Professor Jean-Jacques Muyembe, one of the researchers who discovered Ebola in 1976.
In his letter of resignation, the minister deplored the fact that this technical secretariat was set up by a decree "backdated and countersigned" without his knowledge by the minister assuming his interim, while, says Ilunga, "I was on the July 18, 2019 mission to oversee the response to Goma."
Comparing the response to a "war", the resigned said that "lines of command must be" clearly identified and defined."
"There can not be more than one decision center at the risk of creating confusion and harmful cacophony," he writes.
Perhaps this was inevitable; Tshisekedi, after all, has been an opponent of former President Kabila, and new governments generally appoint new ministers. Ilunga's remaining in office looked like wise consistency: he'd handled the Équateur outbreak in spring 2018 very effectively, and the present outbreak certainly demanded experience.
But Tshisekedi might have handled this more smoothly. Ilunga seems understandably angry about the way the "technical secretariat" was set up.
Quite apart from Ilunga's feelings, the question is how this will affect the response. Muyembe is the grand old man of Congolese medicine. He has great respect and prestige, but it remains to be seen if he and his colleagues (and presumably a new health minister) can take over and run the response without a hitch.
I certainly hope they can. Lives depend on it.
