 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch. Today we're going to discuss the COVID-19 situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and we're joined by Kambali Musawali, a Congolese human rights activist who works extensively with youth across Africa. Thank you so much Kambali for joining us. So could you first give us a overall overview of what the situation is regarding the number of cases and the spread of the disease in the country? Yes, I'm going to be with many countries, especially across the African continent. Congo was caught by surprise with the pandemic. As of today, we have 207 confirmed cases. We have about 20 deaths and I think the numbers of people who have recovered last time I checked was about 18 who have recovered. But I mean, when you look at the number of death and the numbers you see already that Congo has a very high mortality rate through the numbers that are there. But of course, the number of testing, you know, when you have 207 confirmed cases, the capacity of the country to do mass testing is not there at the moment. It's not because of no access to the logistics of the tools for testing. It's more a political wrangling happening within the government where some policies are geared toward trying to get money from the World Bank and IMF and other international donors without focusing on actually the priorities on the ground. In some of the countries, we focus, for example, for Kinshasa. It's one of the most populous cities in the country. I think the fourth, not actually the second largest African cities with 15 million people in just Kinshasa. So it's a huge population in the capital city. The population in the capital city is not of sales as a whole, taking the situation as serious as it should. Not because the information is not there. I mean, all the radio stations are providing it. There are SMS text messages going around to the population. But there seems to be a laissez faire from the part of the state and the population. And from the population, I totally understand the context of the Congo with COVID-19. The response cannot be like any other place around the world. So the government has taken policies for confinement. There should be a lockdown in Congo. People cannot just spend a day without coming out of the house. I mean, it's a question of life and death because they live day by day. By them stepping out of the house, they are getting resources to care for their families. Not doing that is you only have to, you are providing the population with two chances. Either you die from hunger or you die from COVID-19. And the population are saying, well, I'd rather die from COVID-19. I need to feed my family and people are still moving around. In terms of the transmission, it was brought in by the elite of the country. The area that the government even called hot spot is in the capital city, specifically a neighborhood called Gombe, which is where the elite lives. So you know that the elite who travel back and forth in the country where the vast majority of the Congolese population, they don't even own a passport. They are not the one who brought it in. It came from the elite. And the downtown area of Kinshasa, which is mentioned, is called Gombe, has been put on lockdown as well, where they are asking people that if you live in the area, you cannot move in and out. That's in theory, what the government is saying, but in practice, that's not what we are seeing. The area that's on lockdown, before the announcement of the lockdown, information already was circulating across Kinshasa. And some of the elite, they heard that information and many of them moved out of the capital city before the official lockdown. So if some of them were infected, more likely they brought it in to the population, marginalized population who don't live downtown Kinshasa. The second aspect of that is when the lockdown was implemented in this specific neighborhood, the government created a weird scheme. They created a pass that if you live in Gombe, if you have this pass, you can move in and out of Gombe. It was first, the policy was strange. Why are they creating pass for people to move in and out? But what was even more absurd was that they were selling these passes for $20. There is a video circulating of people downtown Kinshasa at City Hall in mass waiting for City Hall to be opened to go buy their passes. So already it's a hub for contamination. And two, you're wondering why are they making money off of the crisis? I mean, it's a perfect example of disaster capitalism, how when crisis happen, the result is in chaos, a way to make money. And there are more examples I can share as we go on discussing around the situation. My biggest worry about the Congo is a country with 81 million people. If it does not come under control, it can have a devastating impact for the African continent, but this is not the only outbreak that we are dealing with. We have the outbreak of missiles. We just got in control of the cholera outbreak for the past two years. So we do have quite a lot of health challenges. And the hope is that we will finally get infrastructure to deal with the health issues we have in the Congo. Right. So that's a key question because across the global south, especially one of the challenges this pandemic has thrown is to the health system itself. So could you give us an outline of what has been, what is the current state of the health system and especially over the past decades under Joseph Camila, for instance, what was the kind of reforms that were introduced? How have they affected the system as a whole? Again, we cannot look at this COVID-19 pandemic in a silo, as you pointed out. There are policies in the past that has made many African countries, especially the Congo, weak in its education sector, weak in its health sector. I mean, this is directly from the World Bank and IMF, the structural adjustment programs of the 80s that moved resources for the public sector and moved it towards what people may call private sector with entrepreneurship, mining companies, completely different priorities for a country. So from the 80s to now, the government has not invested in the health infrastructure and in the education sector. Not because they don't have the will for it, it's because they are being told what to do on how to spend state budgets from the World Bank and IMF. So for the past three decades, we have not seen many hospitals being built. There is one hospital that was built by a former NBA player, Dicky Mabutombo, who is a private individual building a hospital for the Congolese people in the world. And this hospital is only serving a small number of people in the country, 81 million people. And as we speak today, it will be very hard within the whole entire Congo to find 20,000 beds for 81 million people. It will be quite hard to find actually hospitals who have respirators, the ventilators. We know for a fact in Kinshasa, many people have been dying in many of the hospitals and none of them had any ventilator in there. But that brings into the question now, when we have this type of pandemic, what should people do? I strongly believe many of the Congolese medical practitioners spoke to is that we have to have a people's response to COVID-19. In the case of DRC, DRC should not put the policy of confinement just as the confinement is happening in the United States. We have two different contexts. Some of them have even argued that we should operate from the perspective that the population will get COVID-19. And if they are going to get COVID-19, these will be what are the steps that we will take to treat them and how to have the health care system held by the community themselves, care for one another and so on. So those are the discussions that's happening now that clearly we see that policies that the government has implemented for the past three decades in the Congo has put that in a place where we say on one hand, Congo is the number one producer of cobalt, yet they can have 20,000 beds for people who are sick in the Catra 81 million people. We say that it's worth $24 trillion, but we don't have enough hospitals. And you'll start looking at the numbers about economic growth. The economy grew by 7 percent in 2014, had a projection of 4 percent in 2020 that just decreased it now because of COVID. By the beginning of the year, they were saying there will be an increase of 4 percent in the economy. But what do people actually see? They leave with less than a dollar a day. They don't have access to adequate education. They don't have access to health care. And they don't have access to basic utilities. You have to take the COVID-19 for the government to say we'll give you free water and free electricity. Right. And you mentioned the mining sector. So has there been any specific policies regarding those working in that sector and not just the mining sector, but say people working in the informal sector, migrant workers, for instance, who are among the worst hit in most of these countries? Has there been any specific targeted policies towards them by the government? The government has implemented that they have enforced a policy of providing electricity and water free to the population. It's very weird that this policy is being implemented because, one, most Congolese don't have access to electricity because the infrastructure was not built for the electricity of the Congo to actually go to the population. And what's the context? Congo has a river which has a dam and that dam has the capacity to provide electricity to the entire African continent. The power from the dam goes to mining companies. We have this power line that goes where the mining fields are. It goes to foreign countries. It goes to Angola. It goes to South Africa. So they sell the electricity outside of the Congo, but the population themselves don't have access to it. So they see these power lines go over the head, but the power is not there. So when they're saying that they're providing electricity for free, it doesn't mean that the population is getting this electricity. It's the elite who have access to this electricity, who are now going to have access to that. Same is true for water. And from the healthcare perspective, that's been one of the huge debates this past week around how to protect ourselves from COVID-19 contamination, the washing of your hands. The population in many of the videos circulating in the Congolese circles is they are saying we don't have access to water. How are we going to wash our hands? And sometimes the water that we get is not treated well, but we'll use dirty water to also wash our hands. So the policies being implemented again are policies being literally copied from the West as saying this is how we are going to implement it. But the people on the ground are getting angrier by day. You know, every day we keep hearing the tension within the population around the situation where the incompetence of the population, I'm sorry, the incompetence of the elites of the government is showing up very clearly. And the people seeing what the system is, it is there for. And this is an opportunity, it's been a huge opportunity to discuss with other Congolese why are we where we are today, how are our leaders chosen, what is causing that after three decades with all this wealth coming out of the Congo, we cannot have adequate healthcare. And the positive outcome of COVID-19 will be demanding greater accountability and enforcing the accountability for the system to completely change and create a system where the people are getting the benefit of their resources, they're getting the basic needs taken care of. And we have all the models that we are looking into that we are sharing with people on the ground, how is Cuba dealing with the crisis, how are they deploying these doctors all over the world to help how China dealt with it, what we can do in the Congo also to bring a better Congo, which will not be addressed by the Congolese government given they have been inadequate in responding to the crisis as of today. Thank you so much, Kambale, for talking to us. Thank you. That's all we have time for today. Keep watching People's Dispatch.