Beni is a busy town whose mercifully short name is easy to say. Nestled in the far east of DR Congo’s North Kivu province near the Ugandan border, it’s a region that has seen more Ebola outbreaks than almost anywhere else. Yet if you want to understand East Africa, nowhere is better to begin your journey.
A 40-year-old Kenyan did exactly that.
After living and working in Congo for about seven years, he set off for home in late September. Taking the road from Beni, he crossed into Uganda at Kasindi-Mpondwe, then went on to Kasese and Fort Portal before arriving in Kampala. It is a largely scenic drive of nearly 500 kilometres, with only sporadic stretches of bad tarmac (30 years ago mud patches would have rattled your bones!).
From Kampala, he took a budget flight and landed at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi on October 3. He passed the Ebola screening and was driven by relatives to Nairobi Hospital, where he died 58 hours later.
By October 20, the Ministry of Health had confirmed eight cases of Ebola, all direct contacts with him (mostly relatives and health workers) who are currently being monitored in isolation.
Many will read this as a cautionary tale about porous borders and the need to close them. I am not so sure.
This man did what East African leaders and pan-East Africanists have asked young people to do for 30 years: live in another country and work across borders using the roads we built and the airlines we licensed. Strangely and sadly, he was the East African Community’s model citizen.
Most surprisingly, he got through Uganda. Outside Congo, few countries know Ebola as well as Uganda. Having fought it in Gulu (2000), Kibaale (2012), and Mubende (2022), and during the West African epidemic of 2013-16, sending dozens of its doctors flying in, Uganda responds swiftly when the virus turns up in a Ugandan village.
It traces contacts, puts up isolation tents and sends in trained field teams.
Partly because Uganda’s Ebola expertise is tailored to Ugandans, the system is superb at detecting the virus within Uganda. A Kenyan heading home on an East African passport will slip past these systems. At departure in Entebbe, he is about to become Kenya’s problem. In Nairobi’s arrivals hall, he has just stopped being Uganda’s. The flight takes about an hour, an hour of risk that belongs to no one.
Kenya, for its part, has never had to grapple seriously with Ebola. It has no muscle memory for the disease.
A Congolese trader taking dagaa (omena) into Uganda and on to Kenya can be held up for hours at Mpondwe over paperwork. The virus crossed through the same post without a stamp. Our borders are fantastic at impeding commerce and pretty bad at impeding disease.
The obvious reaction is to close crossings, suspend flights, screen everyone, treat all western Congo travellers as suspect.
Ebola takes a different view. The problem with East Africa is that it is only half-integrated. People, money and goods flow across borders, but information about sick people does not. We created one region to trade in, but kept it firmly split across eight different health systems.
A properly integrated region would take a different approach. When a cluster of cases showed up in Beni, alerts would have gone out within hours to every airport from Entebbe to Kigali to Nairobi.
A traveller's health record would tag along with them, like their M-Pesa balance. Screening teams at major airports would include officers from several countries, as one-stop border posts already do, ensuring no departure gate marks the cut-off of responsibility. Isolation centres, mobile labs, and rapid response teams would be jointly funded, mobilised, and deployed wherever needed, without weeks of red tape.
Addis Ababa-based Africa CDC’s health desks already exist. They can advise and call meetings. But they can’t give orders. Until they can, each country will keep guarding its own corner while the virus treats the region as one.
That means Big Men willing to cede a little power. Kenya would need a say in how Uganda screens passengers leaving Entebbe. Uganda would need a say in how Congo handles outbreaks in North Kivu. These are not easy talks.
But consider the alternative. A man left Beni, drove 500km on new roads, took a cheap flight and was dead in Nairobi within three days of landing. Eight people are now infected. The virus read the map of East Africa correctly and saw one territory. It is time our governments learned to read it the same way.
The author is a writer, journalist and curator of the Wall of Great Africans. X (Twitter): @cobbo3
