Decolonising African Medicines and Health System: Towards Post Covid19 Continental Agenda

Abstract

The colonisation of Africa by the imperial powers of Europe has had serious adverse effect on the lives of the people. Over half a century of ceremonial disentangling from colonial clutches, the States of Africa finds it hard to solidly place their feet on global development ground. One of the critical fields Africa has been kowtowing to countries of Asia, Europe and Americas is medicines, which up to the moment, vaccines for treatment of the bulk of the populations are imported. The challenge is not about the incompetent of Africans; neither the ineffectiveness of home-made drugs. But, even if the drug works, the people lacked the psychological confidence in the therapeutic value of it due to colonial and imperial disarticulation and disorientation. It is against this background, the paper makes an interventionist study and argued for the decolonisation of the continent’s medicines and health system in the post Covid19 era. This becomes compelling, because like the World War I and II, the novel pandemic adds yet knowledge to the world, that the whites are not better than the blacks in the knowledge industry. Though not yet uhuru for Africa, the worst ravaged countries by the pandemic are not yet African states, but countries of Asia, Americas and Europe. Against the backdrop of the irrelevance of the white’s superiority myths in the face of the pandemic, the paper charges Africa to look inwardly, in the world system that is fundamentally skewed against her. It finally notes that the continent would be at a crossroads in the wake of global and western conspiracy to depopulate it through the weapons of drugs and vaccines, if it fails to develop and decolonised. It thus, concludes that African governments, policy makers, health experts and scholars should come together in the restless effort to rescue its medicines and health system from the elbow trap of the western society, thereby making Africa truly independent and great in the incoming post Covid19 years.

Keywords: Africa; Decolonisation; Medicines; Health System; Covid19; Pandemic