Abstract

Since 2020, Africa has experienced two severe external economic shocks: the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and the war in Ukraine. These events have ushered in what economists call a new era of austerity, which has been called Structural Adjustment 2.0. This article contends that the major cause of the economic distress following the COVID-19 experience was not the disease itself but the policy response. This response was designed for high-income countries with high medical capacity, low housing densities, and existing models of social protection. However, in an African setting, the policy did not follow scientific protocols and quickly moved towards neocolonial tropes where external institutions shaped policy priorities and outcomes to the detriment of African societies. It was soon clear that these policies were of questionable benefit in areas of high-density housing and that they could not feasibly be sustained without enormous hardship. The article provides new data based on research primarily from Angola, Nigeria, and Uganda: it argues that since scholars have largely failed to address the role of the COVID-19 policy response in Africa’s new era of austerity, this negative human and socioeconomic outcome requires rethinking the discursive and conceptual priorities of the discipline of African Studies.

Since 2020, The African Continent has Encountered Two Significant External Economic Shocks: the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and associated response in 2020 and 2021, and the war in Ukraine since February 2022. The combination has produced bleak economic prospects, growing poverty, material immiseration, and inequality.¹ However, while much of the scholarly analysis of this crisis has focused on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic itself and of the war in Ukraine, comparatively little attention has focused on the COVID-19 pandemic response in driving the devastating new era of austerity in Africa.²

There is a strong argument to be made that the declared global pandemic response and the scientific remedies put in place did not reflect the complex and multifaceted nature of pandemics and their economic ramifications. This resulted in the absence of a sound political and social structure in a neo-colonial setting to cope with such emergent crises. The ensuing one-size-fits-all approach exacerbated inequalities and played a key role in reversing decades of socio-economic gains in societies across the global south. Thus, we contend in this article that, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the root cause of the continent’s grim economic outlook during the contemporary period lies in the agenda of the pandemic response and not in the efforts to contain the virus itself.

The article, which considers the COVID-19 pandemic from multiple angles, is based on remote and in-person interviews conducted between November 2020 and the middle of 2023, reflecting both the availability of data and knowledge of relevant materials from the different case studies. The article builds on data from across the continent, whilst also focusing on three case studies, which have been chosen according to the range of materials available: Angola for Southern Africa, Nigeria for West Africa, and Uganda for East Africa.

A focus on the pandemic response is necessary, since much discussion surrounding the impacts of the pandemic in Africa persists in emphasizing the virus itself, with very limited discussions about the merits and impacts of the associated restrictions, even though these disrupted many dimensions of everyday life—from how we interact with each other to how we work and learn. These changes were a direct result of policies that reflected political and ideological decisions that remain underexamined. As a result, many of the negative outcomes are seen today through the prism of what was ‘caused’ by the virus, and not by the political decisions at the time. For instance, in November 2023, the United Nations Development Programme stated that ‘50 million more people fell into extreme poverty in Africa as a result of COVID’, something which, as we argue in this article, is a difficult position to sustain.³

We are not contending in this article that the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions are the sole cause of the current socioeconomic struggles faced on the continent. Certainly, the war in Ukraine is a relevant factor in this scenario, albeit one predated by the COVID-19 response. In this article, we argue instead that far too much focus has been placed on COVID-19 itself, and that the lack of critical discussion about the role of COVID-19-related policy decisions warrants further examination to ensure that future pandemics will not be approached in the same way.

Certainly, some works have already been published from this framework,⁴ but many more are needed to create the kind of urgent public debate that are demanded by the outcomes of this policy experiment. Few studies have considered the asymmetries that affected the pandemic response and strategies as essential to the material immiseration that has followed the pandemic. Yet, global activities—social and economic—came to a halt.⁵ Elementary economics teaches about the components of GDP and National Income as key elements of transactions that contribute to growth and development. A strong component of this derives from everyday life and living. The contributions of the factors of production, such as labour, land, and capital, as drivers of the economy, experienced a high level of crisis during the lockdowns. The well-known consequences for human welfare began to reveal that people were living below certain levels that were unfit for human existence. This ensured that the attack on livelihoods began to affect the very existence of many people, inadvertently exacerbating social inequalities. People then existed in a state of suspended animation. To what extent did the policy responses to COVID-19 constitute a major departure from how people deal with daily existence, and how they had dealt with previous pandemics? And how far was this type of response feasible at all—even in theory, let alone in practice?

This article thus intends to set out some parameters for answering these questions. It contends that an increase in poverty in 2020 and 2021, before the war in Ukraine, was due not to COVID-19 but to the COVID-19 response. Making this argument moves away from the current focus in much contemporary Western academic research on agency and resilience rather than on the material structures of neocolonialism. As we will see in the conclusion, there is a notable focus in the current literature on the agency and resilience of individuals, and on post-COVID recovery, rather than on the impacts that the pandemic response has had in Africa—obscuring the role of neocolonial structures in the austerity that has resulted. Many governments did not (and indeed could not) implement serious measures to support vulnerable populations, and this, in many cases, caused much harm to the labour market and long-term socioeconomic and health prospects for their populations.

In this article, we attempt to consider both sides of this conundrum. On the one hand, we contend that the ‘recolonization’ of academic discourse through neoliberal concepts sidelines discussions of material economic conditions and social capital, which might challenge the validity of the preferred agency framework. On the other hand, we argue that this can be seen clearly through an analysis of the economic fallout of the pandemic response. The consequences were especially clear throughout 2024, with the protests in Nigeria and then led by Generation Z (Gen Zs) in Kenya underlining the ways in which externally imposed restructuring agreements following the COVID-19-induced debt crisis have produced violent external economic shocks and great hardship.⁶

We proceed by examining, first, the scientific basis of the pandemic response on the continent; second, the relationship this had to colonial and neocolonial forms of governance; and third, the impacts of this response on the socio-economic landscape, especially on the informal sector, with attention also given to other relevant factors, including the war in Ukraine. The article concludes by returning to the hold of neocolonial epistemologies and concepts in much academic work, which seems to have impeded the ability to make the argument that the COVID-19 response constituted a classic case of neocolonialism.

In sum, the different parts of the article are all interconnected through a socioeconomic study of the exacerbation of inequalities and poor health outcomes produced by the pandemic response. This is analysed through the lens of neocolonialism, which we suggest is the clear connecting thread linking all of these policies, analyses, and outcomes, even though (as we will also discuss) the neocolonial dimension was a complex one in this case.

COVID-19 countermeasures and adverse economic conditions

On 24 February 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) published a report based on a fact-finding mission to Wuhan, China. The report found that ‘to reduce COVID-19 illness and death, near-term readiness planning must embrace the large-scale implementation of high-quality, non-pharmaceutical public health measures’.⁷ Countries with confirmed cases should deploy ‘even more stringent measures to interrupt transmission chains as needed (e.g. the suspension of large-scale gatherings and the closure of schools and workplaces)’.⁸ All countries with new cases of COVID-19 were urged to ‘prepare to immediately activate the highest level of emergency response mechanisms to trigger the all-of-government and all-of society approach’.⁹ It was thus the WHO’s recommendation that all countries—regardless of socioeconomic conditions—should essentially follow the lockdown measures implemented in China.

This, however, was contrary to the findings of the WHO’s September 2019 report entitled Non-pharmaceutical Public Health Measures for Mitigating the Risk and Impact of Epidemic and Pandemic Influenza. This report had noted that ‘Ethical considerations: The human right to freedom of movement should be considered, as should potential adverse economic impacts, particularly in vulnerable populations such as migrant workers.’¹⁰ According to the report’s lead author, Ben Cowling of Hong Kong University, this work was based on the latest state of knowledge on non-pharmaceutical interventions in public health.¹¹ Although the WHO did not specifically call for a global lockdown to deal with COVID-19, as Alex Broadbent and Pieter Streicher have noted, they ‘implicitly endorsed it in various ways, for example, by praising leaders of low-income countries who had locked down’.¹²

The first question is to examine how effective these policies, which contradicted previous WHO research, were in the complex and vastly heterogeneous context of African countries. As Kate Meagher has noted, the evidence is that they were counter-productive, and that where Western biomedical procedures were followed more rigorously, COVID-19 outcomes were worse.¹³ For example, South Africa was assessed to have had the strictest lockdown policies in Africa and yet had the worst COVID-19 mortality outcomes.¹⁴ By the final update in April 2024, 102,595 out of a total of nearly 260,000 recorded fatalities on the continent had taken place in South Africa, or almost 40 percent of the total.¹⁵

Cross-cutting examples from across the continent reveal some of the structural reasons why such policies were contra-indicated, alongside the uncertainties surrounding their effectiveness, especially in countries with large informal settlements. Many highly negative consequences soon emerged. In Nigeria, for instance, the lockdown and inter-state travel bans, rather than mitigating the spread of the pandemic, resulted in the escalation of armed banditry in the Northwest of the country. On 30 May 2020, armed bandits attacked Katsina State of Nigeria, to engage in cattle rustling, looting of shops, and other criminal acts.¹⁶ Moreover, since 2020, such acts have increased dramatically, leading to disproportionate harms and tensions, especially in the Middle Belt.¹⁷

Nor was this negative relationship of lockdowns and mortality outcomes unique to the African continent. Peru in South America—which had the world’s strictest lockdown policy in March 2020—has the highest per capita death rates anywhere in the world from COVID-19.¹⁸ The evidence therefore suggests that in low and lower-middle-income countries—far from preventing risk—lockdowns exacerbated it. There is strong evidence to suggest that the reasons for this relate to differences in urban settings and in the mechanisms of disease spread.

COVID-19 and mortality outcomes

The trajectory of ongoing studies and scientific data from the implementation of COVID-19 policies is complicated and reveals quite distinct outcomes in different geographical zones and socioeconomic settings. Broadbent and Streicher note that the modelled epidemiological benefits of reducing social contacts through lockdowns take little account of differing living conditions in informal settings. As they note, ‘in Accra, over 50% of the population lives in a single-room dwelling. In such a context, even if departures from the home are greatly restricted, overall social contact will remain high’.¹⁹ As this suggests, in African informal settlements, confining people to live indoors through quarantine measures increases infectivity through overcrowding: this is because, owing to the crowded and informal nature of housing, most people usually spend the bulk of their time outside, as the Sierra Leonean medical scholar Alhaji Njai noted in the Sierra Leone Telegraph in January 2021.²⁰

Forcing people to observe quarantines or curfews in such settings may, in contrast, increase social contact in informal settlements. In the Indian context, this was observed in Mumbai by Anup Malani, who described the situation in the Mumbai informal settlement of Dharavi in March and April 2020:

While the probability of transmission from one household member to another in the west can be as low as 0.2, it is likely much greater in slums because everyone is always in the same room…Indeed, it is possible that lockdown increased the number of people slum residents interacted with on a typical day. On a typical day, a person may leave to go to school or work. During that period, they would experience the same level of interaction with others that non-slum residents typically experience. The real crowding happens when they come home. But lockdown kept slum residents at home all day, meaning they experienced maximum density all day, not just at night.²¹

This was confirmed by the COVID-19 seroprevalence tests, which Malani’s team conducted. During the first months of the pandemic and the strict lockdown imposed in India, Malani’s team found that seroprevalence in Dharavi was at 54.1 percent of those tested, while it was just at 16.1 percent in non-slum areas.²² Meanwhile, a December 2021 analysis from South Africa found that COVID-19 seroprevalence rates were by this time 59 percent in urban communities and less than 18 percent in rural communities.²³ Thus, the evidence strongly suggests that lockdowns increased seroprevalence of COVID-19 in informal settlements, and through this increase of infection, very likely contributed to the poor health and unequal socioeconomic outcomes in countries such as South Africa and Peru.²⁴

The demographic context is also significant. COVID-19 was known from the outset to be particularly dangerous to the elderly. With a median age of under 20,²⁵ some scientists noted in March 2020 that Africa was likely to be far less exposed: as Science reported then, ‘Sub-Saharan Africa has one major advantage when it comes to COVID-19: Its average age is the lowest in the world…[and] children rarely get sick from COVID-19.’²⁶ This turned out to be the case, since COVID-19 mortality in Africa was far lower than in other world regions. While a range of unscientific—and at times offensive²⁷—explanations for Africa’s different trajectory were offered, the demographic context was always clear. In other words, the aim of suppressing the virus spread was not only imposed unscientifically on the continent’s distinct urban and rural environments alike, but also reflected a one-size-fits-all approach that took no account of relative disease risk and African health priorities.

Finally, it is important to note that lockdowns were not an entirely unfamiliar measure in Africa, as they had previously been trialled in Freetown and Monrovia during the Ebola epidemic of 2014-2015.²⁸ At the time, Médecins Sans Frontières warned that they would not help, as the BBC reported.²⁹ Subsequent research confirmed this analysis.³⁰ Riots followed in Monrovia, with the Guardian reporting one resident of West Point, Patrick Wesseh, as saying: ‘It is inhumane…They can’t suddenly lock us up without any warning. How are our children going to eat?’³¹

There is, moreover, the important relationship between health and livelihood that must be considered. In Oyo State of Nigeria, the sixth most populous state in the country, Governor Seyi Makinde refused to lock down the state. He insisted that this would amount to pronouncing a death sentence on people who depended on daily earnings for their sustenance. He proclaimed: ‘The economic health of the state is as important as the public health…we have to find a local solution…We should only borrow from things that will work for us and that can come from any part of the world.’³²

On the other hand, the contiguous states of Lagos and Ogun endured the federal government-imposed lockdowns. The lockdown kicked in first in Lagos, Ogun, and Abuja on Monday, 30 March 2020, when the Federal Government of Nigeria made a pronouncement that all citizens should stay in their homes, postpone travel to or from other states, and ensure that all businesses and offices within the three locations were fully closed.³³ However, the stratification of COVID-19 data by state from week 9 (29 February 2020) to week 12 (28 March 2020) showed that Oyo State did not constitute one of the top three problematic states. Rather, mortality by states showed Lagos, Edo, Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Oyo, Kano, and Rivers as the most affected deaths, accounting for 21.43, 9.03, 7.62, 6.00, 5.37, and 4.88 percent, respectively.³⁴

In sum, alongside the data from Mumbai, these data show that the scientific presumption behind lockdowns in the Global South betrayed a poor understanding of human diversity and the physiological and social contexts shaping people’s lives. In short, ignoring the local factors in shaping discourse and outcomes—including essential socioeconomic variables—may quickly lead to negative and, in fact, quite unscientific consequences.³⁵ Prior to COVID-19, as the WHO September 2019 report shows, there was a wide awareness of this. It is important to return to this pre-existing knowledge: otherwise, vital discussions can be sidelined by posturing such as that displayed by the then Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who in March 2020 dismissed COVID-19 as gripezinha (lit. a mild dose of the flu).³⁶

In sum, the COVID-19 pandemic threw up tensions surrounding science, biopower, and alternative medical systems.³⁷ This already makes a strong case that the favoured biomedical policy in the West was unscientific in most African settings, and indeed for much of the world’s population. In addition to the foregoing, from a public health point of view, the model did not address the social determinants of health³⁸ or the link between demographics and disease risk. In terms of the former, the socioeconomic context of disease and ill health has long been known, especially in low-income settings. In 1975, Samuel Preston described a clear relationship between wealth and life expectancy through a relation now known as the ‘Preston Curve’. This showed that where GDP is high, and countries are rich, increases in GDP have little impact on life expectancy, while in poor countries, small increases in GDP can have a dramatic impact on life expectancy.³⁹ In short, poverty kills.

Of course, more recent research challenges the appropriateness of the GDP measure in Africa. Traditional GDP figures provide inadequate measures of Africa’s vast informal sector, accounting for nearly 83 percent of employment in Africa overall and 85 percent in sub-Saharan Africa,⁴⁰ and therefore produce ‘poor numbers’.⁴¹ It is also worth noting that marginalized groups, including women and youth, are disproportionately represented in informal labour markets in Africa. In other words, estimates of the economic impact of the COVID-19 response in Africa probably underestimate significantly the negative impacts of COVID-19 suppression measures through overreliance on GDP figures, whilst failing to take account of the large economic losses incurred through shuttering the informal economy, losses noted in the United Nations’ report on the informal sector during the pandemic.⁴² The consequence of this is that, if bearing in mind the inaccurate nature of GDP and its inability to assess the informal economy, overall measures of economic activity would almost certainly show that socioeconomic wellbeing in Africa fell even further during the pandemic response than currently estimated—with even more negative consequences for long-term population health.

An important example of what this meant in practice is Angola, which is reported to have the eighth-largest economy in Africa, with a GDP of 113.34 billion.⁴³ In Angola, the first case of COVID-19 was reported on 21 March 2020.⁴⁴ Several measures, including strict restrictions, regulation of entry into the country, the use of face masks, adherence to physical distancing, temperature control, and the installation of hand hygiene stations at points of entry, were implemented in conjunction with other measures.⁴⁵ Most of the strategies implemented mirrored those on the international scale. At midnight on 27 March 2020, a state of emergency culminated in the general closure of borders. In March 2020, the drastic reduction in international trade and the decline in oil demand, following the widespread closure of international borders, resulted in a significant decline in economic activity as restrictions intensified in response to the COVID-19 crisis.⁴⁶ A steadily worsening liquidity situation persisted as the state continued to implement its pandemic crisis strategy.

The economic impact is reflected in the decrease in purchasing power and public spending, highlighted by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).⁴⁷ For micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises, the impact became significant, especially since social distancing measures resulted in drastic changes to the economy. According to UNCTAD, measures implemented to mitigate the spread of the pandemic present acute difficulties for the vulnerable population, an increase in social expenses, and in the short to medium terms was expected to result in an increase in the levels of poverty and ‘translate into a rise in informal activities, a fall in income among the most vulnerable households and an increase in the incidence of child labour, compounded by the closure of educational establishments’.⁴⁸

In addition, COVID-19 limitations ‘strained the sustainability of peri-urban food supply systems’.⁴⁹ To make matters worse, approximately 70 percent of the budget allocated to the health sector was diverted to COVID-19 and other epidemiological matters.⁵⁰ Thus, the subsequent political risings by the youth in Angola from late October 2020 to 2023, under the banner ‘Esta não foi a Angola que nós sonhámos/‘This is not the Angola we dreamed of’⁵¹ can be explained through these parlous living conditions.⁵² That little had improved in the subsequent years is shown by the recent resurgence of these uprisings in the country, this time centred around the inflation of fuel prices in the oil-rich but now indebted country.⁵³

Thus, the supposed choice of ‘saving lives or the economy’ was very different in low-income countries. In Africa, shutting down the economy through lockdown measures was something known by health economists to cause a lowering of life expectancies and poor health outcomes.⁵⁴ Moreover, it was widely known prior to 2020 that the ability of state-supported social protection frameworks to sustain the population in African contexts was far lower than that in the Global North, and even after the pandemic, in 2021–2022, the coverage was estimated by the International Labor Organization at only 17 percent across the continent.⁵⁵ In this context, it is more than a little surprising that there was not a more far-reaching and sustained policy and academic discussion as to the appropriateness of the Western biomedical response proposed by the WHO in February 2020 given that this response took no account of different living conditions, demographics, risk profile, or previous failed trials of lockdowns in West Africa for Ebola, a disease with an incomparably higher infection fatality rate than COVID-19.

COVID-19 and neocoloniality

The regressive nature of the COVID-19 response in Africa is related to the way in which this is derived from neocolonial forms of governance. Historically, this is connected to the relationship between colonialism and the history of medicine in Africa: throughout the colonial era, Western biomedicine, as manifested during COVID-19, was experienced in Africa in relationship with colonial force.⁵⁶ It is, of course, true that the initial spur to the global COVID-19 response came from China, but the role of supranational institutions such as the World Bank and IMF, and of the European Union, in driving global COVID-19 policies shows that neocolonial aspects quickly became prominent.

Colonial power, of course, required control over the bodies of colonial subjects for labour purposes. This bodily control soon expanded to encompass medical procedures, and Western medicine was thereby deeply involved. This relationship was characterized by the imposition of cordons sanitaires,⁵⁷ and through the testing of experimental drugs, including new vaccines, where informed consent was neither sought nor given by African subjects.⁵⁸ These relationships were reinvigorated in Africa during COVID-19 and, as the South African sociologists Lesley Bank and Nelly Sharples wrote in their book on the pandemic in the rural Cape, what followed was a ‘model of neocolonial state capture’.⁵⁹

But the neocolonial aspect did not just stop at the imposition by external actors of unscientific and authoritarian lockdown policies. It continued through vaccine delivery, albeit not merely through ‘vaccine apartheid’.⁶⁰ According to the historian of medi­cine Samuel Adu-Gyamfi, the neocolonial approach continued through the rejection of potential African herbal remedies for COVID-19—in contravention of WHO’s own stated policy on traditional medicine⁶¹—and through the ways in which Ghan­aians were lined up by politicians at Accra airport to dance in celebration at the arrival of the first batches of COVID vaccines.⁶² They were also embedded in the vaccine procurement framework through World Bank loans,⁶³ which were given to many African countries to help fund access to the COVID-19 vaccines.⁶⁴ As a senior Gambian government official noted, this continued with pressure applied by Western embassies on the ground to vaccinate those working in the tourist industry, without which tourism would not return.⁶⁵

Moreover, the unilateral focus on COVID-19 to the exclusion of other health conditions was itself neocolonial in a context where, as we have seen, Africa’s demographics meant that the virus was a comparatively low risk. According to a local doctor in Mozambique, this meant that all childhood vaccinations had to be halted since all human and financial resources were devoted to the COVID-19 vaccination effort,⁶⁶ and evidence shows that this remained the case as late as March 2022.⁶⁷ More broadly, this was shaped by the obsessive focus on testing in Western nations, which was provided by companies diversifying out of malaria rapid tests, leading to severe shortages of these⁶⁸ and other routine drugs, such as antipsychotics,⁶⁹ by the middle of 2020.

Importantly, the development of a global response framework to the virus inherently prioritized the risk profiles and demographics of the Global North, at the expense of existing medical conditions that posed a far more serious threat in Africa. Although the impact of demographic context had already been highlighted by people as early as March 2020, this did not shift the narrative of the need to focus exclusively on the new outbreak. Subsequently, several interviewees for this article confirmed that COVID-19 was a far less serious condition than existing endemic diseases. Elsa Rodrigues, a social scientist from Benguela, Angola, noted that the impact of the novel coronavirus was ‘much, much less’ than that from existing endemic conditions, for instance.⁷⁰

In spite of its beginnings in China, therefore, the COVID-19 pandemic policy response quickly mirrored established patterns of colonial or neocolonial governance. African models of healthcare were mocked and discarded in favour of expensive Western biomedical systems, which soon became regressive in the African context, and which, when it came to vaccines, were also rooted in models of debt dependency. This policy response was developed to target a disease principally of concern in richer countries with longer life expectancies.

With the economic, medical, and social priorities of Africa subordinated to the needs of the Global North, the pandemic response reproduced—and intensified—existing frameworks of neocolonial governance. Since African countries import up to 94 percent of medical supplies, 75 percent of testing kits, 95 percent of pharmaceuticals, and 99 percent of vaccines, global trade embargoes during COVID-19 meant that the ability of the continent to respond autonomously to the pandemic was also severely circumscribed.⁷¹ In the next part of this article, we will see how this led directly to a new era of austerity on the continent.

COVID-19 policies and the new era of austerity

As noted at the outset, what has transpired since 2020 has led to severe material harms on the continent. This has reversed decades of economic improvements, which had led to the 2010s being dubbed by some as the era of ‘Africa rising’. All that has today vanished from the headlines to be replaced by headlines more reminiscent of the 1980s and 1990s of debt and austerity.

Yet in 2020, the economic picture was solid, as confirmed by the African Development Bank Report from 30 January 2020, which predicted growth across the continent of 3.9 percent in 2020 and 4.1 percent in 2021.⁷² However, by the end of 2022, more than 20 African nations were in debt distress according to the IMF.⁷³ Nothing had changed by the end of 2023; indeed, things had gotten worse with the IMF saying that over half of African nations were in this position.⁷⁴ Ghana’s debt was restructured in 2023, alongside Zambia’s and Ethiopia’s.⁷⁵ Following the election of Bola Tinubu in Nigeria, fuel subsidies were removed, and interest rates reached nearly 23 percent in an effort to reduce debt.⁷⁶ By October 2023, the African Forum on Debt and Development said that the debt service of African nations had reached its highest ever level.⁷⁷ In 2025, the UN reported the continent as being stuck between cuts in aid and increases in indebtedness.⁷⁸

Some informed actors have called this situation Structural Adjustment 2.0.⁷⁹ Indeed, consistently throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the IMF emphasized that its COVID-19 loans were tied to future austerity. In August 2021, OXFAM reported that 85 percent of the 107 COVID-19 loans negotiated by the IMF were tied to future austerity.⁸⁰ The same model continued in 2022, with OXFAM finding in April 2022 that 13 of the 15 loan programmes negotiated in the pandemic’s second year required future austerity.⁸¹ Inevitably, in October 2022, OXFAM found that half of the world’s low-income countries had cut health spending since 2020.⁸² Meanwhile, the same report noted that ‘half of the countries tracked cut the share of social protection spending, [and] 70% cut the share of education spending’.⁸³ In October 2023, projections were that 57 percent of low-income countries would have to cut their public spending by a combined US$229 billion over the next 5 years.⁸⁴

All this, moreover, is only regarding the future effects produced by the COVID-19 debt mountain. In immediate terms, the socioeconomic impacts turbocharged impoverishment and especially gender-based inequality and violence. For instance, in an interview in late 2021, the sociologist Elsa Rodrigues from Benguela, Angola, described how in rural areas of Angola farmers were barred from going to their fields owing to COVID-19 restrictions, even when there were no COVID-19 cases to be found in the region: the result was that they lost their harvests, seriously compromising the food security of their families, and contributing to a notable increase in prostitution in Benguela.⁸⁵

The impacts of the loss of food security, in particular, were immense. They contributed to the widespread increases in child marriage and teenage pregnancy in countries such as Uganda, reversing decades of progress in women’s rights and gender equality. In an eyewitness report written late in 2021, Ugandan PEN nominee Kakwenza Rukirabashaija wrote that ‘If we were to add results from all the districts of the country, we would find that more than 80% of school girls in the whole country will not be going back to school due to pregnancies.’⁸⁶ Shortly afterwards, Ugandan radio reported in November 2021 that the nearly 2-year closure of schools had taken 4.5 million children permanently out of education.⁸⁷ A Ugandan National Planning Agency report made clear the gendered dimensions of this catastrophe, estimating ‘a 19-20 per cent increase in the number of young girls becoming breadwinners for families through, among others, sexual exploitation, child labour, and early marriages’.⁸⁸

Here we are confronted with what the UN has described as the ‘shadow pandemic’: the enormous increase in gender-based violence directed through the policy response. In a report for Drexel University College of Medicine, Christiana Obeng noted that, according to the UN, ‘before the pandemic 243 million women and girls were victims of sexual and physical violence. Since the pandemic, this number has risen to 736 million women and girls’.⁸⁹ A report by UN Women makes stark reading: 45 percent of women said they knew of a woman who had experienced violence since the start of the pandemic, 1 in 4 women said household conflicts had increased, and they felt more unsafe at home, and 3 in 10 said that violence against women had increased across their community.⁹⁰

Beyond these regressive gendered impacts, food insecurity produced by the restrictions contributed directly to the current socioeconomic crisis across the continent. The Ugandan case is especially significant here. A paper published as part of research undertaken by a team of medical health researchers at Makerere University, led by David Musoke, provided a disturbing summary of the outcomes in Uganda of the shadow pandemic: ‘the COVID-19 lockdown led to family breakups, loss of family housing, as well as increased both caring responsibilities and gender-based violence, especially towards females. Children’s welfare suffered through increased child labour, sexual exploitation, and early marriages. The extended closure of schools led to delayed educational milestones, poor adaptation to home-based learning, and increased school drop-out rates. Increased food insecurity led to changes in feeding patterns and reduced food varieties.’⁹¹

Further papers published by the team reveal the devastating impacts of the COVID-19 restrictive measures in Uganda. On the one hand, there was a large increase in economic inequality, particularly in the informal sector, leading to food scarcity and the ‘undermining livelihoods, resulting in lost and lower incomes for many households, increased food insecurity and poverty, as well as business closures. In addition, lockdowns disproportionately impacted lower-income households already in a vulnerable position prior to the pandemic and households reliant on informal sector activities’.⁹² On the other hand, essential basic medical care was suspended, leading to a rapid decline in maternity and both antenatal and postnatal services, alongside the impossibility of accessing routine treatments for chronic conditions because of travel restrictions.⁹³

Faced with such appalling barriers to socioeconomic well-being, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed human instincts to adopt survivalist strategies endemic in the difficulties of the period. For instance, in Guinea–Bissau, among other measures, it was decreed that commerce and other economic activities should operate only from 7 am to 11 am and that public transport should stop working. In a country where people are forced to work every day to ensure a minimum level of survival for themselves and their families, these measures presented a clear danger of condemning the population to starvation. This worsened an already serious situation, in which many families were already living under the ‘one shot’ (one meal per day) regime. Social solidarity and the intervention of some companies made it possible to avoid the worst, but many people were literally starving in the interior of the country and in the outlying neighbourhoods of Bissau, according to civil society activists, and the weakness of the Bissau–Guinean state meant that support was awfully slow to arrive. In response, a group of volunteers launched the ‘Tadja Fome’ initiative, which means ‘Let’s Avoid Hunger’ in Bissau-Guinean Creole. In a fortnight, the volunteers raised enough food to distribute a basic food basket to around 3,000 people in Bissau, the coordinator of the initiative, Saturnino de Oliveira, told DW Africa.⁹⁴

At the same time, many basic but essential questions went unanswered, adding to the anger in the country. What sense did it make to decree social distancing in a reality where, due to the precariousness of their living conditions, people usually eat and drink from the same container, where they are forced to share the same bed, and where a large family is forced to share the same sanitary facilities? What sense did it make to confine infected people to their own homes, when in most cases they don’t offer the minimum hygiene and other conditions to prevent them from infecting their neighbours? What sense did it make to coerce citizens to respect the lockdown, forcing the so-called offenders against the policy to use an overcrowded vehicle or overcrowded spaces in the police’s own facilities?

Consequently, in Guinea–Bissau and across the continent, citizens became very angry against governments for these destructive, impossible, and unscientific policies. Their anger grew even worse, as a larger part of the food stocks was hoarded by government officials or kept in the stores until they went bad. In Nigeria, for instance, several Government stores were attacked, burnt, and looted.⁹⁵ Without pre-existing structures of social protection—which, as we have seen, were well-known beforehand to be scarce—such failings were inevitable for a system that literally was designed for other, richer parts of the world.

The sudden increase in hunger also required African governments to invest in support packages through the COVID-19 loans schemes run by the IMF and World Bank. Nigeria, for instance, was loaned US$3.4 billion—half the government’s annual budget—in April 2020 by the IMF.⁹⁶ Many of these funds were later said to have been misappropriated, as also happened in Senegal⁹⁷ and in Global North countries such as the USA and the UK.⁹⁸

The foregoing makes it crystal clear that analysis is urgently needed as to the causes of these regressive outcomes, and of the connection between economic, social, and physical well-being. Moreover, this crystallizing anger is clearly connected to the political convulsions in many parts of the continent since 2020. This is evident in two of the core case studies examined in this article, Angola and Nigeria. Angola has seen consistent popular unrest since 2020, while in Nigeria, this crystallized in the #EndSARS movement in late 2020.⁹⁹

More recently, this anger has been especially apparent in former French colonies in Africa, where a new wave of military governments has brought an end to ‘Françafrique’.¹⁰⁰ Stubbornly, and as noted at the outset of this article, many supranational agencies continue to attribute these effects to COVID-19 itself rather than to the pandemic response. However, this is a difficult argument to sustain: as discussed below, COVID-19 mortality in Africa led to at most a 3 percent increase in mortality on the continent, which, on the face of it, makes it hard to understand how this can have led to such a disturbing increase in poverty.

What, then, of other potential causes of the debt crisis in Africa? Many economists have blamed this crisis on the over-leveraging of projected African economic growth during the 2010s. As has been pointed out in the case of Nigeria, under President Buhari, Nigeria’s borrowing from China alone tripled to US$4 billion.¹⁰¹ Indeed, foreign loans under Buhari tripled in general.¹⁰² Across the continent as a whole, long-term debt doubled during the 2010s.¹⁰³ This is contended by some as case closed: increasing indebtedness has led to the current debt crisis, just as happened in the 1970s before the oil crisis. However, as we saw at the start of this section, in the early months of 2020, these same economists posited a solid picture for African economic growth and made no mention of the risks of this ‘over-leveraged debt’.

Moreover, the 1970s are an interesting case of comparison. Then, as in the 2010s, debt increased modelled against projected and much-discussed economic growth in Africa: this was according to the traditional Western economic model then invoked by development economists, whereby increasing projected future assets were used as security to take out loans with which to develop infrastructure to kickstart development. With Ethiopia, the fastest-growing country in the world in the 2010s,¹⁰⁴ and many others on the continent not far behind, it was the optimism around African growth which led to increased borrowing—not economic profligacy. This was in line with Western models, whereby investment is leveraged against expected future profits. Thus, the cause of the current crisis is not necessarily the level of debt itself: it can also be argued to stem from the sudden reversal of a decade of growth, which had led to the ‘Africa rising’ label being applied both in the media¹⁰⁵ and by development economists.¹⁰⁶

If over-leveraged debts did not cause this crisis, what of other explanations? Many point to the impact of the War in Ukraine on inflation.¹⁰⁷ Certainly, this has been a significant and widely discussed factor. However, there’s much evidence to dispute this being posited reductively as the pre-eminent factor, not least the report from Thompson-Reuters in June 2021, which found that food prices had grown exponentially across the world since the middle of 2020,¹⁰⁸ and the UN report from the same month that found that food prices then were at their highest for a decade.¹⁰⁹ This suggests comprehensively that this inflation in basic food prices had begun 18 months before the Russian invasion—at the same time as the COVID-19 lockdowns.

To summarize, prior to the pandemic, there were positive visions of the African economic situation. Meanwhile, the economic impacts of inflation of food prices began as early as the second half of 2020, which means that these cannot be pinned on Vladimir Putin. Since COVID-19 itself had a modest impact in Africa, this leaves the pandemic response as the main factor behind the advent of the new era of austerity. This confirms the neocolonial nature of this biomedical model in Africa and also indicates why many scholars on the continent are increasingly wary of this model becoming institutionalized.¹¹⁰

COVID-19 policies and academic discourse

Nevertheless, in spite of the quality of the evidence and the starkness of the outcomes, much of the public discourse in the Global North around COVID-19 in Africa initially portrayed this response as a success. The root of this apparent success was the low numbers of deaths from COVID-19 in Africa. As Megan Vaughan put it at Leiden University in December 2022, ‘many African countries apparently not only suffered less illness and death but also demonstrated an impressive ability to manage this major public health crisis’.¹¹¹

These mortality figures certainly look impressive when compared to the rest of the world. The total number of deaths registered from COVID-19 in Africa was around 260,000.¹¹² Many claim this to be an underestimate, and the WHO estimated late in 2021 that six out of every seven COVID cases in Africa went unreported.¹¹³ Deaths are less likely to be missed than cases, however, and one July 2021 estimate was that the COVID-19 fatality rates in low-income countries were between 30 and 80 percent of the true figure.¹¹⁴ This would make 600,000 a reasonable estimate of the total number of COVID deaths in Africa. At 300,000 per year at the height of the pandemic—and assuming (very conservatively) that none of these people would have died in the meantime of other causes—this is a maximal 2.5 percent mortality increase on a continent where nearly 12 million people died in 2023.¹¹⁵

This is certainly far lower than the excess mortality in many Western countries. But there is, however, a different way to look at this ‘success’. This is because COVID-19 was never likely to be a major health concern on the continent.¹¹⁶ This meant that the one-size-fits-all biomedical policy recommended by the WHO never made sense in terms of African health priorities and needs. Yet, African needs were never foremost in this kind of planning: in an article in March 2024 in the Guardian, Devi Sridhar—Chair of Global Health at Edinburgh University—told a revealing story about a meeting she arranged on pandemic preparedness in 2019:

It reminds me of a meeting we held in 2019 at Edinburgh University on how best to convince low- and middle-income countries to take pandemic preparedness seriously. The response from ministers in these countries was that they were more concerned with getting basic healthcare to their populations rather than face up to the prospect of existential threats.¹¹⁷

Of course, in low-income countries, lack of basic healthcare and the means to provide it is itself an existential threat. In contrast, it is significant to note that scholars based in Africa were well aware of this problem very early on in the pandemic. An open letter from African intellectuals to African leaders was published on Al Jazeera on 17 April 2020. Signed by figures such as Wole Soyinka, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Amílcar Cabral’s daughter Iva Cabral, Olivette Otele, Ndongo Samba Sylla, and Francis Nyamnjoh, the letter noted what had been happening in Africa since the widespread adoption of lockdown measures:

Adopting the all-securitarian model of “containment” of northern countries—often without much care to specific contexts—many African countries have imposed a brutal lockdown upon their populations…If such containment measures have met the agreement of middle classes shielded from crowded living conditions with some having the possibility to work from home, they have proved punitive and disruptive for those whose survival depends on informal activities.¹¹⁸

Just a few days earlier, on 13 April 2020, the Mozambican sociologist Elísio Macamo had published an essay on the differing approaches to risk of Africans and Europeans. As Macamo noted astutely, the Western model of COVID-19 risk-aversion was built on colonial history. The imperative to minimize risk derived from the externalization of risks and losses onto colonial subjects presented as the other side of the coin of the creation of ‘safe consumers’ in the West: ‘The sociology of risk does not mention this, but there is a colonial dimension to the “taming” of risk in Europe…Colonial subjection served the prudential role of re-inventing ordinary Europeans into stable consumers on the back of the domination of colonial subjects.’¹¹⁹

Macamo’s analysis was also sanguine as to the risks which the ‘all-securitarian’ lockdown model posed in Africa:

Africans have always responded to crises by appealing to their vibrant social safety nets for protection and action. This is not a romantic view of the continent. It is a pragmatic acknowledgement of the continent’s real situation, one to which ­Africans have responded in resilient ways, even if at great human cost. Lockdowns, at least theoretically, weaken these safety nets by depriving individuals both of sources of livelihood as well as of opportunities for bonding.¹²⁰

As we have seen, this danger, which was clear to Macamo in early April 2020, has been borne out by events. As noted in a December 2022 Afrobarometer report: ‘government orders closing borders, restricting domestic travel, closing businesses … are likely to have had much more far-reaching effects on trade, sales, employment, and personal income [than health]… The International Energy Agency estimates that 15 million people who had recently gained access to electricity could no longer afford it’.¹²¹

More recently, the socio-economic consequences of COVID-19 lockdowns were considered at a seminar on 5 April 2024 given by Toyin Falola at the University of Lagos. Discussing the socioeconomic impacts of the past few years, Falola said:

Creating a lockdown in Africa for a sickness … will be an attempt to indirectly damage Africa and force it to rely on the charity of foreign powers to survive. … The African economies are still reeling from the tremendous losses that followed. The question of whether Africa is low-income or not is just part of the argument. Nonetheless, if any lockdown measures are implemented, they will have little opportunity to become high-income or maintain satisfactory economic positions.¹²²

Many of the world’s leading intellectuals from Africa have therefore taken public positions on the COVID-19 pandemic response and the prospects for future similar responses. Falola likens this to ‘an incident that is comparable to colonialism’.¹²³ In such circumstances, it is to be expected that, worldwide, scholars of African studies will deploy relevant frameworks to analyse and indict this neocolonialism. This has already happened in some cases, with the urban spatial injustice and impossibility of the Western biomedical response examined early on by scholars such as Kihato and Landau,¹²⁴ and Green’s broader focus on neocolonial injustices.¹²⁵

In many cases, however, the academic literature on COVID and Africa has reproduced tropes shaped by a neoliberal—and thereby necessarily neocolonial—conceptualization of agency. Discussion of the socio-economic impacts relates devastating experiences to the ‘precarities’ associated with the era of globalization.¹²⁶ Much of this literature focuses on core concepts such as ‘vulnerability’,¹²⁷ ‘food security’, and ‘resilience’¹²⁸—all of them concepts related to the expansion of neoliberal frameworks of indebtedness and inequality.

A particular focus in much of this literature is on vulnerability.¹²⁹ Protecting the vulnerable was seen as a vital collective act, celebrating shared vulnerability as human beings. However, what has emerged here is the triumph of discourse over materiality prefigured by the collapse of Marxist states in the 1990s. Laudable though this discursive idea of vulnerability may be in the seminar room, enacting a policy that has rendered hundreds of millions of people newly vulnerable is hardly a successful embodiment of it. There may, in fact, be a way in which a focus on vulnerability creates a perceived need for paternalistic protection of those deemed vulnerable.¹³⁰

Instead, what has been lacking in so much of the academic response to COVID-19 is a structural critique of neoliberal and neocolonial capitalism. This is curious, since the response so clearly follows the model set out by Naomi Klein in her famous book on disaster capitalism, The Shock Doctrine,¹³¹ and in another book, so popular in recent years, Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.¹³² In this article, we have attempted to develop the analysis of both of these books to consider how externalized shocks were used during the pandemic to engineer massive profiteering and impoverishment, as losses were outsourced to the African poor. This was imposed through surveillance techniques and the capacity of new technologies to enable remote ‘work’ for the middle classes and the accumulation of economic value to the digital economy.

Scholars working in and on Africa must reflect, therefore, on the urgent need to shed concepts freighted in through neoliberalism, which normalize the economic warfare on Africa, which this article has outlined. As Falola, Macamo, and the Open Letter cited above indicate, these concepts failed to address the neocolonial nature of the pandemic response. While some initial confusion was understandable, especially given the onset of pandemic management in China, the direction of travel quickly became clear. Nevertheless, the desire to ‘show agency’ meant that a dominant majority of Global North academics did not analyse this neocolonial and unscientific assault on the African poor, perhaps for fear of reproducing stereotypes of African poverty. This outcome indicates that the primacy of a discursive agency model over material analyses of inequality failed African experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, indicating a need for a rebalancing of this general framework in the discipline of African Studies.

Conclusion

The analysis outlined here therefore provides more questions than answers, as is intended in what we hope will be the opening of a broad debate. Our discussion shows the urgency of a more systematic analysis by scholars of the relationship between the COVID-19 pandemic response and Africa’s new era of austerity. It also shows how the other side of this coin has been the academic response to the pandemic in the Global North: this replicated the inequalities of the response, through the inability of dominant conceptual frameworks to adequately address neocolonialism and material inequalities. Coming to terms with this will require a collective analysis of the ways in which too much academic thinking has been captured by neoliberal concepts, which normalize economic inequality while often tacitly penalizing those who might turn to materialist analysis in any neo-Marxian sense.

In their recent book Wreckonomics, Ruben Andersson and David Keen show how Western academic frameworks themselves are part of the new war-economies in which crises generate massive corporate profits and institutional inertia among those who can benefit from them.¹³³ In this way, crisis becomes institutionally part of academia, and the financial security that goes with it in an increasingly economically divided world. This analysis must urgently be taken further in order to understand the mechanisms of how and why the pandemic response reproduced entrenched modes of neocolonial governance and outcomes on the continent—and why, conversely, the Western academic world often seemed incapable of discussing this, even when the evidence was so abundant, as this article has illustrated.

Conflict of interest. None declared.

Author notes

© The Author(s) 2026. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal African Society.