30th March 2020 by Linda van Tilburg

The coronavirus is spreading across the planet and countries that thought that they are immune to events on the other side of the world, are falling like dominoes to this ‘unseen enemy’. Scientists are fearing that for Africa it could become a nightmare as the continent’s health care facilities are not as robust or well-funded as the wealthy nations that have recorded thousands of  fatalities up to now. Paul Hoffman, the Director of Accountability Now, known for his day job of chasing after corrupt officials, has come up with a list of the ten lessons we can learn from the pandemic, which is an adaption of the 17 sustainable development goals of the United Nations. Apart from a recommendation that we need “Doctors without Borders on Steroids” to ensure health care as a basic human right for everybody in the world, Hoffman writes that we should recognise that illegal poaching and exports have not been taken seriously and “if the poaching syndicates were in jail, the pangolins would not be in the wet markets.” China and Vietnam have finally banned the consumption of wild animals, but there is a loophole; it does not include the use of wild animals for medicinal purposes and judging from news reports from Australia, many of the wet markets in China have re-opened and are trading as before. – Linda van Tilburg