Congo’s Ebola Outbreak Is the Fastest-Growing Ever Recorded
Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.
The highlights this week: Public health bodies struggle to keep up with the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak ever recorded, Addis Ababa holds a highly anticipated Ethiopian national dialogue, and Nigeria announces plans to take greater ownership of its domestic humanitarian response.
The Ebola outbreak in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo is the fastest-growing outbreak of the disease ever recorded—and according to the World Health Organization (WHO), the epidemic is now “outpacing” response efforts.
The Congolese government has confirmed 2,473 cases, including more than 1,000 deaths, since the outbreak was first reported in May. Health officials think the number could be four times higher. Ebola has occurred intermittently in Africa since 1976, but the 2013-16 outbreak, previously considered the worst on record, took eight months to reach 1,000 deaths.
More than 80 percent of new Ebola cases are being found outside of known transmission chains. “About two-thirds of deaths are occurring in communities, among people who never receive care in a health facility,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned last week. This makes it harder to enforce safe burials and funerals to stop disease spread.
Thierno Baldé, an incident manager at the WHO, said on Tuesday, “Let’s be very clear, this outbreak remains ahead of us and we are still in the phase of catching up.”
The outbreak is being driven by the rare Bundibugyo virus, whose early symptoms can mimic other illnesses, such as the flu, making detection harder. No approved vaccines or specific treatments exist yet for the Bundibugyo strain.
Around 90 percent of the known cases are in Congo’s eastern Ituri province, where there is ongoing conflict between the federal government and the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a Ugandan Islamist group that has operated out of eastern Congo since the 1990s.
The ADF is among the more than 100 militias plundering gold and other minerals from eastern Congo. Experts believe that the virus spread largely undetected throughout many of those mines this spring. The outbreak was also likely worsened by the lack of a coordinated health response among the government and rebel groups.
That dynamic is especially pronounced in the eastern provinces of North and South Kivu, where the public health response has been split between the federal government and the M23 rebel group. M23 operates its own response in the cities of Goma and Bukavu, both of which it seized last year and has since established parallel governments in.
In M23-controlled regions, only four Ebola cases have been officially recorded. In a bid to legitimize itself as a governing body, M23 and its broader political coalition, the Congo River Alliance, declared late last month that the Ebola outbreak was “over” within the territories under their control. M23’s declaration followed a selective 21-day monitoring window, during which the rebels imposed a strict lockdown and suspended bus routes.
Yet the areas under M23 control are on the periphery of the outbreak, and international analysts told Reuters that the small numbers are an inadequate test of its ability to contain the virus.
Lack of funding is a major problem in the overall response to the outbreak. Last week, the WHO warned that it had received less than half of the $115 million that it needs to address the epidemic in Congo.
The European Union has pledged around $572 million to support Africa’s Ebola response, while the Trump administration has given more than $220 million and made available an experimental drug called MBP134 to treat the virus. But Washington has also drawn criticism amid the outbreak for eroding the U.S. Agency for International Development, withdrawing from the WHO in January, and instating strict Congo travel bans that could hinder humanitarian action.
Meanwhile, some of Congo’s healthcare workers have been on strike since last week over unpaid wages and inadequate working conditions. In one hospital in northeastern Ituri, workers said that they hadn’t been paid since the beginning of the outbreak.
Emergencies such as Ebola outbreaks “persist not because the world lacks scientific knowledge,” Annie Sparrow and Daniel Lucey wrote in Foreign Policy in May, “but because conflict, inequity, collapsing vaccination systems, and political fragility continue to erode the foundations of public health.”
Wednesday, July 29: The U.N. Security Council discusses extended targeted sanctions in the Central African Republic.
Ethiopia dialogue. Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s highly anticipated national dialogue began on July 15, as roughly 4,000 delegates gathered in Addis Ababa to reach a consensus on constitutional and electoral reforms. The dialogue is expected to continue for the next few weeks.
The dialogue, which was first launched in 2022 to address the fallout of a two-year civil war in Tigray, seeks to resolve the country’s deep-rooted political, social, and ethnic divisions.
While experts agree that the talks are necessary, the dialogue has sparked criticism for taking place amid ongoing conflict in Ethiopia’s Amhara, Oromia, and Tigray regions and not involving armed groups, including the Fano in Amhara, the Oromo Liberation Army, and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).
Constitutional changes may also prove to be difficult because they require two-thirds approval from regional councils—a majority that is unlikely to happen in regions such as Tigray. In May, the TPLF, the region’s leading party, ousted factions in the federally backed interim administration in Tigray and reinstated its prewar leadership. The TPLF has boycotted the dialogue.
Congo’s canceled protests. Opposition groups in Congo have canceled protests against a referendum bill that could change the constitution after the government agreed to hold a national dialogue.
The C64 alliance—which takes its name from Article 64 of the Congolese Constitution, which obliges citizens to oppose power grabs—had planned to hold demonstrations on July 22 in the capital of Kinshasa after accusing President Felix Tshisekedi of using the bill as a path to serving an illegal third term in office.
Following talks with the African Union, both sides have agreed to a dialogue mediated by religious organizations, to be held before Aug. 15.
Nigeria aid plan. Last week, the Nigerian government declared that it would take over domestic humanitarian response planning duties from the U.N. by January 2027. The announcement comes as African governments look to make themselves more resilient to shocks, as international aid to the continent has dwindled in recent years.
Nigeria’s minister of humanitarian affairs, Bernard Doro, suggested that Abuja will rely on more government and private-sector funding to cushion the decline of traditional foreign aid. As a petrostate, the country has sought in recent months to take advantage of record oil prices due to the war in Iran. Nigeria’s crude oil production rose to an average of 1.56 million barrels per day in June, its highest level in more than six years.
Last year, a temporary freeze on U.S. development aid by the Trump administration forced the Nigerian parliament to inject $200 million into its budget to cover gaps in malaria, HIV, and vaccination programs. A bill targeting alleged Christian persecution in Nigeria passed the U.S. House of Representatives earlier this month, threatening an absolute freeze on development resources if ratified by the Senate. (Nigerians of all faiths are affected by insecurity.)
Kenya’s Ebola facility. Evangelical Christian humanitarian group Samaritan’s Purse has said that seven of its American aid workers are isolating at a controversial U.S. quarantine center in Kenya, despite a Kenyan court order preventing the facility’s opening.
The individuals are undergoing a 21-day quarantine made mandatory under the Trump administration’s policy that requires citizens returning from Congo to isolate in a third country before entering the United States.
Katiba Institute, a Kenyan civil society group, denounced the use of the facility as “a flagrant and dangerous defiance” of Kenya’s High Court and its constitution.
On Wednesday, Kenyan Health Secretary Aden Duale refused to answer questions about the aid workers. “I don’t know why you are focused on America. There are also employees of the president quarantined too for 21 days,” he told local media. Kenya has no known Ebola cases.
Sahrawi odyssey. In the Guardian, Sahrawi filmmaker Mohamed Sleiman Labat argues that Christopher Nolan’s decision to film part of The Odyssey in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara is a “betrayal” that erases the 50-year displacement of the Indigenous Sahrawi people.
As Labat writes, Nolan’s film, which explores themes of displacement and a “decades-long struggle to return home,” was shot in a place where local filmmakers face imprisonment for documenting life under occupation.
“Today, half of our people languish in refugee camps in the Algerian desert, while the other half lives under a suffocating military police state, separated by a 2,700km militarised wall built by Morocco and fortified with millions of landmines,” he writes.
Nigerian diplomacy. In Foreign Policy, Ebenezer Obadare argues that Nigeria’s foreign policy, far from being in decline, is experiencing a resurgence under President Bola Tinubu, whose administration has successfully managed diplomatic tensions with the United States and begun to reassert Abuja’s influence in West Africa.
“Overall, Tinubu has been guided by a concern about safeguarding liberal democracy in Nigeria’s immediate neighborhood—an instinct that makes complete sense in light of his background as a pro-democracy activist who was once forced into exile by the military,” Obadare writes.
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