“I am the first Director General of CDC Africa elected by African Heads of State. » There is pride in Jean Kaseya and it is undoubtedly a diplomatic victory for the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which has mobilized to campaign behind its champion in the race to take the helm of the continental health.
The man, freshly landed in Addis Ababa, officially took office as head of the African Centers for Disease Surveillance and Prevention on Monday 17 April. “I hope this is a turning point for our country which, despite its size [le deuxième du continent en superficie et le quatrième en population] and the challenges it faces, is very under-represented in all international bodies”, judges the new head of African health.
A success hailed by Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi the day after his election at the end of February, and immediately challenged by the Rwandan Paul Kagame in a letter sent at the beginning of March to the President of the African Union (AU), the Comorian Azali Assoumani. But the Rwandan president’s attempt to export the tensions between the two countries on the eastern Congolese front by attacking the legitimacy of this former minister of Laurent-Désiré Kabila has failed.
Because it is at the end of a long process of selection among 180 candidates that the doctor, just 53 years old, won against the acting director of CDC Africa, the Kenyan Ahmed Ogwell Ouma, and the Bissau-Guinean Magda Robalo Correia E Silva to take over from the charismatic Cameroonian John Nkengasong, who was appointed when the institution was created in 2016.
“Africans’ first health reflex”
This election, therefore a first, is a symbol for this young pan-African institution called to take more momentum by consolidating the joint strategies of African States. The projects are immense at a time when the continent is going through an economic, social and health crisis unprecedented for thirty years. Famines, epidemics of all kinds, malaria, vaccination delays, impoverishment, inflation and chronic under-investment by States in the health sector, but also a historic drop in public development aid to Northern countries, according to the latest figures of the OECD published on Thursday 13 April.
The first file that the new tenant of the CDC wants to take on is to develop the financial autonomy of the agency and that it become a reference for all Africans. “We are still too little known on the continent, he explained at the end of February on the antenna of Radio Top Congo in a long interview. Even if the Covid crisis and the management by “Doctor John” have put it in the light. I want the first health reflex of Africans in the event of a health crisis to be to seek information from the CDC, as is the case in the United States. »
By proposing in its candidate program to introduce a tax on plane tickets for pan-African air traffic, which could ” to secure “ according to him every year “up to $300 million”financing mechanisms “innovative” which appeal to the communities themselves, Jean Kaseya hopes to make Africans more actors in their own health while limiting the negative effects of national budgets too “modest and fluctuating”.
By encouraging mixed public-private financing, doctors also want to build “strategies with all the partners who want to invest in health in Africa” And “to get the continent out of dependence, from a position of demand”. The failures of the Covax international mutual aid mechanism in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic and the episode of vaccines ordered from India, never delivered due to the breaking of the Omicron wave in January 2022, were real traumas for the leaders. Africans.
Growth phase
A Covid pandemic which has however imposed the pan-African institution as a central actor in the coordination of national responses. “Epidemics circulate, they are not confined to one country, so it is our responsibility to ensure that communities have access to information through all the mechanisms that we put in place. »
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It was after the serious Ebola crisis that hit several West African countries between 2013 and 2014 that the Africa CDC was created. Entering a phase of growth, the health agency must establish itself as the essential body that States must seize to build greater coherence and carry continental ambitions beyond exceptional crises: consolidate epidemiological surveillance, develop collecting and analyzing reliable data, pushing the vaccine manufacturing project on the continent, rolling out universal health coverage.
The World Bank also announced in July 2022 exceptional financing of 100 million dollars (91.2 million euros) to the health agency to strengthen its institutional framework and technical capacities.
To accomplish this well-stocked roadmap, the diversity of the career of the Congolese doctor, who specialized in public health in France after having studied at the head of the Kahemba rural hospital in the south-west of the DRC and Kinshasa hospital at the end of the 1990s, will be decisive.
From the American development aid agency USAID to the Global Fund, via the Atlanta office of the American CDC, Unicef, the World Health Organization, the Clinton Foundation, the GAVI Vaccine Alliance, the Gates Foundation (partner of the World Africa), Jean Kaseya has been involved in the deployment of several plans to fight poliomyelitis, meningitis, HIV, tuberculosis or malaria in the DRC, Angola, Côte d’Ivoire, Congo-Brazzaville and Namibia .
“From a technical structure, the CDC has become a political and strategic body guiding all health policies on the continent.he concludes. The health of all Africans is in our hands. »