By Osy Agbo
On September 23rd, 2019, at an event called The Future Africa Forum held at the African center in Harlem, New York, Mo Ibrahim mouthed what he called a controversial prescription that can help Africa develop, namely: Family planning. In that platform, the Sudanese Billionaire argued that major societal challenges such as violence and extremism are byproducts of population growth outpacing job growth.
Flanked on one side by Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote and on the other by Bill Gates, it seemed like Mo had sensed Mr. Gates’s relative unease about the subject matter. It’s no secret that a Caucasian talking about limiting family size in Africa is the quickest way to invite a harsh blowback. Yet according to the United Nations, Africa’s population is expected to double by 2050 and an estimated 50% of all newborns worldwide will be born in Africa by the end of the century.
In a continent where many of her citizens live under less than a dollar a day, you can’t help but worry about what is to come. To avert this looming disaster, all options need to be on the table. From visionary and purposeful political leadership to engaging in proactive measures to reverse the region’s intractable economic woes.
And yes, we can no longer afford to shy away from addressing the big elephant in the room: limiting family size. “If you have two kids, you can educate them. But if you have seven to eight kids and no jobs, you have Boko Haram”, Mr. Ibrahim was quoted to have said. Africa cannot continue on the path of a planless future in the hope that in the fullness of time a benevolent spirit will come down from heaven to the rescue.
No sooner had the meeting ended than the spin doctors turned everything upside down. They labelled the summit as Mr. Gates’s African population controls strategy. They cleverly refused to even mention that Mo Ibrahim, himself an African was the one that brought the issue up or acknowledged that Aliko Dangote was also there at the summit. The far-right media were only interested in Bill Gates and aggressively sponsored fake news and social media campaign against him.
They called him a racist and an eugenicist and launched publications to portray him as such. As always the case, many in Africa and some in the diaspora bought into this massive misinformation campaign and swallowed it hook, line and sinker.
Forbes listed William Henry Gates III’s net worth at a whopping $104.1Billion. From 1995 to 2017, he held the title of the richest man in the world all but four of those years. As I write this piece, he is easily the most recorgnisable name alive in terms of wealth and riches.
Am not sure what more is there for this 64 year-old to achieve in terms of material acquisition. Perhaps coming to such an understanding informed what he committed to do with his wife Melinda when in the year 2000, they launched their foundation in Seattle, Washington. Today, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is reported to be the largest private foundation in the world, holding $46.8 billion in assets. Among other things, his charity focuses heavily on public health worldwide and has committed large sums of money in areas of development of vaccines for different kinds of diseases in developing world.
In 2009, Gates and his long time friend, Warren Buffet founded The Giving Pledge. They encouraged other billionaires to give at least half of their wealth to charity. Gates went further and pledged to give 99.5% of his fortune away and will leave behind only $30 million to be divided among his three children. Like Buffet, Gates has also been in favor of the rich paying more in taxes which to the American far-right makes them liberal and are therefore sworn enemies.
Wether it’s making a personal donation for Alzheimer’s research, partnering with Swiss tennis legend, Roger Federer in the Match for Africa or through his ubiquitous Foundation, the story is the same. He has deployed his legendary fortune to better countless lives in the poorest of the poor countries of the world. Till date, the Gates have given over $28 billion to charity, a big chunk of which was spent in helping the African poor.
It’s not all the time that his charity and vision are favorably received. For instance when his foundation worked in favor of universal access to voluntary contraceptive services in poor countries, he was vilified. This is not minding that such services had been available to their counterparts living in richer nations of the world decades earlier. In 2014 when Gates decided to donate $50 million to UNAIDS for the purpose of mass circumcision in Zambia and Swaziland, there was a protest in Vancouver. What the protesters may not have known was the report of higher risk for penile cancer among uncircumcised men.
Fast forward today. As the coronavirus pandemic continued to ravage the US, Gates who has been leading efforts in finding a vaccine participated in a Reddit Q&A where he suggested a national tracking system for coronavirus. Per report, he suggested a digital certificates to show who has recovered, been tested recently or who has received a vaccine when it becomes available. Following this, a video surfaced online suggesting that Gates’s statement was a grand plan to implant everybody with a global ID and compared it to tattoos on Holocaust victims. The video quickly went viral with more than 100k views. People forgot that Mr.Gates is still that computer nerd and IT pioneer who founded Microsoft and so it’s not unexpected that his background will influence the way he approaches problems and proffers solutions. That said,It would have been easy to dismiss this as a gross misunderstanding of facts except that Infowars, a known conspiracy theory outlet founded by Alex Jones picked up this theory and gave it a life of it’s own. Infowars was openly spreading misinformation in both Facebook and Instagram.
There is also this other claim about 5G spreading the virus that inspired some lunatics to vandalized masts in the UK. In another twist, two racist French doctors were caught on tape talking about vaccine testing in Africa in the most demeaning of ways. All of a sudden Mr. Gates is back on the news and this time the insinuation was that somehow he must be working with the French docs to force mass vaccination of Africans. Why shouldn’t that be the case since such goes with his life long goal of population control in Africa? If you think such assertion is ludicrous, then you may not have realized that even some very educated folks are helping push such a plain nonsensical narrative.
Few years ago a friend of mine called me up visibly angry and very distraught. A cousin, whom he helped through college with his entire life savings had turned around to accused him of witchcraft. A psychic was able to convince this person that the reason why his family couldn’t make ends meet was because of my friend’s diabolical ways. In fact they told him my friend stole his family’s destiny,whatever that means.
Replace that cousin with poor countries of Asia and Africa and you will not be too far from the current negative portrayal of Bill Gates around Africa. The psychic in this case are the right wing media establishments who for own selfish reasons are no fan of the billionaire. Unlike Mr. Gates, these wicked beings have no interest in doing any good but no one understands the power of the instrument of religion as the most effective weapon to control African minds more than they do. And so you bring up family planning (which they prefer to call population control), 5G and throw in End-time and you have assembled a perfect recipe to cook a thriving conspiracy.Ours is a society where everything is viewed through the prism of religion and all you need to do is mention God or Jesus in one sentence and many would have no need to query what else you have to say. This explains why Mr.Trump,a President whose actions and utterances have been consistently anti-African is still popular among some Nigerians. The same people that demonize Bill Gates as anti-Christ, packaged and sold Trump to us as a defender of Christianity.
The fear of this destructive campaign is that if it continues ,Mr.Gates may likely pull back on the activities of his life-saving charity. The effect will be nothing short of a disaster, impacting mostly poor nations that desperately need his help. In those places, most of his beneficiaries are oftentimes the poorest in the society who had already been abandoned by their own government and with no one else to turn to. Which is why those at the center of this ignominy will surely have blood in their hands .
You don’t have to agree with all the actions of Mr.Gates or follow his recommendations. I can bet with my life that no one will force you to take his vaccine when it finally becomes available. Truth is certain sins are harder to forgive even when commited out of ignorance. The sin of ingratitude is on top of that list. Africa should be rolling out the red carpet for a true hero and not join the American n far-right in their nefarious agenda.
*Osmund Agbo MD,FCCP writes from Houston