BURUNDI-HEALTH: The High Price of Sanctions

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

BUJUMBURA, Oct 15 1996 (IPS) - As far as his relatives are concerned, Andrien Ndikuriyo paid with his life for sanctions imposed on Burundi by its neighbours.

Ndikuriyo, who was a history professor at the University of Burundi, had been on a life-support system since suffering a stroke on Sep. 23. He died on Oct. 13 in the Prince Rwagosora Hospital here.

“Were it not for the embargo, my brother-in-law (Ndikuriyo) would have been evacuated to Europe,” Innocent Nsabimana, head of the French language section of Radio Burundi, told IPS. “He would be alive now.”

Nsabimana’s view is echoed by the deceased’s widow, Isidora Ndayizeye, who is a doctor at the hospital. “He would have been evacuated either to Belgium or France,” she said.

The embargo also prevented her from obtaining drugs for her husband to prevent complications arising from the stroke. “We have run out of such drugs because of the blockade,” she explained to IPS.

Drugs are among the many basic commodities that have become scarce in Burundi since air, road and water links to this landlocked country were cut off by Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Zaire and Zambia.

They have kept up an embargo they imposed on the Central African nation on Jul. 31 to force de facto president Maj. Pierre Buyoya to return the country to civilian rule. Buyoya, who had ruled Burundi from 1987 to 1993, was catapulted back to power in a Jul. 25 coup d’etat.

The embargo poses a serious threat to health in the country which, according to Burundi’s Director-general of Public Health, Dr. Maregeya Emmanuel, imports up to 90 percent of its drugs.

Maregeya — who had sought the help of the World Health Organisation (WHO) in a vain bid to have Ndikuriyo evacuated to Kenya — said that 23 people in Kirundo, northern Burundi, died from meningitis between Sep. 28 and Oct. 10.

(Meningitis is a disease in which the tissues enclosing the brain and spinal cord become infected and swollen.)

“We don’t have enough stocks of anti-meningitis vaccine in Burundi to contain the epidemic,” said Maregeya, who also fears that the September-February rainy season will be accompanied by outbreaks of dysentery and diarrhoea. “We don’t have drugs for them,” she added.

Immunisation campaigns have also been hampered. Laurent Tugizimana, who works in a World Bank-funded health and population project, recalls being turned away when he took his two-month-old baby for vaccination. “I was told there was no anti-polio vaccine,” he said.

Mutava Theophile, an employee of the local subsidiary of the British drug firm GlaxoWellcome, told IPS last week that stocks in their warehouse were expected to run out within a month “because we haven’t imported anything for two months.”

While the embargo has been relaxed to allow U.N. agencies to send humanitarian aid to Burundi, only limited supplies of drugs have been getting to the country.

Said a pharmacist in Bujumbura: “I haven’t seen empty shelves like this since I started work here 15 years ago. I can tell you that what we are selling here is 15 percent of the total stock we had before the sanctions.”

Her pharmacy has run out of eye ointments, insulin for diabetics and the inhalers used by asthma sufferers. She said clients usually got upset when they failed to obtain the drugs they needed: “They become excited and start cursing the regional leaders who imposed the blockade against Burundi. We can only look at them, saying nothing.”

Charles Karibwami, a hawker in this lakeside capital told IPS that whenever a Burundian falls ill he blames the sanctions.

Maregeya said Burundi’s neighbours should allow the delivery of medicines to the country immediately. “Drugs imported by Burundi are being held in Belgium, France, India and Switzerland,” he said. “Others are in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and in Kigali, Rwanda.

“We are discussing with the World Health Organisation, UNICEF (the UN Children’s Fund) and the UN Development Programme to get them here. We hope they arrive in Burundi soon.”

However, even if the sanctions were to be lifted today, it would take some time for the pharmacies to be replenished, unless the medicines were airlifted, in which case they would become more costly.

“It takes three months to import drugs from Europe to Burundi by ship. And it takes about two weeks to import by air,”said Tugizimana. “That means consumers will pay three times more for drugs imported by air,”