Disbelief, dysfunction, disaster: Congo’s Ebola outbreak

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Noisy, crowded, dark, violent, terrifying. Our correspondent discusses the conditions inside many of the prisons and jails built in decades past. But architects are updating old designs to make jails more about rehabilitation than retribution. And are you a customer service ninja? Do you have superhero hospitality powers? Do you bring your whole self to work? We take a look at the increasingly absurd language of job adverts. First up, though— A year ago today, an outbreak of Ebola began in Congo. It's grown into the second worst anywhere ever. Some 2,600 people have been diagnosed, of whom about two-thirds have died. Last month, the World Health Organization declared a global emergency, fearing further spread to neighboring countries. The challenges of fighting the outbreak are telling of the broader troubles of this vast, unstable country.

So we were in Congo pursuing a variety of stories, but one of the things that particularly interested me was looking at the east of the country, the parts of it that are afflicted both by Ebola and by conflict.

Robert Guest is The Economist's foreign editor.

Clear.

From the air, you get a sense of how huge Congo is, with the rainforest, savanna, the volcanoes. And it's surprisingly thinly populated. And you see visible signs of rebels, of militiamen hiding in the bush. You see illegal farms in nature parks. What you don't see is paved roads. There are hardly any in Congo. And quite often when you're flying over places, you don't see much in the way of light either. There are whole cities of a million or so that don't have grid electricity. And you see there are checkpoints on bridges where people are made to wash their feet and their hands to try to stop the spread of the disease.

So how can a proper response to the Ebola crisis happen in a place that has so little infrastructure?

What you can do is you can spot people who have high temperatures, put them under observation, test them to see if they develop Ebola. If they do, you isolate them. You can put them behind clear plastic where their families can visit them and see them, but where they won't catch anything from them. And then if someone does have Ebola, And you track all the people they've been in contact with. You ask them, you find out. So you have to emphasize to people that they can be cured. If you get to an Ebola treatment center within a couple of days of contracting the disease, you have more than a 90% chance of being cured. But if you wait until the disease is fully developed after a couple of weeks, you are very probably going to die. So it's essential that you get there quickly. And that's very hard in a place like Congo where there are very few good roads. And on what roads there are, there are often gunmen blocking them.

And so gunmen on the roads are connected to what you're really there for, the attacks on the clinics.

Absolutely. My colleague Olivia Ratland and I flew into Butembo to talk to the people at some of the Ebola clinics there that had been burnt down. Now, you might think that's a bizarre thing for anyone to do, but nonetheless, there have been like 200 attacks so far this year on Ebola workers and Ebola clinics, and it's actually quite common for the gunmen to destroy these places. We met a doctor who'd been there when one of the clinics were burnt down, and she overheard the attackers explaining, if you like, what they were doing. They were accusing the health workers of enriching themselves.

So why would they think that? Why would they think that the doctors trying to solve this disease are enriching themselves?

There are two things. Half the people in in the Ebola zones don't believe that Ebola is real. They think it's something that's been made up. They're intensely suspicious both of their own government, which has always oppressed them, and of outsiders. They've been invaded and brutalized many times. They assume that people in power are using their power to steal money. And so when they see these foreigners coming in in big 4x4s and armored escorts and with clearly lots of money, they assume that anyone working in it must be profiteering. And some of the local warlords and politicians are keen to encourage these kind of dangerous myths because they want a piece of the action. And so they, we believe, stir up attacks against Ebola clinics to punish and deter any of the NGOs who make it too difficult for them to get a piece of the action, to get a piece of the money that's coming in.

And propagate the myth that Ebola isn't even real.

Yes. We spoke to David Gressley, the UN's big honcho coordinating the Ebola response, and he talked about another conspiracy theory.

This came about in part because of the postponement of the elections here in the communities affected by Ebola at the end of December last year. This is during the presidential election, and this was perceived by many, because the rationale was, was that it was due to the Ebola epidemic, that Ebola was manufactured as an excuse to deny them the right to vote for the presidency. And in fact, they were not able to vote for the president. That was a source of much misinformation, disinformation by political leaders who wanted to emphasize that.

So there is this resentment. There is this misinformation about the virus itself. There is this lack of infrastructure. There is ongoing violence, including against the very people who are trying to solve this. I mean, as someone who's been there, what do you think should be done? How could this be fixed?

All the time that thousands and thousands of people were being killed in Congo's various civil wars, the world didn't pay very much attention. They imagined that it wouldn't affect them. Now that the Ebola epidemic has shown that insecurity in Congo does have consequences for the outside world, finally people are starting to pay attention. But it would be great if they could pay attention to the underlying causes of why it's so difficult to stop Ebola epidemics in the country. We're at an interesting political point in Congo now. They've had an appalling, larcenous dictatorship for the past 18 years under President Joseph Kabila, and the good news is that he's not president anymore. The bad news is that the guy who's replaced him, Félix Tshisekedi, didn't win the election in December. There was a stitch-up and there's now a kind of power struggle between the ex-president and the current president. There's an opportunity because it's effectively a new regime for the outside world to have some influence here. It's up to the outside world to be in there to push them in the right direction, to give technical advice, to help with sudden emergencies like Ebola, to keep the UN peacekeeping forces keeping a lid on the east of the country where the government doesn't really control what's happening, and to hope that we can push the country in a direction that frankly the Congolese people want it to go.

But what about right now? The World Health Organization has declared this as a global emergency. Today there's news that Rwanda is taking steps to close its border with Congo. What's the smartest policy at this point?

The knee-jerk response from a lot of people in the outside world is to say that if you've got Ebola in one place, let's seal the borders and stop it from getting out. That's exactly the wrong thing to do. Firstly, you can't possibly seal the borders of a gigantic and ill-governed place like Congo. What you would do is you would make people who wanted to get somewhere go there secretly, which is very easy to do, and then you can't keep track of them. The way you stop something like Ebola going around is you keep track of who's going where, and if you catch someone at a border crossing, at a checkpoint, who's got a very high fever, you can check to see if they've got Ebola, and then you can trace all the people that they've touched. If you drive people underground, you can't do that.

Robert, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you, Jason.

Imagine the inside of a prison. Iron bars, steel doors, concrete walls, and unrelenting noise. HMP Brixton is the oldest prison in London. These recordings were made on its wings by the Prison Radio Association, a charity. They include the sounds of food being served, of people socializing, of radios being played in cells, and prisoners' nighttime emergency alarms going unanswered. They reveal an environment that's crowded, tense, and very loud.

"Them sort of sounds.

It's a bang-up sound.

It's because we're behind our door and we can't get out." Is there a better way to design prisons for those who live and work in them? In America, a rethink is underway.

Well, the challenges of designing jails have evolved.

Emily Bobrow writes for The Economist and is based in New York.

For decades, particularly in America, jails and prisons were seen as spaces for really just warehousing people who are not considered fit for polite society. And they were, you know, spaces that were as merciless as a warehouse sounds, particularly with the tough-on-crime laws in the 1980s and '90s, which drove a boom in facilities. These spaces were just noisy, crowded, dark, violent, and really just kind of terrifying. And basically, cities, states, counties are recognizing that these spaces need to treat the people who are coming in as people who are most likely to return to society. The prisons and jails that we see on screen, where there are loud, noisy metal bars and doors and, you know, very little natural light, That is still by and large what these spaces look like, but that is starting to change.

So where are these changes happening?

So one place where this is happening is New York City. In 2017, New York City's mayor, Bill de Blasio, made what he described as an historic announcement.

New York City will close the Rikers Island jail facility. It will take many years, it will take many tough decisions along the way, but it will happen.

Rikers was built on an island around 80 years ago that was the site of a dump, and it's pretty much functioned accordingly. It's known as being corrupt, crowded, and unfortunate, and the people who are warehoused there tend to be young and poor, and there's a great deal of violence. So the plan is now to replace Rikers with 4 smaller jails by 2026.

So that sounds like an opportunity to kind of start from scratch on jail design. I mean, what kind of factors are being taken into account to make the next places less Rikers-like?

So the new jails are expected to emphasize rehabilitation over retribution. They're meant to be spaces where these prisoners are understood as people who are most likely to be returning to their communities. And so New York City officials are casting about for ideas, where are there jails where this has been done effectively? And there aren't that many experiments in the United States, but one that I know the city has visited is in Denver, where the 1,500-bed Van Cise-Simonett Detention Center was opened in 2010. And what's interesting about this building is that not only is it right in the city center next to the courthouse, but when you pass by it, it actually could be a library or part of a college campus. It just looks like civic architecture. And the space inside is light. There aren't visible bars on windows. There isn't a loud clanking sound. And the actual inmates stay in what are called pods, where up to 64 people spend most of their time. And there is a single deputy in charge of security for an approach to security called direct supervision. Instead of having wardens watch things from a distance on screens or patrol, you know, long corridors, you have a guard with the inmates, understanding who they are, capable of sensing when problems arise before they really flare up become serious problems.

So better design for jails seems to reduce some, some misery as well as some expenditure, but that's not really the core problem, I suppose, right?

I mean, one of the big problems when it comes to incarceration in America is overcrowding, and a number of architects I spoke to said you can't build your way out of overcrowding. You know, the incarceration rate in the US is the highest in the world, and that obviously needs to change. In New York City, the jail population is down around around 50% in 5 years. And that has to do with not only decreasing crime, but also that police are stopping fewer people. Marijuana has been decriminalized. We have certain progressive policy changes such as bail reform. And basically, there are just ways to divert people who might be experiencing a problem away from jail, which is considered expensive and shortsighted as a way to solve these problems. So better design is a good place to start, but only that.

And so from your reporting, is it clear that other places will be following New York's lead on these sort of design considerations?

Well, it's important to recognize that while what New York is doing with Rikers is really a very big deal, New York is not exactly leading the way. There are other places in the country where there have been some interesting experiments with more humane approaches to incarceration. I spoke to one sheriff who said, you know, there's no such thing as a perfect jail, but if there If there was, it would be Las Colinas in San Diego, which when you look at it, it looks like a college campus. And in Iowa, there's a correctional institute where they've created a more normative environment where, you know, it looks like a place where, you know, you understand that you're a human and people want you to be a good person when you're returned back in the world.

The architects that you spoke to, what do they make of this kind of, this general push?

Well, a number of the architects I spoke with who've been working in the field of justice design for decades really view this as a watershed moment. They feel heartened by the ways in which states, cities, counties are recognizing the high costs of incarceration and see value in better design for creating spaces that are less about punishment and more about rehabilitation.

Emily, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you.

Next time you're looking for a new job, you might be asked if you're a team player or an efficient worker.

But you might also be asked if you're a passionate, sales-driven brand ambassador and a rockstar coder.

Philip Coggan writes Bartleby, our column on work and management. He's been witnessing a shift in the qualifications that employers are asking for. They're, well, a bit over the top.

Amongst the jobs on offer are a black belt prioritization ninja, a bartender with superhero hospitality powers, and a call center ninja.

There's a lot of ninjas in there.

There's a lot of ninja. Now, how do you demonstrate that you're a ninja if you're a candidate? Do you dress all in black for the interview? Do you sneak in during the night and appear behind the manager's desk and then startle him? It's very difficult to know why you should want to be a ninja to do a job. It's a medieval Japanese warrior, after all. It's hard to translate that really into everyday 9-to-5 work.

So what is this all about then?

I think it's all about a desire to make jobs sound more exciting in a world where it's not always clear what jobs do involve. No longer are we builders and carpenters and butchers. And it's also a desire to try and up the ante for getting the best possible candidate. So only if you envisage yourself in such grandiose terms do you apply for the job. And there's a danger here, as one reader's already pointed out to me, which is that these jobs and these descriptions are designed to appeal to men much more than women.

How do you suppose that we've ended up here? Why is this the way of going about it then, with your ninjas and your rock stars?

I think it's because we have websites with a vast amount of jobs on offer, and people are just trying to make their candidates stand out. And so we have an adjective inflation at work. You're just a ninja, the next person is a superhero ninja, the third person is a rock star ninja. Only by doing that does your job ad leap out of the long list.

You don't think that there's an element of it that people are going to ask more and more of their employees, and so they're looking for the ones who think they are above and beyond?

I think there is that danger too. So passion is another thing that people ask for, and that's a bit of a worry. So there was one pretzel bakery in West London that wanted a passionate crew member, but they're offering £8 an hour, about $10 an hour. Now, you know, I don't know about you, but if you want me to display passion, I need a bit more than the sort of minimum wage. Naomi Campbell wouldn't get out of bed for less than $10,000. £8 an hour, you know, you don't get passion. You get turning up, yeah, but nothing more than that.

Well, I mean, it takes a very particular kind of job-employee match to inspire passion in the first place.

Yes, and I don't think you can keep passion up for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. I feel passionate about my wife, I feel passionate about England sports teams, No, some days it's hard to believe. I don't always feel passionate about coming into The Economist, but what you do hope for your employees is that they are enthusiastic enough. They don't want to let their comrades down by not turning up.

Would you consider yourself passionate about your work with The Intelligence?

I'm thrilled to be on The Intelligence, and in fact, you know, I'm disappointed when you don't invite me, to be honest. Why aren't I on every day?

Would you consider yourself an intelligence ninja?

No. I would not. I wouldn't consider myself an intelligence bit-part player, but proud to be somewhere down in the end credits.

Philip, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you.

That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts, and you can subscribe to The Economist at economist.com/podcast. Radio offer: 12 issues for $12 or £12. See you back here tomorrow.