The catastrophic impact of Covid lockdown policy in Ghana

CG’s Professor Toby Green hosts an enlightening discussion with Samuel Adu-Gyamfi, Head of History and Political Science at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana.

Topics discussed include:

- The impact of lockdown on the informal economy: "Preventing movement is simply taking away the lifeblood of virtually the entire country's economy."

- The West's misunderstanding of the importance of COVID vaccines in Ghana: "It's like dropping a sugar cube in the ocean. It doesn't make sense."

- The effect on the dependency ratio: "Those who are breadwinners have now become dependents as they are now going to depend on the government to support them."

- As well as the accuracy of the COVID death counts and how lockdowns actually accelerated the spread of COVID-19 due to the social architecture and built environments of Ghana.

Toby Green, Professor of Precolonial and Lusophone African History and Culture at King's College, London. Author, A Fistful of Shells and The Covid Consensus: The New Politics of Global Inequality (Hurst). Writes on impacts of Covid restrictions at African Arguments, Prospect, UnHerd, The Wire. Member of CG Scientific Advisory Board.

Samuel Adu-Gyamfi is the Head of History and Political Studies of KNUST. His research focus is in Applied History including the social studies of health and medicine in Africa .Through Applied History, he makes explicit attempt to illuminate current challenges and choices by analyzing historical precedents and analogues. He begins with a current choice or predicament and provides a perspective from history. His current project focuses on epidemics and pandemics in Ghana focusing on Asante.