THE DISTRESS OF NATIONS WITH PERPLEXITY
Many third-world countries today are in a desperate predicament. Primarily because it’s impossible for them to balance their external trade accounts. They are incapable of producing enough desirable goods and services to sell abroad. To enable them to earn all the foreign exchange that they need. To purchase the capital goods, food, and medicines, which their nationals are so anxious to consume. Predictably, presidents and prime ministers go to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Cap in hand to beg for loans, which cannot solve their economic problems but are merely a debt trap. Because in order to obtain such financial assistance. They in turn have to drastically devalue their own currencies. Further impoverishing their citizenry and compounding the problem. Unfortunately, most of these loans are used not to facilitate capital development. So that at some future date the country would produce more wealth to pay for its consumption. Instead, such loans are utilized for overhead expenses. Consequently, the relationship with foreign International Financial Institutions, instead of being a brief affair, becomes a permanent marriage. Goodbye colonialism and welcome to neocolonialism. “The more things change the more they remain the same.”
The heads of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank warned Wednesday that rising interest rates are squeezing the world’s poorest countries as they struggle with the coronavirus and soaring food prices. There is “a huge buildup of debt, especially in the poorest countries,” World Bank President David Malpass said in a press conference. “As interest rates rise, the debt pressures are mounting on developing countries, and we need to move urgently towards solutions.‘’ IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva told reporters Wednesday that 60 percent of low-income countries were in or near “debt distress” — an alarming threshold reached when their debt payments equal half the size of their national economies. Countries that strain to pay their creditors will also struggle to help their poorest citizens at a time when the Ukraine war is disrupting food shipments and pushing food prices higher. Countries around the world piled on debt to shield their economies from the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic and the lockdowns meant to contain it. The IMF forecasts that government debts in low-income countries will surpass 50 percent of gross domestic product — the broadest measure of economic output — this year, up from less than 44 percent in the pre-pandemic year 2019. (ALJAZEERA: IMF, World Bank warn of ‘huge buildup of debt’ in poorest nations, 20 April 2022).
Perplexity is a part of this global equation because there seems to be no rational way out of this distressing continuum.
THE PHENOMENAL INCREASE IN PESTILENCE
In Thesaurus.com Pestilence is defined as:
- A deadly or virulent epidemic disease.
2. bubonic plague.
3. Something that is considered harmful, destructive, or evil.
Since Jesus made that pronouncement in the first century C.E., various health catastrophes have afflicted the human race down through the centuries of time during the course of the last two millennia. Each succeeding pestilence was more devastating than the previous one. Initially, hundreds of lives were lost but as the years rolled by each new plague claimed thousands, then hundreds of thousands in succeeding eras. Now such losses run into millions of lives. History’s seven deadliest plagues are as follows:
Plague of Justinian: 30-50 million people (541-549 A.D.)
The disease – now confirmed to be bubonic plague – reached Constantinople, capital of the Late Roman or Byzantine Empire, in 541 AD. It was soon killing 10,000 people a day. Corpses littered public spaces and were stacked like produce indoors. It was perhaps the first major outbreak of bubonic plague the world had seen and the record suggests that it extended across continents, reaching Roman Egypt, the Mediterranean, Northern Europe and the Arabian Peninsula.
Black Death: 75-200M (1334-1353)
The second pandemic of the bubonic plague likely sprang up in north-eastern China, killing maybe five million, fast. It moved west, through India, Syria and Mesopotamia. In 1346 it struck a trading port called Kaffa in the Black Sea. Ships from departing Kaffa carried trade goods and also carried rats, who carried fleas, who carried Yersinia Pestis. In October 1347, 12 such ships docked at Messina in Sicily, their hulls full of dead and dying sailors. By the time harbour authorities realised what the ships brought, it was too late. Over the next five years, the Black Death killed almost half of Europe.
The Third Plague: 12 million (1855 – 1959)
It had never completely gone away, but the bubonic plague resurged violently in 1855. Beginning in Yunnan, China, it spread to the port cities of Guangzhou and Hong Kong by 1894. Outbound ships seeded burgeoning clusters in Bombay, Calcutta, Cape Town and San Francisco by the turn of the century. It didn’t stop there: before 1959, some 12 million people across the world – half of them in India – would be dead. But science was catching up, meaning that this would be the final pandemic of the bubonic plague. The causative bacterium, Yersinia pestis, was identified in 1894 in Hong Kong.
1918 flu: 50-100 million (1918-1920)
Five days after the pandemic influenza of 1918 made landfall at Brevig Mission, a remote village in Alaska, 90 percent of the community was dead. In Philadelphia, priests collected corpses in horse-drawn carts. In parts of India the devastation was so complete that bodies were left out for the jackals to pick at. It arrived in Bombay in June 1918 on troop ships returning soldiers from the battlegrounds of World War I and, by year’s end, had claimed possibly as many as 18.5 million lives in South Asia. Freetown, Liberia, lost four percent of its population in three weeks. Persia may have lost as many as 22 percent of its people. 50 to 100 million people the world over died before rising immunity blunted the virus’s threat.
New World Smallpox: 25-56 million (1520 – early 1600s)
Smallpox had been a familiar scourge in many parts of the world for centuries when the first Europeans arrived on American shores. 20-60% of those it infected in Europe died. Survivors emerged immune. But the pre-Columbian indigenous people of America were immunologically naïve to the variolavirus that landed aboard a Spanish ship at present-day Veracruz, Mexico in April 1520, hidden in the body of an infected, enslaved African man. The continent was perfectly vulnerable. The outbreak seeded by first contact was catastrophic, but it was only the first volley. Waves of infection broke on the continent for decades. Whoever didn’t die of smallpox was killed by the imported influenza that chased the smallpox or the measles epidemic that surged in its wake. A mind-blowing 90 percent of the indigenous population perished.
HIV/AIDS: 27.2-47.8 million (1981 – current)
The HIV virus may have first crossed over from chimpanzees to humans in the Democratic Republic of the Congo via blood contact around 1920. It spread more-or-less undetected until 1981, when a virulent pneumonia and rare cancer called Kaposi’s Sarcoma began to crop up among gay men in the US. By year’s end, there were 270 reported cases. 121 of them had already died. It’s possible, however, that by 1980, HIV was already on five continents, infecting between 100,000 and 300,000 people. By 1987, when the WHO launched the Global Program on AIDS, an estimated 5-10 million people worldwide were living with HIV. Today, despite massive advances in the treatment and management of HIV, it remains incurable. The number of people infected stands at around 38 million, with more than two-thirds of those patients living in Sub-Saharan Africa.
COVID-19: 5-17 million (2020 – current)
You probably know this one: in December 2019, a series of unusual pneumonia cases cropped up in Wuhan, China. At first, health officials offered reassurance: the new coronavirus wasn’t being passed from human to human. That quickly proved false. In late January 2020, the WHO declared COVID-19 a global health emergency. By March, there were cases in 114 countries. Nations around the world cascaded into lockdown. A year and a half later, 17 million people are estimated to have died; many survivors have lingering symptoms. The risks of the pandemic – of the social and economic disruptions, the psychological toll on healthcare workers across the world, the deepening global inequality due to uneven vaccine access – are still resolving. (VACCINES WORK: History’s Seven Deadliest Plagues by Maya Prabhu , Jessica Gergen 15 November 2021).
These scourges are not the result of blind coincidence. They are judgments, the manifestations of divine displeasure. Intended to bring humanity to repentance. To turn man towards The Creator of Heaven and earth. So that he might accept Jesus Christ as Saviour from Sin and obey the divine mandates (The Ten Commandments). Unfortunately, however, we read:
“But the rest of mankind, who were not killed by these plagues, did not repent of the works of their hands, that they should not worship demons, and idols of gold, silver, brass, stone, and wood, which can neither see nor hear nor walk. And they did not repent of their murders or their sorceries or their sexual immorality or their thefts.” Revelation 9:20-21. (NKJV).
aadventuresinghana.wordpress.com 