The Covid-19 pandemic has had multiple impacts. Apart from hundreds of thousands of deaths, many economies are now shadows of their former selves, while scores of people have joined the ranks of the unemployed, with no prospect of finding another job any time soon.

One could also add to the litany of impacts the fact that African fat cats, who are wont to dash to an overseas health facility at the slightest hint of illness, are no longer able to do so, what with bans on international travel still in place in many countries. But I have very little sympathy for such people – especially the politicians. In many African countries, the healthcare system is in a sorry state because their priorities are so warped that scarce resources are channelled into irrelevant pursuits. One of the most infamous examples of this is the palatial complex and international airport that the late Mobutu Sese Seko built in a remote part of then Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), while citizens died because clinics and hospitals – where they existed – were understaffed or not sufficiently stocked with medicines.

The people who have my sympathy are the ordinary folk whose livelihoods have been snatched from them by the pandemic. Particularly for those in north-eastern Nigeria, South Sudan and the very DRC that Mobutu ruled with an iron fist for more than three decades, the Covid-19-induced misery is set to intensify. This is according to top United Nations (UN) relief official Mark Lowcock, who warned this month in a letter to members of the Security Council that the risk of famine in these countries had been intensified by natural disasters, economic shocks and public health crises, “all compounded by the Covid-19 pandemic”.

In UN parlance, a famine, which is worse than a ‘food crisis’ or a ‘food emergency’, is characterised by “starvation, death, destitution and extremely critical malnutrition levels”.

Lowcock, who is UN undersecretary for humanitarian affairs, stated in the letter that, in the eastern part of the DRC, 21-million people were living in “crisis or worse levels of food insecurity, while in the north-eastern Nigerian states of Borno, Adamawa and Yobe, which have borne the brunt of Boko Haram attacks, an estimated four out of five people require humanitarian assistance and protection”.

In South Sudan, which has been at civil war for the past seven years, a recent upsurge in violence has left more than 1.4-million people facing what Lowcock describes as “crisis or worse levels of food insecurity”. He added that, two years after the threat of famine was narrowly averted in the country, some regions were deteriorating sharply.

Lowcock’s letter followed remarks, in April, by David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Programme (WFP), the antihunger arm of the UN, in which he warned that, while the world was seized with the Covid-19 pandemic, many people were on the brink of a “hunger pandemic”. He added: “With Covid-19, I want to stress that we are not only facing a global health pandemic but also a global humanitarian catastrophe. Millions of civilians living in conflict-scarred nations, including many women and children, face being pushed back to the brink of starvation, with the spectre of famine a very real and dangerous possibility.”

Should this materialise, it will worsen an already dire situation. According to the WFP, currently, 821-million people go to bed hungry every night, while a further 135-million face crisis levels of hunger or worse. Covid-19 could add 130-million people to this number, according to the agency, raising the total to 265-million. This is a dire picture indeed.