By Mabinty M. Kamara
The Mano River Union (MRU) has disclosed plans to support member states in the fight against Coronavirus, which has posed a major global health threat.
Ambassador Medina A. Wesseh, MRU Secretary General, said there was a need for collaboration among its member states and that the Secretariat was working on a plan to coordinate such.
“Over the coming days and weeks, we will be coordinating and seeking urgently needed assistance from development partners to support a sub-regional approach in our effort to arrest the grave and existential threat this virus poses to our national health systems in the MRU space,” she told journalists at a press briefing held at the bloc’s Secretariat in Freetown on Thursday.
Ambassador Wesseh later told Politico that they intended to engage stakeholders of the various countries to know their specific needs on which the MRU can come in as an entity.
“As a sub-regional entity we will take a sub-regional approach. We will reach out to each of our member states to ask. This is what we are doing now,” she said.
Ms Wesseh and her team were scheduled for a meeting with Minister of Health, Dr Alpha Tejan Wurie on the same day as part of this engagement.
She called for calm while admonishing all member states to remain vigilant, noting that the public should rely on credible sources of information in making decisions in light of the coronavirus pandemic. She said national public health intuitions and the mainstream media should be the focus, rather than social media which is awash with misleading information that could contribute to panic.
Ambassador Wesseh further noted that the MRU were very mindful of the devastating effect of the Ebola virus disease that wreaked socio economic havoc on three of the four MRU countries – Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone – all of whom were yet to recover fully from the shocks five years after the epidemic ended.
The MRU Secretary General reiterated that the secretariat intended to work in consultation with national and other regional partners to coordinate support to bring this pandemic under control.
“We will remain engaged with traditional and religious Leaders (TRL), community and opinion leaders in the major towns and cities as well as the leaders of MRU Joint Border Security and Confidence Building Units, for social mobilization against the COVID to get communities involved,” she noted.
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