INTRODUCTION

When a crisis violently disrupts a society's way of life, who reacts first? And how? In this chapter we use recent crisis management conceptual frameworks to explore the African dimensions. Do African decision makers and leaders approach crises differently from their counterparts elsewhere? Indeed, how do they make sense of a chaotic, even catastrophic situation, and act to preserve and protect what they can? Do they – and the institutions within which they operate – learn any lessons? We draw on the dynamics of the Ebola crisis that afflicted West Africa in 2014 and 2015 to explore the conceptual assumptions.

The patterns of response and early warning observed in our West African case study (Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone) lead us to conclude that weak governance is a challenge that goes beyond fragile health systems. In this chapter, we demonstrate the correlation between the spread of the disease and poor governance. We do this by pointing out how poor crisis management and weak institutions exacerbated the spread of Ebola.

The chapter concludes with an assessment of the value of crisis management models; points to areas in which it can be strengthened for use in settings where fragile states exist; and, finally, reflects on the underlying reasons for weaknesses, absences and failures in such states.

ORIENTATION

A crisis is a sudden and unexpected event that threatens an established way of life. Crises tend to disrupt people's understanding of the world around them, therefore testing the resilience of a group or society, and often exposing the shortcomings of its leaders and public institutions. Another way to understand crisis is to think of it as ‘breakdowns of familiar symbolic frameworks that legitimate the pre-existing sociopolitical order’ (Boin, McConnell and 't Hart 2008: 3). Antiimperialists tend to view these ‘breakdowns’ as problems of capital accumulation – when a system's reproduction cannot be self-corrected using the internal logic of the system (Cox 1987: 269).