50 TheEconomistOctober 17th 2020
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eople werehungry during lockdown.
So Francis Zaake, a Ugandan member of
parliament, bought some rice and sugar
and had it delivered to his neediest constit-
uents. For this charitable act, he was arrest-
ed. Mr Zaake is a member of the opposition,
and Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni
has ordered that only the government may
hand out food aid. Anyone else who does so
can be charged with murder, Mr Museveni
has threatened, since they might do it in a
disorderly way, attract crowds and thereby
spread the coronavirus.
Mr Zaake had been careful not to put his
constituents at risk. Rather than having
crowds converge on one place to pick up
the food parcels, he had them delivered to
people’s doors by motorbike-taxi. None-
theless, the next day police and soldiers
jumped over his fence while he was show-
ering and broke into his house. They
dragged him into a van and threw him in a
cell. He says they beat, kicked and cut him,
crushed his testicles, sprayed a blinding
chemical into his eyes, called him a dogand told him to quit politics. He claims that
one sneered: “We can do whatever we want
to you or even kill you...No one will dem-
onstrate for you because they are under
lockdown.” The police say he inflicted the
injuries on himself and is fishing for sym-
pathy with foreign donors.
The charges against him were eventual-
ly dropped, but the message was clear. “The
president doesn’t want the opposition to
give out food,” says Mr Zaake, who walks
with crutches and wears sunglasses to pro-
tect his eyes. “He knows that people will
like us [if we do].”
The pandemic has been terrible not
only for the human body but also for the
body politic. Freedom House, a think-tank
in Washington, counts 80 countries where
the quality of democracy and respect for
human rights have deteriorated since the
pandemic began. The list includes both
dictatorships that have grown nastier and
democracies where standards have
slipped. Only one country, Malawi, has im-
proved (see map overleaf ). Covid-19 “hasfuelled a crisis for democracy around the
world,” argue Sarah Repucci and Amy Sli-
powitz of Freedom House. Global freedom
has been declining since just before the fi-
nancial crisis of 2007-08, by their reckon-
ing. Covid-19 has accelerated this pre-exist-
ing trend in several ways.
The disease poses a grave and fast-mov-
ing threat to every nation. Governments
have, quite reasonably, assumed emergen-
cy powers to counter it. But such powers
can be abused. Governments have selec-
tively banned protests on the grounds that
they might spread the virus, silenced crit-
ics and scapegoated minorities. They have
used emergency measures to harass dissi-
dents. And they have taken advantage of a
general atmosphere of alarm. With every-
one’s attention on covid-19, autocrats and
would-be autocrats in many countries can
do all sorts of bad things, safe in the knowl-
edge that the rest of the world will barely
notice, let alone object.
Measuring the pandemic’s effect on de-
mocracy and human rights is hard. With-
out covid-19, would China’s rulers still have
inflicted such horrors on Muslim Uyghurs
this year? Would Thailand’s king have
grabbed nearly absolute powers? Would
Egypt have executed 15 political prisoners
in a single weekend this month? Perhaps.
But these outrages would surely have faced
stronger opposition, both at home and
abroad. Granted, the current American ad-
ministration makes less fuss about humanCovid-19 and libertyNo vaccine for cruelty
ALMATY, ISTANBUL, KAMPALA, MEXICO CITY AND SÃO PAULO
The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human rightsInternational