It has a name. It has a pattern. It has, by now, a history long enough to constitute a tradition, though no one would choose to call it that. Ebola. The word lands differently depending on where you are standing.ALSO READ: Seven things to know about the latest Ebola outbreak in DR CongoIn Ituri Province in northeastern DR Congo, it lands as a death sentence delivered without warning. In Kigali, it lands as a rehearsed emergency. The difference between those two sentences is not geography. It is governance.This is the seventeenth Ebola outbreak in DR Congo since 1976. The current one caused by the Bundibugyo strain, for which there is no approved vaccine and no specific treatment was declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by the WHO on May 17. As of this writing, more than 1,000 suspected and confirmed cases have been reported, with at least 241 deaths across Ituri, North Kivu, and South Kivu provinces. Cases have reached Uganda's capital Kampala. The WHO Director-General, flying to Kinshasa this week, said the outbreak was likely to get worse before it gets better.ALSO READ: What does the declaration of Ebola as a global health emergency mean?Worse before it gets better. For the seventeenth time.There is something that must be said plainly: the recurring nature of Ebola in DR Congo is not a matter of ecology or bad fortune. It is chronic institutional failure. The first case in this outbreak - a nurse showed symptoms on April 24. She died. Four health workers died in Mongbwalu in a single week before alarm bells sounded.ALSO READ: FDLR impunity is a choice, not an accidentInitial tests came back negative because they targeted the wrong strain. The outbreak burned quietly for weeks before being confirmed publicly on May 15, by which point hundreds of suspected cases had already accumulated. Experts were alarmed that the outbreak had reached such scale before it was even reported.This is not a surveillance failure. It is the predictable consequence of a state that has not built the infrastructure to protect its own people not after the first outbreak, nor the second, nor the sixteenth.Meanwhile, Rwanda moved.On May 17, the same day WHO declared the international emergency, Rwanda's Ministry of Health issued a public alert and reinforced health screening at all border entry points with DR Congo.ALSO READ: Rwanda steps up screening at border crossings despite no Ebola caseBy May 22, all foreign nationals who had travelled through or transited DR Congo within 30 days were denied entry. Rwandan nationals and verified residents could return under mandatory quarantine protocols. Screening at Kigali International Airport was immediately reinforced.No fanfare. No delay. Just the architecture of a state that has decided its people's lives are worth protecting.This is Rwanda's standing practice, not a new invention. A country of nearly 14 million people, with a GDP a fraction of its neighbour's, has built what the vast DR Congo, mineral-rich, internationally funded, has not: a health system that takes the word prevention seriously.The contrast is not one Rwanda should celebrate too loudly. The people dying in Ituri deserve the same protection that Rwandans receive as a matter of policy. The tragedy of DR Congo is not that its people are somehow less deserving. It is that its state has, for decades, failed to show up for them.Ebola will come back. It will be the eighteenth outbreak, then the nineteenth. The question is not whether Rwanda can keep holding the line our record suggests it can. The question is how long DR Congo's people will wait for a state that finally decides to hold it too.The writer is a communications specialist, writer, and strategist.
