Africa: An Ebola "Fortress Strategy" Will Fail - Lessons from the Past

In late 2014, I watched the Zaire strain of Ebola overwhelm Liberia and Sierra Leone following its emergence from Patient Zero, a two-year-old toddler in Southern Guinea. The international community was frozen in bureaucratic inertia.

I remember a frantic 48 hours spent coordinating emergency lines between Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and U.S. congressional leaders to bypass gridlock in Washington and catalyze White House action—an operational challenge I detailed in the epilogue of my memoir, Choosing the Hero.

Yet, out of that raw friction, a groundbreaking public-private partnership emerged, driven by ArcelorMittal, Liberia’s largest investor. Rather than evacuating personnel, the company kept operating, protected its workforce, and spearheaded the Ebola Private Sector Mobilization Group (EPSMG)—a coalition of over 40 multinational mining, logistics, and energy companies across Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea.

Working alongside healthcare responders, the EPSMG pooled heavy machinery to construct treatment units, synchronized supply chains, offered access to clinics and transport, and shared daily protocols. The coalition proved that multinational infrastructure could serve as a vital stabilizing force. This case study remains a definitive, actionable model for crisis teamwork in developing countries.

Twelve years later, a similar crisis is unfolding across East and Central Africa. A significant outbreak of the Bundibugyo Ebola strain is expanding rapidly through the mineral-rich fields of the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and into Uganda. Today's mining companies, facing intense operational and safety mandates, are understandably relying on an inward-looking strategy, creating heavily secured perimeters to insulate their immediate workforces and protect industrial continuity.

But these corporate operations cannot isolate themselves from how the virus moves. Transmission is being driven by highly mobile artisanal miners navigating cross-border trade routes. The outbreak has already pushed past 900 suspected cases and more than 130 laboratory-confirmed cases.

Because the Bundibugyo strain lacks an approved vaccine or therapeutic stockpile, containment relies entirely on field diagnostics, aggressive contact tracing, and physical isolation—capabilities that corporate infrastructure is uniquely positioned to help scale.

Responding to domestic pressure, the Trump administration has adopted a fortress mentality. This is highlighted by a plan to construct a 50-bed quarantine field hospital at an airbase in central Kenya