By Charles Onyango-Obbo

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The coronavirus pandemic continues to hammer us all. In addition to the deaths, and infections, it will leave very many penniless and jobless.

The African Union (AU) has done some modelling, which has a worst-case scenario of 20 million jobs in the formal and informal sectors being lost in Africa.

Up to 15 per cent of foreign direct investment could disappear, it says, and African governments could lose up to 20 to 30 per cent of their fiscal revenue, estimated at $500 billion in 2019.

AU projects that exports and imports could drop at least 35 per cent from 2019 levels, incurring a loss in the value of trade of around $270 billion. This as they increase public spending to deal with the pandemic by at least $130 billion.

Africa’s tourist sector, which has ground to a halt with borders closed and airlines grounded, will be particularly hard hit. Countries where tourism constitutes a large part of GDP will see their economies contract by an average of 3.3 per cent this year, and where it is the only game in town, economies could shrink by at least seven per cent.

Coronavirus has put constraints on presidential power in ways no forces has done for generations.

Some governments are distributing the largest amounts of free food in the history of their countries to populations in lockdowns, and big men who used to personally hand out a sack of food, aren’t showing up to flag off the goodies.

Presidents who used to directly dole out envelopes stuffed with cash from as low as $50, can’t dare step out and distribute $5 million to the halloi polloi.

It is impossible to imagine that anyone is doing well out of this. Well, no one is, except if you are in pharmaceuticals, selling hand sanitiser, face masks, or batons and tear gas to curfew-enforcing police; but something is.

The biggest beneficiary in East Africa from the Covid-19 pandemic will definitely be Lake Victoria.

At the start of this year, fellow columnist on The EastAfrican Joachim Buwembo, painted one of the bleakest pictures of Lake Nalubaale/Nyanza or Nam Lolwe, to use its original African names.

From the Ugandan side alone, a report had estimated that most cars in the country are older than its human median age of 15.7 years at the time they're imported, which had turned Kampala into East Africa’s leading polluter of Nalubaale. Up to 20 million litres of after-service-oil from these old vehicles ends up in the lake every year.

From Kenya and Tanzania, large amounts of effluents from industries, garbage and sewage from cities all flow into the lake. Combined with the long torment of the water hyacinth, at the time of the Covid-19 outbreak, Nalubaale needed a respirator to breathe.

With the lockdowns and curfews, the flow of the filth in the lake is down, and with fewer fisher people going out, the overfished waters are catching a break and stocks might see a recovery — especially if coronavirus hangs around longer than three months.

There is also a risk though, that the water hyacinth will finally establish itself as the undisputed master of Nalubaale in this period. Besides that, Nalubaale has probably never been happier in 100 years.

Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3