Forum for Economic and Financial Studies 2023; 1(1): 242. Review Article 1 Weakening the weak: A political economy of COVID-19 in Africa Bashir Bello 1,* , Felix Amadi 2 , Bello Salmanu Batsari 3 1 Department of Sociology, Federal University, 632101 Gusau, Nigeria 2 Department of Sociology, Usmanu Danfodio University, 840104 Sokoto, Nigeria 3 Department of Sociology, Umaru Musa Yar’adua University, 820102 Katsina, Nigeria * Corresponding author: Bashir Bello, bashbell2006@yahoo.com ABSTRACT: The coronavirus disease (COVID-19), which began in China at the end of 2019, is said to have infected over seven million people and has been responsible for the deaths of almost 600,000 people. It became a global emergency with its impact on the political, social, and economic lives of the entire world population. The International Monetary Fund and other sources have predicted that the effect of COVID-19 would include recession, and experts have claimed it would be orchestrated by commodity plummet, drops in tourism, inconsistent supply and demand, etc. Importantly, as COVID-19 advances in Africa, it is pertinent to address the peculiar nature of its impact on the African countries’ social, political, and economic atmosphere. The whole impact of COVID-19 seems to be weakening the weak African countries, considering the conspicuous challenges individual African countries are confronted with. This paper explores and explicates the political economy of COVID-19 in African countries. The paper was a desktop approach analysis of the political economy of COVID-19 and relevant materials were used from textbooks, the internet, and other journals. KEYWORDS: COVID-19; political economy; weakening; the weak African 1. Introduction It became pertinent to examine the political economy of COVID-19 in Africa, especially because the virus was described as what could lead to mass death and the possible extermination of many Africans [1] . It may be difficult to assess the exact impact of COVID-19 on Africa, basically because, up to date, the occurrence differs and apparently the fatality rate seems low [2] . The advent of COVID-19 in China and, subsequently, other parts of the world recorded several infections and deaths [3] . The fear of the devastating destruction that the pandemic is capable of causing in Africa fomented many scholars and scientists, who raised fear as to the fact that if such a pandemic permeates Africa, so many lives would be lost [4] . When it eventually got to Africa, beginning in Egypt, people became scared from the inception, and so many described it as a death sentence, and those infected were stigmatized and avoided [5] . Subsequently, the numbers continue to increase on a daily basis; however, the fatality rate is not increasing equally as the infectious rate. This shows that there was hope, as the pessimism raised in Africa regarding the fatality of the pandemic on the continent has become phantasmagoria. The prediction or warning by WHO that the pandemic could kill between 83,000 and 190,000 people in about 47 African countries in the first year seems to have been repressed by reality [6] . However, it was not yet “uhuru” for Africans, as the ARTICLE INFO Received: 22 September 2023 Accepted: 2 November 2023 Available online: 23 November 2023 doi: 10.59400/fefs.v1i1.242 Copyright © 2023 Author(s). Forum for Economic and Financial Studies is published by Academic Publishing Pte. Ltd. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/