THANKFULLY the United Nations has withdrawn its offer to former health secretary Matt Hancock to become a special envoy to help Covid-19 recovery on the continent of Africa. 

Apparently a technicality came to light that prevented the UN from proceeding with the appointment.

I suspect that at the UN they have their fair share of lawyers and bureaucratic processes that pretty much everything would have to pass through to agree even which tea bags to use in formal meetings. 

I am also pretty sure that positions like this do not just emerge out of the blue. Lots of discussion would have taken place. 

It seems highly unlikely that some technicality was overlooked and only came to light after the announcement had been made to stop the appointment of Hancock.

The facts are that Hancock was health secretary when in excess of 155,000 people in the UK died from the virus. 

He was also supposedly at the helm when, according the government’s own statistics, black people were up to five times more likely to be dying from the virus than our white counterparts. 

Hancock presided over what his fellow MPs last week called one of the worst public health failures in British history.

All of these facts are serious enough on their own to disqualify Hancock from any notion that he deserves any reward for his role during the pandemic. But there are other facts.

A year ago the governments of South Africa and India proposed a temporary waiver of some rules covered by the World Trade Organisation called the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (Trips agreement). 

The waiver proposal, supported by more than 100 nations and organisations such as Medicins Sans Frontieres, would remove existing intellectual property barriers on urgently needed Covid-19 vaccines, treatments and tests. In short, it would help to get more jabs in more arms.

Big Pharma, the likes of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, refuse to share their vaccine technology and knowhow with manufacturers in low- and middle-income countries. All in this together? Clearly not. 

Britain and other rich nations, such as Australia, Brazil, Japan, Norway and Switzerland, along with the European Union, have supported profit-driven Big Pharma and blocked this waiver proposal. 

The result is that a year after this was first proposed, more than 3.7 million people have died. 

It is beyond belief that, having been part of the government that prioritised the interests of Big Pharma over getting more vaccines into arms,  Hancock is somehow qualified to be a special envoy to a continent where only around 4.4 per cent of the population have been vaccinated.

So rather than speaking of recovery from Covid-19 across Africa, we are continuing to see the unfolding of a major human tragedy. 

A tragedy, as it so often is in Africa and among its diaspora, wrapped up in the racism that emerges from notions of white supremacy. 

The last thing that Africa needs is a great white saviour coming to its rescue. Hancock, in any case, is certainly not great nor any kind of white saviour.

I suspect that African nations objected to the appointment of Hancock by the UN in this missionary — I mean envoy — role. 

First, because it’s far from a recovery stage and second because his record — never mind what else he was up to that actually forced him to resign — was that of someone who should have lost his job long before he did.

Hancock aside, and not for the first time, human greed is outweighing the importance of African lives. These same politicians, in Britain and elsewhere, who declare how much black lives matter to them when it suits their purposes, are responsible for the deaths of Africans at a time when they have the means to do something about it.

In the UK, according to recently published Home Office statistics, there were 124,091 reported racist incidents in the year to March 2021. 

This is the highest level on record which, remarkable in itself is made more so by the fact that these figures represent the period of lockdown and the heightened concerns after the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery in the US and the re-emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The Voice newspaper released an excellent report last week that revealed the extent of the exploitation of Caribbean migrant workers on British farms. 

The Black Lives in Music organisation recently released the results of a survey that showed the systematic and institutional racism in the music industry. We have all seen the racist treatment of black footballers in recent times.

Racism continues to blight the lives of black workers throughout Britain. The Institute for Race Relations and the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity published a report showing that policing during the pandemic targeted the black community to add to the list alongside the Windrush affair which continues to be an absolute disgrace to this country.

Evidence of anti-black racism is there for all to see in this country. It is hard to find much evidence of anything effective happening to address it. In fact the contrary seems to be the case.

The proposed appointment of Hancock to the UN role was made because the Tories and the UN thought that they could get away with it. They did it because black lives do not really matter to them. It was a disgrace. Shame on them both.

Roger McKenzie is general secretary of Liberation (liberationorg.co.uk) and a long-time union and anti-racist organiser.