By Steve Nwosu
How can the classroom, the night club, the church, the office and the mosque all converge in one small place? Inside one small mobile phone! And they call it the new normal?
Indeed the abnormal has become the new normal, especially when we can also throw the red lights into the mix and they too would be welcome. And so I ask: when can we get our life back?
To make matters worse, the children you thought you’d get a breather from, after dumping them on their teachers and schools, are all home, denying you of much needed rest and forever making demands, which require money. Yes, the same money that has since run out, as the covid-19-induced hardship bites harder. And for several weeks now, the song that has been playing in my subconscious is my variant of that old nursery rhyme… LOCKDOWN, GO AWAY, COME AGAIN ANOTHER DAY, OLD PEOPLE WANT TO PLAY…
Now, make no mistake about it, I’m not one of those putting the blame for all the failures and disappointments in their businesses on Covid-19, the subsequent lockdown, the business shutdown, and the resultant economic meltdown.
For one, long before Covid-19 happened on the scene, our finances (both private and public) were already headed down south. What the pandemic has only done, therefore, is to provide us with some sort of alibi. A good excuse. Something, other than ourselves, to blame for all our past years of poor business decisions. And we have gladly grabbed it. Debtors now have good reason to default. Fumbling businesses can now boldly file for bankruptcy, without any iota of shame. Employers are hurriedly laying off staff and slashing salaries, while otherwise vociferous workers unions can only offer a whimper of resistance. Stingy relations now have genuine reason to be even stingier. Of course, that is not discounting the fact that several businesses honestly took a fatal hit from this Covid-19 debacle.
I guess that the only people making a kill and smiling to the bank this period, apart from sellers of foodstuffs, the pharmaceutical mafia, and other essential commodities, are the telecos. Now, I can relate to that advert payoff line ‘Data is life’. With everything now going online, nobody wants to be found dead without data.
And talking about this new era of living online, I don’t know if I’m the only parent frustrated by all these online classes the schools have now imposed on our children and us.
Yes, barely five weeks after paying them what amounts to an armed robber’s loot, in the name of school fees, the schools have sent the children back to us. And we don’t blame them. It’s the fault of corona virus. But the painful part is that, although the schools had yet to complete their second term coursework, the kids were sent home with a reminder that they would be required to pay the fees for third term whenever the school reopens. And to justify this irrational demand for more fees, they are all pretending to be teaching the children electronically. Again, the burden is on the same fee-paying parents to not only get state of the technology phones for their kids to be able to download the relevant apps that would enable them partake in the online classes, buy also invest heavily in data to keep them connected. Now, I understand why several private schools in the United Kingdom refunded some money to fee-paying parents for this period that their wards would be at home. But our own schools here are desperately looking for ‘smart’ ways to not only keep the fees, but convince us on why we would need to pay a little more very soon. That is why there always exists a disconnect between the town and gown in Nigeria. The teachers (professors and all) carry on as though their little school enclave is insulated from the happenings in the larger society. They don’t want to believe that falling oil prices, for instance, would impact on FG’s promise to pay salary arrears, nor that the nationwide economic crunch could adversely affect the ability of many parents to pay their wards’ tuition fees. But that’s story for another day.
Back to the online classes! Now, even when you’ve used all the household feeding allowance to purchase phones and data, you still have to regularly sacrifice your own phones, because there would always be something that suddenly goes wrong in the children’s phones. And if you don’t want them to miss classes, you have to surrender your own phones. So, technically, you’re also attending the online classes with them. On two occasions last week, I could not leave the house to attend to an urgent problem in the office because Zoom suddenly refused to function on my son’s phone and I had to surrender mine.
READ ALSO: https://www.thexpressng.com/2020/05/24/oyo-deputy-governor-denies-rift-with-gov-makinde/
And of course, the classes are often the most boring way one could possible waste five hours every day. The only lively periods are usually the intervals between the end of one lesson and the coming online of the teacher for the next lesson. That is when the students get the opportunity to chat and ‘make noise’ – the closest they can get to a real classroom setting.
The teachers, many of whom have probably not understood that teaching students online is a completely different kettle of fish from teaching them physically in the classroom, have failed to first upgrade themselves on the required tools and skills for this new area. The result is that the online classes are super boring. No matter how much pressure my wife and I put on my kids, for instance, they end up sleeping through many of the classes. The teachers then load the hapless kids with humongous assignments. And after a few more sessions of the drudgery, announce that they have completed the coursework for the subject. Haba! This is simply inhuman! I can’t wait for the schools to reopen, so we can say goodbye to this charade called online classes.
Meanwhile, as tough as this might sound, my children, I dare say, can even consider themselves privileged. What happens to those kids whose parents can’t even afford the sophisticated phones needed for online classes? What about the children in our public schools? Yes, Lagos State government, and a few other states have been experimenting with the radio and television. But is a country where poverty is most acute, there’s little guarantee that the pupils’ parents even have radio sets, let alone television sets and cable TV subscription. And even when all these are available, there is still public power outage, as well as erratic mobile network signals, to contend with.
So, while a handful of us might cobble together some makeshift arrangement to keep our own children partially in school, the bulk of the children of this country are out there stranded and hungry. And they are not even the Almajiris we’re currently tossing around from one state to another, as pawns of the Covid-19 chess board.
Of course,I know everything is going digital and online. That is the direction of the future. But I’m just not sold yet on all this over-rating of online business, especially, giving the falsehood and make-believe that still characterizes the social media, and the fact that we still, to a large extent, operate a very crude economy in this part of the world.
Furthermore, all manner of charlatans and never-do-wells have taken over blogosphere, pontificating about how to take your business online and make millions with just a click. Everybody is on Zoom, Instagram, Telegram, Facebook, WhatsApp and all, discussing post-Covid 19 economy, and smooth-talking the gullible ones out of their little reserves. But after gobbling down all the motivational talk online, we suddenly switch off the phone to be confronted by the realities of empty stomachs, empty soup pots, depleted food stock, empty wallets and bank accounts that are still in the red. All the online posturing had only done one thing: given more money to the telecos, by way of data purchase.
Moreover, I can’t just imagine living all my life on the phone, tab or laptop. There are just certain aspects of our lives we just can’t conveniently adapt to social media and online just yet.
For instance, many of our big men (and elders) still feel insulted when you send them electronic invitations to your event. They still expect the physical card – possibly, with a bottle of wine, to underscore their social status. Against this backdrop, therefore, one can only imagine how such people would react to an invitation to attend a virtual Owambe. For them, that would be the height of unseriousness.
You can, therefore, understand my predicament on Saturday, as I watched a recap, on Channels Television, of the virtual party to mark the much-anticipated 60th birthday of Basorun Dele Momodu.
As novel and innovative as this hugely successful online party was, I was almost reduced to tears watching it. And no matter how much they tried to make it look real, I kept asking myself: is this the way Bob Dee would have celebrated such a landmark event? Even if, for some inexplicable reason, the celebrated and celebrity journalist had wanted a quiet event, many of us would still have hit the town (in spite of him) to party on our own bill, and get drunk on his behalf. How can Bob Dee hold a party and a few of us would not be able to gate-crash? Yes, many of the A-listers who would ordinarily have attended a Bob Dee shindig hooked on to the virtual ‘gig’, I still insist that was not exactly the party we were all looking forward to. So, whenever this Covid-19 misadventure is over, Bob Dee still owes us our party. Even if he doesn’t attend, we’ll attend on his behalf. That is one other reason I can’t wait for this Corona virus to go back to where ever it came from, lockdown to be over and for the teachers to take back their pupils. Haba! We have tried!
