By Steve Nwosu
I’m not exactly a prophet of doom, but I’m frightened by the reality of the corona virus situation in Nigeria. To begin with, we are a travelling people, who jet out of the country at the drop of a hat, including for the flimsiest reason. Some even travel to show-off.
We hold a traditional wedding in Nigeria, do the White wedding in the UK, hold lavish reception in Dubai, and then organize the Parte After Parte in the Caribbean. Even 80 year olds and 90 year olds move a whole community to London and Dubai for birthday parties.
The embassies and consulate of every imaginable country on God’s Earth (including North Pole and South Pole) are bursting at the seams with Nigerians going and coming from there.
It is therefore to be expected that we would import the good and the ugly (including Covid-19) from all over the world. Unfortunately, it would seem that our senses take flight as soon as we step foot on Nigeria’s soil. We suddenly want to disregard every law, and be exempted from every directive – including those we religiously and diligently obeyed even in foreign banana republics.
We refuse to wait our turns, we jump queues, disregard traffic light, refuse to stop for police check, and generally constitute environmental nuisance. It is this same attitude that we have brought to bear on the raging Covid-19 pandemic, by refusing to abide by a simple directive to self-isolate on our return.
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The result is that almost all the cases we have so far identified turn out to have been sowing the evil virus all over the place, before their symptoms outed them. What that means is that for every case, there are at least 20 to 30 people who have come in direct contact, and thousands of others who have contacted the contacts – and on and on.
Bottom line? We could actually be looking at millions already infected. Scary!
Meanwhile, we’re probably the least prepared for what is coming our way.
And this is what I mean:
A few days ago, friend in the Dallas area of the United States sent me a photo of how they are coping with the corona virus pandemic. And that photo got me thinking. I had been worried about how this friend and the children would survive, as their part of the United States prepared to go into total lockdown.
Having just relocated to the US, and still battling to secure all relevant immigration papers, my friend has had to make do with casual/menial jobs to sustain the family. Without social security number, it means they literally have to pick every bill – feeding, rent, utilities, medicals etc., without any form of assistance from the system. And as the city set to go into lockdown, they’d marooned at home, without basic necessities. It’s scary.
But mood brightened, when I received the photo, it was the picture of the lunch packs sent to the children from their public school, which had since been forced to shut down as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Yes, despite that school had been closed, the school authorities still make provision for the daily breakfast and lunch given to pupils when school is in session.
They still prepare the lunch parks and ask concerned parents/guardians to come pick up their wards’ meals. Such little handouts will surely go a long way in reducing the hunger in this time of economic collapse. And that is not saying anything about the proposed cash that is to be paid to legit workers in this time of emergency.
I then remembered that we also claim to have a school feeding programme in our country. I remembered that it was one of the campaign promises of the APC government. And I asked myself: how much have we expanded the programme beyond the few states used for the pilot programme?
How many APC states, let alone their PDP counterparts, are feeding pupils at school. Of course, I’m not talking of the quality of the meals served. My late father always said that one has to first find a chair to sit on before he begins to think of reclining and sitting comfortable.
If in the best of times, we found it difficult to feed our pupils, we can only imagine what would happen now that our economy has literally shut down (as the rest of the world is literally forcing us to drink our crude oil, to which we have daftly refused to add any value).
Now, there is also the army of pupils from poor families, who never enjoyed any school feeding in the first place, and had to rely on whatever their scavenging poor parents could scrape out of their daily outings for survival. Now, their parents would be forced to stay home.
Yes, all the schools have been closed down and the children sent home, to curtail the spread of the virus, but have we spared a thought for what these children of the poorest of the poor would be going through right now. While the meals at school might have been a starvation ration, ab initio, one is not in doubt that it was the only meal some of the indigent pupils were ever sure of, all day.
And, as they have now gone home, some officials somewhere would since have converted all the procured foodstuffs for their own families’ use. The unspent cash for the feeding of the pupils would have long vanished into private pockets.
Now, the rich and permanently airborne elite, who are solely responsible for bringing this Covid-19 plague into our country in the first place, have emptied the grocery shops, bought up all the hand sanitizers, stockpiled food in their homes, and are now calling that the country should go into total lockdown.
Now, nobody should get me wrong! I’m also convinced that a lockdown is the smartest way any country can hope to minimize the spread of this end-time virus, but we haven’t the foggiest social safety net for our poor masses, and our clay-footed middle class.
What this means is that those who would run away from the streets, in the hope of escaping uncertain Covid-19, would eventually be killed at home by hunger. And when faced with life-threatening hunger at home, they’d have no choice than to ignore the lockdown order and hit the streets. And when they do, they’ll eat both the rich and any law enforcement agents who attempt to stop them. It is a no-win case from every angle!
So, my poser is: where are the palliatives? Where are the safety nets for times like this? Even the fuel prices we reduced, has remained reduced only on paper. Nobody is out there ensuring compliance, as most gas stations continue to sell at the old price regime.
As the panic buying continues, everyone that has anything to sell is price-gouging, inflation is going through the roof. The naira might soon become toilet paper (thankfully, there is no Idi Amin on the horizon to order that some goon show me what they do to sh*t, for calling Nigeria money sh*t money).
Now, as we shut down an economy that was already on life-support before now, only God knows what lies ahead of us. But one thing is clear, many of those to whom we have entrusted our security and sustenance don’t have the faintest idea of the mess we’re in.
Those of them who should go into isolation are still throwing their ‘big man’ weight around. They don’t know that Corona virus is not a respecter of “do you know who I am?!” That is why they’re opening, closing and reopening our airspace and land borders as soon as another big man requests it.
That is why some of them are heartless enough to turn the corona virus crisis into another oil block, and shamelessly cream us off the now very scarce resources. Governments at all levels are setting up committees and taskforces to battle Covid-19, but it’s still the same old story.
Money is voted, money is released, money is pocketed, the problem remains. Blood samples of suspected cases are taken and the results, in some cases, take as long as four days to come out. By that time, the patient is either dead, critically ill, or has spread the virus even wider.
Clearly, there is an Armageddon in the making.
…Our culture and religion albatross
Our culture of hiding our sickness is also going to do us in this Corona crisis. While the rich and powerful keep quiet about their cancer, for instance, regularly sneaking out of the country for treatment and sneaking back, the poor resort to fraudulent pastors, who reassure them that it is not their portion in Jesus name.
At the end they all die, and their conniving families continue to hide everything under the banner of ‘brief illness’, and lately, ‘protracted illness’. Unfortunately, Covid-19 is highly infectious: if you don’t expose it, it will expose you.
It does not matter how many times your pastor reassures you that Corona virus cannot touch you because it can’t face the ‘corrosive anointing’ in you.
