Olatunji Ololade
THE raunch and squalor of a plague breaks cultural and religious taboo. The coronavirus aka COVID-19, for instance, incites a fable of ugliness in the human experience.
By reducing persons to bodies, the plague casts personality as a totem of renewal and disintegration. It prefigures our struggle with Ebola and its stern, maleficent ghost. COVID-19 could be deadlier, if not well managed.
By its encounter with the virus, the world suffers a rehash of climactic trauma: more paranoid segments of the globe cringe in fear of a tragedy akin to the Black Death of 1348, a bubonic plague that killed up to 40 percent of Europe’s population.
Though COVID-19 is supposedly milder in scale and maleficence, wherever it strikes, human tissues cower, viral cells bloom and open their capsules; they split apart and spit pips in the red tide of the victims’ blood. Death is a surety for patients, where health systems fail and treatment is inadequate.
Epic similes compare COVID-19 to a divine judgement, a vampire, a raging storm, and thunderbolt. When it struck China, the Asian giant, for all its economic power and military strength, cowered before its viral might. The super power recolonizing wide swathes of the African continent could neither tame nor contain the pestilence’s raging storm.
Authorities have confirmed more than 92,000 cases of the virus worldwide, of which more than 80,000 are in China. More than 3,000 people have died globally, the vast majority in China.
The virus devastates the giant and minion alike; its surly seeds sprout as conduits of lusus naturae, obliterating history and mankind. Ask Wuhan; a visit to the despoiled Chinese district would convince you.
How does Nigeria respond to the virus? How does she deal with the brute awakening posed by her Italian patient? First, society tried to dominate the disease psychologically, dismissing it as the proverbial plague that never calls close to home. But then the frightening news of an Italian patient counselled caution; COVID-19 won’t simply pass as urban legend.
Each surge of rumour or news report about fresh quarantine of “suspected cases” booms as a relapse to reason or hypnotic startling to sentience.
In the throes of a plague, there is always an awakening of self-preservation but more significantly, a deeper arousal of monstrosity within consciousness. The grotesque becomes random personae.
Within the government and rich upper class, impulse may stir in sordid forms, premeditatedly, with éclat. Deep within the shanties, suburbs and dreary boondocks, less sophisticated forms of grotesqueness may stir. Pestilence haunts our sordid neighbourhoods, restoring horrid theatricality.
Nigeria experiences a frenzy for nasal masks, gloves, antibiotics, hand sanitizers and ‘anointing-miracle oil,’ all barely available at prohibitive prices.
At the backdrop of the drama, the House of Representatives, on Tuesday, resolved to suspend plenary sessions for two weeks in order to allow management of the National Assembly provide screening and detention facilities at the complex.
Thus a nation of 190-million people or thereabouts, will be deserted for two weeks by her elected representatives simply because they fear the eruption of a plague past their gated paradise.
The lawmakers will embark on their shameful vacation even as millions of school kids, mostly children of the underprivileged electorate, continue to attend school.
They will retire to guilty pleasures, unperturbed, even as disturbed parents take their children to school, every morning, with a heaviness in their hearts and tremor in the souls, praying fervently that the pestilence spares their beloved wards.
Nigeria’s 360 lawmakers would desert the country for two-weeks in perilous times. The 109-member Senate may follow suit and down tools to protect their privileged hides.
The National Assembly would bat no eyelid even as the bumbling government, which they are part of, abandon the citizenry to a comatose health system and infrastructure. The situation at the nation’s hospitals is worrisome. The airports are a health risk as the arrival and departure terminals suffer the lack of adequate screening facilities. But these are of little significance in the estimation of the Nigerian lawmaker.
More worrisome is the citizenry’s cynicism and indifference to the situation. Silence is never apt to government perfidy.
Nigeria’s lawmakers are a comical group, always eager to appropriate outrageous perks to advantage while they neglect more pressing, constitutional duties, like staying in session, in time of a plague.
Just recently, a coalition of civil society groups launched a lawsuit to stop the purchase of luxury cars, valued at N5.550 billion (about $15.3 million) for principal officers in the Senate, stressing, that, such spending was “unjust” and inimical to the welfare of the citizenry in a troubled economy.
In a related development, another coalition filed a lawsuit asking the Federal High Court in Abuja to stop the leadership of the House of Representatives from spending an estimated N5.04 billion to buy 400 exotic Toyota Camry 2020 cars for principal officers and members, “until an impact assessment of the spending on access to public services and goods like education, security, health and clean water, is carried out.”
Such is the quality of lawmakers, or “statesmen” if you like, parading Nigeria’s hallowed chambers.
Perhaps they would set aside a day or two, of their ill-advised vacation, to mull over the challenges before them and the perils of botching the COVID-19 containment exercise.
The disease has spread through China and to 31 other countries, including the United States. There are now at least 137 known cases across 13 states in the US. As a result, the U.S. government and public health partners are implementing aggressive measures to slow and contain transmission of the virus in the US, according to the Centre for Disease Control (CDC).
About 1,336 CDC staff members have been involved in the COVID-19 response, including clinicians (i.e., physicians, nurses, and pharmacists), epidemiologists, veterinarians, communicators, data scientists and modellers, and coordination staff members.
Of these, 497 (37%) have been deployed to 39 locations in the US and internationally, including CDC quarantine stations at U.S. ports of entry, state and local health departments, hospitals, and military bases that are housing quarantined persons.
The health workers are working with state, local, tribal, and territorial health departments to assist with case identification, contact tracing, evaluation of persons under investigation for COVID-19, and medical management of cases; and with academic partners to understand the virulence, risk for transmission, and other characteristics of the virus.
Also, the U.S. Department of State is working to safely evacuate Americans to the US from international locations where there is substantial, sustained transmission of COVID-19, and to house them and monitor their health during a 14-day quarantine period – even as Nigeria’s government ignores her stranded citizens in Wuhan, hub of COVID-19’s outbreak.
Beyond the bromides on Lagos State’s very effective anti-Ebola campaign, few years ago, is Nigeria really equipped to contain COVID-19?
Our reality spotlights the factors driving denial and the need for disease control to be contextualized in social realities and practicalities. An outbreak can worsen preexisting tensions; palliative measures would fail due to the current weakness and lack of accountability of health systems in an atmosphere of insecurity and politicised rumours.
Shut downs, movement restrictions, quarantine and isolation can only be tolerable if provision for basic needs, treatment and livelihoods are made in conducive environment by the government and intervening parties.
But these issues aren’t worth our lawmakers’ attention.
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