Corona Easter

Olakunle Abimbola

 

“Through plagues and wars, even through upheaval and revolution, there has never been an Easter like this one” — Mark Edington, Bishop of Episcopal Church in Europe, American Cathedral, Paris, France.

 

Easter 2020!

No palm-fraught street parade, on Palm Sunday, to replicate the Christ’s Jericho-to-Jerusalem triumphant ride, on a donkey’s back.

No Good Friday replica of Jesus’ painful stagger, from Pontus Pilate’s court, to nailed death, at Golgotha.

No drumming, singing and dancing at dawn on Easter Sunday, as some Aladura (Cherubim and Seraphim) sects are wont, to “announce” the glad tidings, of the glorious Resurrection.

No mass happy-go-merry picnicking in “Galilee”, on beaches and other open relaxation hubs, to mark Easter Monday.

All is quiet on the global front.  It’s the making of Corona Easter, 2020!

Easter symbolizes the Resurrection: the Christian spiritual triumph of life over death.  But the dark mood of Easter 2020 suggests the gripping fear, of putative triumph of death over life.

Yes, the highest COVID-19 death ratio hovers just above six per cent of the infected.  The CNN global figure of 109, 691 (deaths) to 1, 787, 766 cases, as at April 12, gives a ratio of 6.1 per cent.  Nigeria’s 10 deaths to 323 cases (as at April 12) is three per cent.

But for acutely pain-intolerant humans, that is absolute catastrophe, bordering on nemesis.

That most of the dead have come from the more developed 1st World of Europe and 2nd World of America, even with their glittering state-of-the-art hospitals and fearsome scientific accomplishments, hallmarks the hubris — and humbling — of science.

With such grim stalker and global cleanser — 2, 000 dying within 24 hours, in New York, USA, on April 11 — science appears not potent enough a god to worship; the physical interaction of elements, and their cause-and-effect scientific rigueur, no angels to beatify.

As science buckles, providing no snappy vaccine answers to a pandemic that ravages the globe, spirituality soars.

So for now, it’s good old prayer to the rescue!  Hope, however, reigns eternal that science, sooner than later, would get it right; and the world would wrestle back its soul — and life!

Still, it is doubtful if that world would ever be the same again.

For starters, all-mighty America arrives this definitive epoch with clearly its weakest leadership in eons, with the tweeting and bumbling Donald Trump.

But in an April 9 letter, from the 116th Congress of the United States, Uncle Sam appears pouncing on Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus and his Geneva, Switzerland-headquartered World Health Organization (WHO), for allegedly hailing China, instead of nailing it (all Easter pun intended!), over COVID-19.

What exactly is Uncle Sam’s grouse?  That China has sorted out its COVID-19 headache, while America’s is peaking in a hideous migraine, despite America’s cutting-edge scientific feats?

And how does WHO fit into that mess — beyond the Achebe-speak of a bully that hungers for a fight, only after sighting a weakling he can trounce?

Is COVID-19 and its handling — or mishandling — signifying a putative shift in global hegemony, such that whereas the 20th was clearly American, the 21st could well end as the Chinese Century?

But as America reels in Trump-etizing alarm, of presidential befuddlement in its COVID-19 response, and the best of British blue bloods, royal and political, walk under the valley and shadow of Coronavirus, help comes from the most unexpected of quarters — China, no more than a big and sprawling joke 60 years ago; and Cuba, that speck of an island, off all-mighty America’s Florida coast.

Enter, Cuban doctors, many of them offspring of African slaves shipped to the Caribbean by the cruel 1st World in capitalist greed, nobly come to save Europe, old nemesis, in dire existential need!

It is Easter, at its most profound, in humility and humiliation!

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Christ, the Divine, humbled self to save the world but earned utmost humiliation.  But all that birthed soaring Christianity, which rules the global roost, much more than Judaism, its Jewish elder cousin, ever could.

On the other hand, COVID-19 came, from virtual nowhere, to confound the capitalist haughty and wise; humble the military big and mighty.   But it relatively spares much of the Africa weak and crushed!

It’s early days though, and Belinda Gates, with the paternalistic shrill of a worried do-gooder, still dreams Africa, choking with deaths from COVID-19.

Right now, however, that apocalyptic vision appears far-off, even as COVID-19 scythes the rest of the globe.  Whether Mrs Gates’s fear would come to pass depends on our own attitude, to this clear and present danger.

That brings Easter 2020, and its local COVID-19 sundry follies, under the harsh radar.

Nothing, on this score, trumps Bauchi Governor, Bala Mohammed.  No sooner was he declared free of COVID-19 did he scuttle and slither, hand glove, face mask, et al, to a crowded Jumat service!

What the hell was His Excellency doing?  Pressing his democratic right to re-infection?  And with what thinking does he lead his people?  Blind faith that calls the Ummah to Jumat, when strict advisory warns they could all be in wilful danger of cropping COVID-19?

And what does the governor have in place, to cope with possible community transmission, the type blitzing Europe and America, even with their top-grade hospitals and top-notch medics?

Or Rivers Governor, Nyesom Wike, risking an Easter mass convocation of the faith, when he knew COVID-19 lurked?

Thank God, the Rivers led, calm and wise, seized the initiative from their leader, rash and reckless.  A similar acute followers, arresting sloppy leaders, played out in Rotimi Akeredolu’s Ondo.

Saved by the virtual bell, that two-some! Otherwise, we may now all be bracing up for crowd-induced, putative post-Easter COVID-19 crisis in both states.

Kogi, however, lacked that luck, as the faithful trooped out: Muslims for Jumat; Christians for Easter, with Jumat and Good Friday, fair potentials for double trouble!

Yet, Governor Yahya Bello, rumoured to possibly have contracted COVID-19 from Abba Kyari, presidential chief of staff, rushed out a keep-fit video, where he snorted, at a gym session: “I ain’t got no Coronavirus!  I ain’t got no Coronavirus!”  Could he, with his Easter grandstanding, have endangered his people?  Time will tell.

“On this disorienting Easter,” Bishop Edington, whose quote opened this piece, from his article, ‘The Easter of empty churches’, in www.theatlantic.com, “the moral claim of loving our neighbours, by slowing the spread of an eager and evil disease, takes precedence over the imperative to gather and celebrate.”

That common sense, in a season of global health peril, appears beyond the ken of many a Nigerian state governor.