By Jide Osuntokun
No one knows when we will be out of this Covid-19 crisis. Your guess is as good as mine. Scientists all over the world are working on possible medical solutions ranging from administering a cocktail of drugs that were meant for other conditions but which may well take care of those struck down by the novel coronavirus, to treatment with blood plasma of those who were infected but had recovered on those suffering from the virus and the ultimate solution of development of vaccines. President Donald Trump carelessly sold the idea of an anti-malaria drug, hydroxychloroquine being effective in the treatment of Covid-19 without any clinical trial. Immediately he said this there was a run on the drug mainly now produced cheaply in India to the point that India started hoarding it. Trump had to threaten India before this immoral action was stopped.
Even here in Nigeria, there was a run on the pharmaceutical shops that had them. At the end of the hullabaloos, the drug was found to be useless against coronavirus and in fact it was found to do more harm on those affected by the viral disease. Recently, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the United States federal government’s leading infectious diseases scientist, announced that Remdesivir, which previously tested unsuccessfully as an antiviral against Ebola, after clinical trial, showed that remdesivir may “ reduce the mortality rate of Covid-19 and can shorten the duration of the illness”. The Japanese in another trial had also found this drug somehow effective in the treatment of the coronavirus.
There are other trials of other drugs under the rubric of “drug repurposing” by which it is meant old drugs already approved for a range of disease from cancers, to H.I.V and others are being combined and tested for use against this new coronavirus. It is a case of necessity is the mother of invention. Development of vaccines are going on by over a hundred companies all over the world with prospects that one or more than one will be successfully tested and ready for use on humans by spring next year. That means we will be in this state of anxiety and animation for the next ten or so months. This is like waiting for eternity. Thankfully, the global efforts led by the European Union, organized a pledging conference to come up with $8 billion which will be made available to researchers working on vaccines for the coronavirus pandemic so as to ensure that when eventually developed, the vaccines will be sold at cost to all countries without profit so that no country will be excluded from benefiting from the solution on the grounds of poverty. The European Union has pledged $1 billion, Great Britain, Germany, France, Norway and Saudi Arabia have already each pledged to contribute about half a billion dollars.
As I write, the United States of President Donald Trump has not shown any interest in the global efforts apparently believing the United States can go on to develop a vaccine on its own without being handicapped by any global coalition against profit. China, where the virus broke on the world has also tactically refrained from joining the rest of the world to pledge any financial support. Most of the companies involved in the race to produce vaccines are private drugs and pharmaceutical companies sometimes aided by state grants. Ordinarily it takes more than 18 months to produce vaccines but in the case of this pandemic, the whole process is being shortened because the world cannot afford to be huddled down for almost two years while the economy remains prostrate and millions of people remain unemployed thus constituting social and security threat to national and international peace and security. The situation is so dire that rather than wait for the development of the vaccines to go through the normal animal testing, vaccines are already going through human testing. In fact people are already volunteering in Oxford, England to be used more like guinea pigs. My prayer is that these efforts will pay at the end so that we all can see some light at the end of this dark tunnel of the novel coronavirus.
Not much is known about what efforts are being made in China in terms of drugs or production of vaccines that may reduce the morbidity and mortality of the coronavirus. I will be most surprised if the Chinese do not have something up their sleeves. It stands to reason that a country where the problem first surfaced and which had overcome the problems and with very minimal mortality will surely have secrets about how to handle the problem. Unfortunately, the spat between China and the USA may be militating against full transparency and joint Sino-American partnership in finding solution to the coronavirus. The temporary stoppage of funding by the USA of the WHO on the grounds that the global organization is too pro-China is another stumbling block on multilateral approach to joint action. What is however clear is that whatever the case may be, the days of the coronavirus are numbered. One hopes that the world will be more prepared for whatever pandemic comes in future. This statement applies to all countries in the world, Africa and the United States inclusive. This is because the USA is the only major industrial global power which does not have universal health insurance cover and where most of the close to 78,000 dead have come from the ranks of the poor black and brown people. The post Covid-19 world would have to change for everyone. I hope it changes in Africa and in Nigeria in particular.
Here in Nigeria, it is quite clear that we as a country must change our approach to governance or events which we cannot control will change us. The coronavirus has exposed our medical unpreparedness for any medical emergency even of lesser severity than a viral pandemic. We muddled through Ebola and we are regularly having to cope with Lassa fever which is caused by our unhygienic way of life. Our filthy environment allows rats and other vermin to breed and affect our poorly kept food which we then consume with relish. I remember some years ago when China declared war on house rats and within a short time, the country unleashed its more than one billion people to wipe out rats from the country and it was done. When Jamaica was troubled by snakes, the British administration then in the country went to India to import mongoose which made mincemeat of all the snakes in the island. We can also do the same to the snakes and rats roaming around the northeast of Nigeria and the FCT in one burst of biological energy to solve a serious problem using simple natural environment-friendly solution. Now that the hydrocarbons-dependency of our country is proving to be near fatal, shouldn’t we begin to think out of the box about what to do? We cannot borrow our way out of the problem. No serious country would lend us money when they know we would not be able to pay. In any case, we should always try and cut our coat according to our cloth. The over-bloated bureaucracies of federal, state and local governments have to be trimmed. In this regard it is not just merging of parastatals and departments that we need to do; we must also rationalize the number of states and local governments. We do not need the hordes of people presently in our parliaments both at national and sub national levels. In short. we need a new groundnorm to spell out all the changes that we desire.
There is just no money to have the bevy of universities and colleges politically established without planning about staff and money. Instead of the over 40 federal universities and still growing, we can admit all the students in them in half of the number with expansion of the old ones and stopping the jamboree of military, police, customs, navy, immigration, petroleum and transport universities. Territorially and culturally contiguous states can be encouraged to pull their resources together to integrate the present state universities. The great universities of Ife and Ahmadu Bello and University of Nigeria were built on solid grounds because they had the foundational backing of large and reasonably viable states unlike what we have now where states that do not generate revenue internally are rushing to establish two or more universities with inadequate staff and infrastructure.
If the present states must exist, they have to demonstrate their ability to be financially self-sufficient. In any case, in a reconfigured federation, ability to stand on their own will be the primary requirement for statehood. For Nigeria itself to be viable, it must be reconfigured along proper federal lines in which the states must create the federal government and not the other way round. This was what happened in the first republic. If Ahmadu Bello and Awolowo had known that they were signing up to unitary system masquerading as a federal system, they would not have signed up to the independence constitution. We must go back to the past to realize a viable constitutional future. It is as simple as that. Once the constitutional architecture is agreed upon, then the rest of how to become a modern state will fall in line. It is a disgrace that the whole of Kano State did not have oxygen in its hospitals to assist people choking to death as a result of coronavirus. If we have a functioning political and constitutional system, only people who can run things will be put in charge of government departments. Appointments will not be sinecures and will not be based on political jobbery.
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