Olatunji Dare
Whoever said that old age sucks was expressing a truism that every person who has grossed the proverbial three score and ten years not only knows but feels.
But the coronavirus pandemic has upended even this truism, turning an actuarial handicap into a blessing of sorts, by propelled persons who belong in that demographic right next to the ranks of those on the priority list for what may well be the most precious gift in these dark and darkening days: the scarce anti-Covid vaccine.
The rollout of the vaccine has been as desultory as its formulation and manufacture were hope-inducing. The quantity reaching the public fell far short of what had been advertised, trust Donald Trump.
From early morning till late at night in mid-winter, long lines of frazzled citizens spilled from the streets and snaked round the passages and corridors on to the halls of designated vaccine centres.
Most went home disappointed and returned the next day; same outcome. There simply wasn’t enough vaccine to go round.
And not just in the United States, where Covid-19 deaths had averaged more than 1000 a day for weeks on end. In post-Brexit UK, and in Europe, the rollout has been just a problematic, sparking rows among governments and manufacturers and among the manufacturers themselves, and fueling what has been called vaccine nationalism.
The dangerously vacuous but highly conceited governor of Kogi State, Yahaya Bello, will dismiss this narrative as “political Covid.”
The late Western Nigeria premier, Chief SL Akintola, had an answer for people of Bello’s ilk.
“When adversity comes to the forest,” that unrivalled master of Yoruba, would say in that evocative language, “even the pawpaw plant will demand to be counted as a stalwart.”
This is the context in which Yahaya Bello, an accidental governor and Covid denialist with scarcely an exceptional entry in his résumé, not only seeks to become Nigeria’s next president but actually sets in motion the machinery for pursuing that quest with public funds.
It is also, sadly, the context in which major political actors are importuning former president Goodluck Jonathan, a byword for cluelessness, to come claim the second term he was denied six years ago when the APC machine and its presidential candidate, Muhammadu Buhari, sandbagged him at the polls.
That is a measure of the depth to which Nigeria has sunk. Under military president Ibrahim Babangida, we had a national Army of “anything goes.” Now, some 25 year later, ours seems to have become a country of “anything goes.”
But I digress.
Amidst all the snafus that have marked vaccine production, distribution and administration, the infernal virus has been spawning ever more durable variants that surface in the farthest corners of the world almost as soon as they are identified in one location, rendering the global war against Covid more and more fraught.
You have been accorded a privileged place in the ranks of million yearning for the vaccine all right. But given all the attendant discontinuities, would your turn ever come? How would you know anyway, since those seeking answers to those questions have gotten nowhere?
Meanwhile, new cases are surging everywhere.
Then the phone rings. It is the family doctor’s nurse, asking whether you would like to take the vaccine. It was like being told that you had won the lottery.
Of course, I replied eagerly.
“When?”
“How about yesterday?” I asked jocosely.
“No, but we can do tomorrow, 3 pm at the Methodist Hospital Atrium,” she said. I reckoned that, with some luck, I would be back home by 10 pm.
The parking lot was fuller than usual, but there was no other sign a mass vaccination event was in progress. No overflow crowd; no crowded passages or hallways. You were shepherded, masked like everyone else, along a marked, socially distanced path, to four stations.
At the first, they took your body temperature. At the second, you were registered for the vaccine on showing a government-issued identification card. At the third, they explained the name and nature of the vaccine you were about to receive, gave you the shot, told you the second instalment was due in 28 days, and presented you with a certificate documenting the transaction.
At the fourth and final stop, you rested in a well-padded chair for some 20 minutes so that nurses could monitor you and report any behavior that may warrant medical intervention. If there was none, they wished you a good day. From start to finish, the whole thing lasted no longer than 30 minutes. It was a seamless operation.
None of the five vaccines now in the market confers immunity, but regardless of the mutations, they have eliminated Covid deaths and reduced hospitalizations drastically, according to the best authorities. That is perhaps the best news to have come out of this dark encounter with the virus.
The bad news is that the virus is going to be around for quite a while.
The lesson from the United States and every country that has confronted the Covid menace robustly is that it is one thing to produce or procure the vaccines and quite another to distribute or administer them.
Donald Trump (remember him?) made false claims about the quantity that would be supplied, and naively assumed that the vaccine would flow through the system like commercial goods, not taking into account special properties of the vaccines and the conditions in which they must be administered.
The Nigerian effort has been marked by the usual false starts. Officials were discussing how to share the vaccines – federal character, equality of states, populations (inflated for the most part) absorptive capacity, etc, etc. – before perfecting a strategy for acquiring them. It has even been suggested that the vaccines be produced locally, to conserve foreign exchange.
When they finally decided to place orders, they could not furnish the Budget Office with the data that would enable it figure out just how much was required, and at what cost. They say the figures are being crunched now. And from there, the proposal will go before the National Assembly, where enlightened debate and a swift resolution are not guaranteed.
There is no danger, happily, that the effort will be hijacked by an ambitious First Lady with an eye on the main chance, as happened with the Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI) at the time of the loathsome General Sani Abacha. The amount budgeted for the programme ran into billions of Naira, and his wife Mariam, being “Mother of the Nation,” took it upon herself to ensure that it was faithfully executed.
She hijacked it, thinking perhaps that it was just another item in the self-aggrandizing portfolio of the Better Life Programme initiated by Maryam Babangida, the wife of her husband’s predecessor, or even better, an opportunity for presiding over the award of lucrative contracts for vaccines.
But it was no such thing. A national immunization drive, Dr Nataila Kanem, an epidemiologist with Ford Foundation in Lagos and now executive director of the UN’s Fund for Population Activities, told me at the time, is like a military mission. The design must be precise and comprehensive; the schedule must be exact, supply lines must be foolproof, the outcomes must be clearly articulated. Failure was not an option.
In Mariam Abacha’s less than amateurish hands, the EPI collapsed, with disastrous consequences for Nigeria’s children.
There is little chance of that happening now. But we shall always have among us those determined to profit and profit hugely from the misery around them. Everything must be done to frustrate their designs.
More importantly, by the time the vaccines arrive, the logistics, the strategy and tactics for distribution and administration, should have been perfected to the highest degree possible.
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