In a thriller of an interview that spanned over one and half hours on Arise Television, Reuben Abati and Laila Johnson-Salami took on Peter Pan, one of the best ever to write a column or call himself a journalist on mother earth. At 85, Peter Enahoro, who never had a university degree but graduated from Government College Ughelli, spoke lucidly about the Nigerian press, the Nigerian crisis, restructuring, his family and the sham of a pardon for his elder brother Anthony, also about Obj, Sam Amuka – The Vanguard owner and fellow Ughelli old boy – Chief Segun Osoba who he called young man, and of course the mighty poet J.P. Clark, also Ughelli old boy. Enahoro granted the interview lying on a bed because of injuries from an accident in 1961.
What struck me was intervention on the 1966 coup, and the note he obtained about Ifeajuna’s impressions of his role. According to Enahoro, Ifeajuna seems to present himself as the leader. Many believe Chukwuma Nzeogwu merits that accolade, if accolade is the word and if the word merit should ever go into that blood-nosed narrative.
Ifeajuna said he wanted to hand over power to Ironsi, then chief of the army. But Nzeogwu said Awo was their target to take over the mantle. That remains a speculative aspect of our history. In his book, There was A Country, Achebe testifies to Nzeogwu’s indignation at Ifeajuna’s claim. Ifeajuna ran away, tails and all, to Ghana like an athlete in a counterfeit jump. Nzeogwu stayed put. Ifeajuna did not perform his part of the task successfully in Lagos by leaving Ironsi untouched. Ifeajuna’s act complicated the definition of the purpose of the coup as an Igbo affair. Again, Ifeajuna, as Enahoro noted in the interview, did not make the announcement in the morning. When he didn’t Nzeogwu took up the role in the afternoon. Nzeogwu, in my mind, was the leader. If he did not lead going into the coup, he did coming out of it.
It is trite that every new situation comes with its own challenges. So it is with the current war against the corona virus COVID-19 pandemic.
With the pandemic are emerging issues in the way we hitherto lived our lives; new challenges in our socio-political organization, new tests in the way we conduct business, run our schools and engage in virtually every other human endeavor. It is akin to a war situation that is bound to produce new outcomes.
But it is not a conventional warfare with defined territories. There are neither armies nor ammunitions in deploy for the war.
This war has no boundaries and does not discriminate between races and peoples. It is an invisible war where no shots are fired. Yet, its lethality is only comparable to situations of biological or chemical warfare.
Fighting such war is bound to be very daunting. That is why even with the sophistication of the advanced countries in warfare, they have found themselves routed by this armless and invisible enemy.
So it is that many of them have found themselves virtually helpless in the face of the ravaging virus. The situation is bound to be more tasking for developing countries such as ours with weak institutions and weak structures.
Faced with these challenges, the new reality is recommending new ways of doing virtually every old thing and our hapless citizens are expected to align themselves. It is an entirely new beginning that fits into the category of the Khunian revolution. It calls for paradigm shift.
That accounts for the plethora of protocols rolled out by the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19, the Nigerian Centre for Disease Control, NCDC, and the various state governments to redirect the way we hitherto conducted our lives. The overall objective being to flatten the curve of the disease spread and save humanity from annihilation.
The various levels of government, their agencies and personnel have put in a lot even at the risk of personal lives to ensure the lethal disease does not consume our people. Of special concerns are all categories of health workers who have put their lives at grave risk just to save the lives of victims of the pandemic.
Some of them working under difficult conditions, have contracted the disease and even lost their lives in the course of saving human lives.
All these sacrifices must to be appreciated especially given the non availability of personal protective equipments at the initial stages of the pandemic.
But there are emerging issues from our strategies to the war that must be addressed else they diminish some of the progress made. There are increasing doubts in the minds of the discerning public on some of the issues arising from the management of the pandemic.
When these are juxtaposed against skepticisms in some quarters on the reality of the viral disease, it is to be imagined the damage they can do to the efforts to contain the disease.
No doubt, the confidence of the people is vital to the overall success of the war against the disease. The general public must buy into the sincerity of the campaign.
They must believe in all they are being told about the viral disease to respect and abide by all the protocols to keep it at check. Creating doubts in the minds of the citizens on account of actions or inactions of governments and their agencies is not helping matters especially in a clime many are still finding it difficult to observe the rules of the time.
We are faced with conflicting signals when we hear Kogi State government accuse unnamed people of attempting to force fictitious COVID-19 figures on the state for political reasons.
This is even as the state government maintains that no person has tested positive for the viral disease. It has also rebuffed all attempts by the NCDC to come into the state to verify the claims.
This altercation is unhealthy given the circumstance of the time. But more seriously, it raises eyebrows as to whether Kogi State is privy to some information that the coming of the NCDC will herald the discovery of COVID-19 afflicted persons.
Perhaps, there is something the state government knows that is not readily available to the discerning public. Whatever it is, the quarrel is not serving the course of the campaign because of the credibility issues it has thrown up.
If a state government could bandy such weighty allegations, there may be more to the COVID-19 pandemic campaign than ordinarily meets the eyes. Before now, many have lived in self-doubt about the reality of the viral disease.
That accounts in the main, for the scant regard for the protocols that will aid the authorities win the war against the pandemic. Such doubts are bound to worsen with claims emanating from Kogi State.
The federal government must come clear on what the issues are with the Kogi State government. We need to know the source of the fictitious figures and the purpose they intend to serve.
There was also the demonstration in Gombe State by isolated patients who took to the highways because they were not being cared for.
Their grouse was that they spent days in the isolation centre without being attended to or have drugs administered on them. Some of them who spoke to the media even doubted they had the viral disease.
But the relevant authorities claimed that all those at that centre were asymptomatic. Even if that was the case, they should have been taken into confidence about the state of their ailment. Treating them in a manner that predisposed them to suspicion and subsequent demonstrations left a sour taste in the mouth.
It not only created doubts in the minds of the people but reinforced the suspicion that there may be other reasons to the high figures being churned out from some quarters. Such doubts are even reinforced with the mingling of villagers with the demonstrating isolated patients.
The impression those villagers will take away from the unfortunate incident is that all that is being said about the viral disease may after all be a fluke.
The Gombe incident is inexorably linked to the Benue indent case. The woman had alleged in a video that went viral that she had sent 43 days in isolation without treatment. The ‘patient’ who was taken into custody on her return from abroad, disputed claims that she had the viral disease.
She bandied damaging allegations against the Benue State government and called for an independent inquisition into her case.
Though the Benue State government denied some of her claims, issues relating to that incident have at best, been shrouded in secrecy. But they add to the growing suspicion on the sincerity of the management of the pandemic.
Nothing however, illustrates more vividly the growing credibility issues on the management of the pandemic than the altercation between the Lagos State Commissioner for Health Prof. Akin Abayomi and returnees from Dubai currently in isolation. This followed the announcement by the commissioner that one of the returnees from Dubai died of the viral disease.
Some of the returnees have disputed this claim. According to them, the person that died returned in a wheel chair after undergoing a surgery in Dubai.
But instead of sending him to the hospital, he was isolated with others until his situation deteriorated. They contended that had the patient been sent to the hospital earlier, he may not have died even as they dispute the claim by the commissioner that he died of the viral disease.
Nothing has again been heard of the face-off between the commissioner and the returnees after the former visited their hotel.
Neither has anything been heard of the disputed health conditions of the dead returnee nor the actual cause of his death. The public is left to decide which side of the story to believe.
Unfortunately such yawning gaps in information management do not help the course of the war against the pandemic.
Is it surprising that there are emerging doubts on the credibility of the tests being run by the relevant agencies? It is important to eliminate the sources of these doubts and firm up the confidence of the people in the credibility of the exercise.
This is the surest way to enhance the success of the war in a predominantly illiterate and poor setting where governments are hardly trusted.
TODAY’s pandemic is redefining, if for now, how it is to be rich and poor. To be rich is not to flaunt, but to help. It is to spend all the cost of a business class ticket to buy a meal for over six thousand people. For the first time in history, billionaires clap as one beyond their clans.
It is also a time to beg with impunity. The poor are bold and don’t bow with their bowls. They jettison a loaf of bread and toss it like an Arsenal player into the air. We also have the episodes of genuine destitution where long lines of the city’s lower class buzz for a bag of rice and garri.
We are witnessing a moral moment in our country, and it is easy to interrogate the rich as a cynical or afraid, or full of empathy. The rich must be full of introspection today. Why did this sort of good feeling not flow out pre-Covid? Why now?
If the pandemic were not raging, the planes would be revving above us, their contrails pointing to England or France or the United States. Money burning in those plumes of smoke, dollars, pounds and Euros. They would be travelling for deals, to make more of the millions or billions. When they were not making deals, they hunt for parties, the weddings, the birthdays, or funeral, or a mere flamboyance for a fellow who bought a new mansion, had a new baby or new contract.
Some of them would take place in a small town in Monaco, or Italy, or Spain, and everyone who wanted to be regarded as somebody would travel first class or business class, and land in the town. The services would take place in a local church that was never half-full for a decade until the Nigerians came. Or a party in which some exotic-looking fashion, gaudy and showy, stuns locals who take pictures, or merely gawp. The head-ties of the women, the men without a tie but shoulders and torsos swathed in colour and fine material. The shoes and scents are local, but above the onlookers leagues from whose factories they are spun.
The visitors know not the hosts. The hosts know not the visitors. The visitors are vain and happy. The hosts are paid and marvel. Everyone wants to be in the picture, posing with false grandeur. No local reporters or newshounds come or care. The ones that care are not aware or even invited until a few days later. Or in this internet age, a few hours later, or even minutes later. They are here in the society circuit of the newspapers like this one, or television. All the visitors need to do is record the matter for the world to see. We see their façade of wealth and dignity, their smiles of hauteur. They have good camera to take still and moving pictures. They transfer the moments to editors and producers.
The editors publish. It has cost all of them, probably 50 people, about a million dollars to get that done. It probably would cost a fraction to do the same in Ikoyi. But better to tell the world that my daughter’s wedding reception or my 50th birthday took place in Dubai or south of France, than in miserly place like home.
Even at that, what of the ones that happen at home? We have big parties. The invitation cards of a rich man’s party are enough to fund the whole of a carpenter’s son’s graduation party. We have the general invite, and then we have access cards. We have all of these because we have to classify those we love. We love you less so you don’t have access to the holy of holies.
Some of the money spent is not theirs. Some of them are loans, or money diverted from contracts that they will not perform, but rig so they can get new ones.
So when they go to the hovel of the poor, and they donate bags of rice, or beans, or dole out N1,000 each to a specified number of people in Tudun Wada or Ajegunle, we wonder whether to say thank you, or to say, well, this is our money that the almighty Covid-19 has stopped you from spending.
It is also known that the rich is trapped among the poor. They cannot run if they tried. If the poor revolt, the rich cannot jet out to London, nor their children who are around. They cannot do much but to remain here.
This may be a cynical view. This may be a point of view that demonises the rich. Some of them, after all, worked for their money. It may not be a fair system. As Thomas Hobbes has argued in His Leviathan, we are all born equal into a jungle of power. Don’t begrudge the other’s success because we did not win. Rousseau said “man is born free but everywhere he finds himself in chains.” The poor will argue that the French philosopher was foolish. Is the man born with a million dollars from his father as free as the man born in a ghetto? One is freer than the other. But, says the counter, some ghetto-born have overtaken the rich. It is that Ghetto-born exception that preserves the myth of equality.
We have always had in capitalist societies of two halves as Plato noted in his The Republic. One for the rich and other one for the poor. The poor will always be with us. But it is the duty of the society to remember that the poor make the rich. But the rich maim them in the process.
What we are probably seeing is that the Pandemic has brought out the angels in the rich. Plagues are often more ruthless than wars. They recognize neither class. They ravage without discrimination. They are the best humblers. They level the revelers and haves, and hack down the other half, the have-nots. Government sometimes helps to preserve the poor with their programmes. For instance, the almajiri schools. This essayist had some flak from readers over my jibe at those schools. They praise President Goodluck Jonathan for building such schools. I described them, as I have done in the past, as tokenist. It preserves their status rather than eliminate it. But if you integrate them into public schools, it forces you to improve the schools, and an almajiri graduate does not become a stigma. He is as qualified as any other.
The issue of alienation is at the core of this season of donations. We hope that it is a show of empathy, not of cynical dismissal. It is not a show of pity, or fear, but of love. Aristotle has shown that human drama is about pity and fear. In this case, the rich show pity because they fear backlash. We hope it is not the contempt of the Lazarus of crumbs and the rich man of lavish luxury. Paul said he knows how to abound and abase.” Jesus said if you do good to the poor, you do it to Him.
Our rich are however more clever than the prince Prospero of Adgar Allan Poe’s story, The Masque of the Red Death. The prince moves his friends and family away from town to a “safe sanctuary of leisure” while the plague decimates the people. He does not escape when the red death comes.
The caption above may sound somewhat abrasive or outright offensive because of the tinge of fatality it entails. But it inexorably captures the challenge confronting Nigerians in the face of the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic.
This contradiction emanates from the responses of governments to check the spread of the disease and the countervailing issues thrown up by them. The various governments had in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic rolled out measures including total lockdown in some states to stem the spread. If diligently adhered to by members of the public, the measures will lead to a quick curtailment of the viral disease and save valuable lives that would have been lost.
As well intentioned as the measures are, it soon became clear that total curtailment of movements and shut down of businesses cannot last for too long. Humans have to move around and engage in productive ventures to sustain life. It then became a matter of ‘time when’ the government will relax the measures so as not to suffocate the people on account of their biting effects.
The predicament of the government was not helped by the reality that even as the measures had run for about five weeks, there had been no significant reduction in the spread of the viral disease. As a matter of fact, available statistics showed the viral disease in a steady increase. The government was therefore faced with the difficult decision either to continue with the lockdown or throw the streets open so that normal life could resume.
But each of these options goes with serious repercussions or payoffs. If the government goes ahead with total lockdown, it risks social unrest and possible collapse of the economy. This had already started manifesting in the riots witnessed in some states as the lockdown lasted. It was also evident in emerging signals of economic downturn into which the country is irretrievably headed.
The other option is to throw open the economy and allow normal life to resume. This goes with the risk of an exponential spread in the viral disease such that can wipe out human population from the face of the earth. Given the fast mode of spread of the disease and the reality that no cure has yet been found for it, the consequences of such a decision could be too dire for the country. The government found itself standing between the devil and the deep blue sea. It was a difficult decision issue.
Whichever option it takes comes with consequences/payoffs. But it must take a decision. Decision theorists are interested in that option that will minimize losses in the event of the worst outcome. It is a middle of the road approach between the imperatives for a total lockdown and the need to open up a window to ameliorate the effects of the excruciating effects of the stay at home order. So it was that the federal government commenced a gradual or phased easing of the lockdown.
A phased return to normal life with conditions to be adhered to for it not to produce counterproductive outcomes was ordered by the government. These include social distancing, regular washing of hands, wearing of masks, ban on interstate travels and limiting the number of passengers carried by commercial vehicles. In rolling out these measures, the government envisaged a responsible citizenry willing to obey the rules for their own good.
In part, it placed the management of the pandemic in the hands of the citizens. If they behave rationally, they will become responsible partners in the effective management of the pandemic. Conversely, irrational action leading to scant regard for the regulations will produce very deadly outcome. It is a choice between temporary hunger and personal discomfort on the one hand and death by the killer disease on the other.
But what did we really find since the partial opening up of the economy of some states and the Federal Capital Territory? Are the citizens taking up that responsibility as partners in combating the disease spread? To what extent are people responding to those protocols on which the relaxation of the lockdown were predicated and without which its purpose will stands defeated?
These questions are at the very heart of the direction the spread of the disease goes in the days ahead. The way they are answered will chart the path as to whether there will be curtailment in the disease or another spike in its spread. It will say a lot about the overall disposition of our people- allow themselves be annihilated by the viral disease or suffer the inconveniences of the protocols aimed at containing the spread. That is the decision for all of us to take in pursuing our different economic endeavours to sustain life.
Sadly, in the first week of the gradual ease of movements, facts on the ground indicate scant attention to these rules. Apart from the wearing of masks which is being largely observed in Lagos, FCT and some other places, interstate travels, social distancing and other protocols are being observed largely in their breach. It was a sorry sight to behold people struggling to enter banks on the first day of the lockdown ease in Lagos and the FCT.
As this writer moved round some areas in Lagos, he was greeted with the usual bubbling and bustling environment that depicted Lagos in full session with even some people fighting and pushing themselves around at bus stops. The touts that usually collected tolls from tricycle operators were not left out in the brazen disregard for the rules of the time. Some of the operators neither wore masks nor complied with the mandatory number of passengers. It was more or less business as usual.
This raised eyebrows as to whether all that have been said about the lethality of the viral disease were after all, a ruse. How do we rationalize the relative ease with which caution was thrown to the winds with people behaving as if COVID-19 no longer existed? Or are we contending with a verity of the Freudian perspective that there is something inherent in man that predisposes him to suicide?
May be that dimension was largely at play. May be also it was a statement affirming the second arm of the title of this article- a preference to be exterminated by COVID-19 instead of hunger. That would be suicidal since hunger cannot kill in the numbers ascribed to COVID-19. In my local environment, there is an aphorism that hunger which has hope does not kill. Ours is hunger with hope. It cannot kill. So death by COVID-19 should be out of the calculation. That should be our collective resolve through sacrifice.
But there other miscellaneous matters working to stultify all efforts to stem the spread of the disease. And unless serious efforts are made to check their obstructive influences, we are in for a bigger trouble. Here, the almajiri factor comes into mind. Reports that truckloads of almajiris are being conveyed to the southern parts of the country are very scaring. This is more so with the disclosure by the Kaduna State government that 65 of the 72 almajiris repatriated from Kano tested positive to the disease.
Kaduna is not alone in this. Jigawa State is also contending with 16 almajiris from Kano that have tested positive to the disease. Given this chilling statistics and extant ban on interstate travels, the horde of almajiris making their way to the south is bound to raise serious suspicion. How come they were able to beat the security cordon in all the states’ borders they crossed without being detected? Or is it part of a larger agenda to spread the virus as some have alleged?
Other challenges to the integrity of the war on the pandemic include the issues raised by suspected COVID-19 patients’ demonstrators in Gombe State and the claim by Kogi State government that it is being forced to declare fictitious COVID-19 figures for political reasons. It will be nice to interrogate the Kogi State government on its claims. There may be more to it than ordinarily meets the eyes.
Before then, we hope the so-called Nigerian factor has not crept into the management of the pandemic. We shudder at such prospects.
Covid-19 will not cease to unfold in irony in Nigeria. We saw one recently in Akwa Ibom. A certain George Udom, not the governor, had thrown up a wild and insidious allegation that the state cabinet was corona-infested. He even charged that a good number of persons in the executive council were in the grip of the global pandemic. People should stay out of the government, “hide and run,” he warned. It was, by implication of his charge, in a tizzy of coughing, sneezing and fever, throats emitting phlegm and chests snarling.
Akwa Ibom is afire with social media activities, perhaps more than any state in the country in this obsession with political warfare.
Governor Udom Emmanuel, in a moment of transparency, paraded members of the cabinet to the media and told them, like Samuel in the Bible, this is who we are. No one was down with Covid-19 in the cabinet. Citizen George Udom was then charged to court for peddling those malicious information. When he appeared in court, he began to show that he was not well.
The judge observed he was showing possible symptoms of Covid-19. The magistrate ordered him to be quarantined for 14 days. The accuser is now the accused, reminds one of Governor Makinde.
It seems 2023 politics is taking too long for the mischief maker. The flavour is getting very tangy and angry, and some are already running before the whistle blast. Even at that, we should make everything quiet. There will be enough time to throw brickbats.
The violence in the past was not just viral but virulent in the state, and in harvests of human bodies. Governor Emmanuel has cooled the state temper. Doves of peace resumed to flap their wings but some people in the opposition are not happy.
He has been a person without a place. As a boy, he knows no father, no mother, no home. He is a canonised wanderer, anointed to beg, to scavenge. He has grown to have no state, no boundaries. He is weaned to be a student. He ends up a stooge.
Bowl in hand, mastery in the chants of the supplicant, his face an eternal suppliant. His feet, shoeless, have logged in miles. He is a holy boy this morning, a soldier tonight. He inspires pity from one, instills fear in another. He is nurtured into a belief but this faith tortures with the weapons of blood and death.
He is the almajiri, the boy who was once a saint. Now he is a worry. He is not a worry because we pity him. It is because we fear him. Before, the almajiri was left to his own devices. We condemned his fate with the rhetoric of sympathy. We did not want him to suffer. We wanted to give him schools. What school? Just tokens here and there. It turns out that we are hypocrites. We love to be seen or heard to love the boy child. Such hypocrisy is self-exculpatory. It makes us free from guilt. The French writer puts it succinctly. The writer and essayist, Francis Duc La Rochefoucauld said, “hypocrisy is the compliment that vice pays to virtue.” We hide our evil because we want to be like the good.
They were born a flood. They were not just a throng of beggars. They were an electoral machine. Videos show them as multitudes of voters, enhancing the fraud of a candidate they neither know nor love. When it is convenient we make the almajiri the masses. He becomes an elector, a model citizen, constitutionally backed. At other times we make him a scoundrel, an avenger on the street. Today he is the people, tomorrow he is the mob. We fail to conflate them, but we preserve the illusion.
So, when they were carted about from state to state in the north in their truckloads, they became a scandal. Governors in the north started to act as “statists.” My almajiri is better than yours. To your tents, all almajirai.
Suddenly, we pretend we love the almajiri by saying they should go to their very homes. We now know that family trumps the evangelical. He now has a father and a mother. He has become not a specimen of human beggary, but a human with the full complement of ambition. Government has not worked so that he can benefit from the dividends of democracy.
But all those who peddle ethnic lopsidedness in appointments in this country should ask the poor. The almajiri in the north who does not benefit from what we have seen as appointment favoritism.
We had this anxiety in the Jonathan era. The Otuoke man had come with an image that he was very close to the Igbo. He recalled that his middle name was Azikiwe. He did well to appoint many Igbo into sensitive positions. He made one the virtual prime minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. He also elevated an Igbo man the chief of army staff, the first since the end of the civil war.
He did the same thing with some folks in the Niger Delta. He was a warrior for the minorities. He never looked up, though, to see the suffering minorities up north.
But after his tenure, the rich were happy. But what of the poor in those communities? Any progress on the roads, the farms, the gullies, projects of empowerment, schools? The kidnapper and militant had to take advantage of class divisions to launch terror on fellow citizens.
Yet in the Jonathan era, the streets of London knew no rest. The buying cards slid into machines for purchases that ran into fortunes. London media noticed and serenaded Nigerians with peculiar hats and generous pockets buying up vanities from the luxury shops.
Yet Ogoni remained Ogoni. The creeks were poor, the schools in bad shape when they were not washed into the sea or oil-clogged rivers.
Yet, they snagged Louis Vuitton in London while the man and woman in the creek had no shoes.
Today, the same way the almajiri up north does not understand it when a Kano or Zamfara man clutches a hot ministerial portfolio or agency directorship. The almajiri does not fly with them. He is not in the airport except to beg. Or if older, he serves as assistant to convey bags.
What follows is herd mentality. The leaders invoke the masses to fight for ethnic solidarity. When it’s time to reap, the poor are absent at the table. Philosophers and political scientists have identified two major ideologies that have remained resilient over time. They are those based on economic inequalities and the others on race or, in our case, ethnic thinking.
Inequality was the basis of Karl Marx’s ideas. But when Europe erupted with anti-semitic rage, especially in France with the famous Dreyfus trial, Marx as a Jew himself was accused of ignoring his own race. Race thinking is innocent until it becomes racism. Ditto ethnic thinking. Rene Descartes had said “I think, therefore I am.” In these parts, it will be, “I think, therefore I am Afemai, or Yoruba or Ijaw, etc.” But it is the economic warriors who deploy such ethnic shibboleths to stir up division and entrench themselves. This is the cynicism of the ages.
So, the almajiri is not the problem but those who made them, the feudal elite of the north. The former Emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi, in spite of his personal contradiction, could not survive putting it to the test of its own morality. It is the same hypocrisy elsewhere in the country.
The crime though is that the political class is not worried about the hypocrisy. The same almajiri become Boko haram, riot in elections, commit pogroms, slaughter political enemies. They are sent by masters hiding in cosy ramparts. The big men are not arrested or even accused, but the almajirai are locked up. Some of them die. It is two moralities. Just as 19th century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli noted, “What is crime among the multitudes is only a vice among the few.”
Meanwhile, the almajiri’s case will continue to haunt the whole country, especially the north, because any almajiri who bears a bowl and chants in the rhythm of hunger, is like the scarlet letter in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel of that name.
Kaduna State government and the state chapter of the Nigerian Labour Congress, NLC are at daggers drawn. The bone of contention is the decision of Governor Nasir El-Rufai to cut 25 per cent of the salaries of senior civil servants in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The state government said it would deduct that percentage from the salaries of all civil servants receiving N67, 000 and above to provide palliatives to vulnerable citizens affected by the ravaging viral disease.
But the state NLC is vehemently opposed to the proposal on the ground that it was not consulted before such a decision with far-reaching consequences on the overall well-being of the civil servants was taken.
Matters were not helped given that even before the decision was made public, the state government had gone ahead to effect the deductions from the April salaries of its civil servants.
This did not go down well with the NLC which has asked the government to return the deductions or face the wrath of the union.
Citing international labour conventions on such matters, the union said though it is in principle not against the deduction of workers’ salaries for the purpose intended but their consent ought to be sought before such deductions are made. Even then, the deductions should be voluntary, it further contended.
The state chapter of the NLC is on point. They are not necessarily against salary deductions to ameliorate the sufferings of victims of COVID-19.
That much, they have said. But what they did not find funny is the very arbitrary manner the government went about the matter.
Issues bordering on the salaries and allowances of workers are generally very touchy and sensitive.
At a time workers are contending with excruciating living conditions and general increase in the prices of essential commodities occasioned by the same COVID-19 pandemic, the mere thought of salary cut, is bound to ruffle feathers in no small way.
Being a sensitive matter, the least expected of that government was to have approached the matter with great caution. That did not happen as events have shown.
The fact that the government hatched such an idea (no matter how well-intentioned) and proceeded to implement it without taking organized labour into confidence, exposes all that is wrong with the policy process on these shores .
Being a unilateral action, the NLC is within its rights to mount opposition against it. Had the government taken labour into confidence, perhaps the right percentage cut and the modalities for its implementation would have been amicably ironed out without recourse to muzzle flexing.
We are led into this conclusion given the disclosure by the NLC that it is not in principle against the pay cut to take care of vulnerable persons affected by the ravaging viral disease.
What they are against is the arbitrariness of the action. Why the Kaduna State government never deemed it necessary to factor in the feelings of organized labour in such a sensitive matter remains largely curious.
The cloudy labour atmosphere hovering over the state appears the price the government is now paying for that act of indiscretion.
And the cost could be very high if the government does not take steps to redress the situation. Given the challenges of our times, Kaduna State can ill-afford labour crisis now.
The government should hesitate no further in carrying the NLC along in whatever decisions that affect workers’ salaries.
But that is not all there is to this opposition. Underneath the opposition by the NLC is the nagging issue of mistrust.
The way governments are run on these shores has greatly eroded public confidence in the capacity of those in leadership to effectively husband public funds for public good.
Rather, we have had to contend with a leadership style that is steep in scandalous corruption, greed, reckless and ostentatious spending.
Ours is system in which ascendancy to elective and appointive political offices is the quickest and fastest route to opulence.
Little wonder the scandalous lifestyles of this category of people that contrast sharply with the existential realties of the majority of our people as hewers of wood and fetchers of water.
Corruption in public places is the reason this country has been lagging behind in all the development indicators. It is little surprising that Nigeria is now tagged the poverty capital of the world.
Ironically, our country is bountifully endowed with huge natural and human capital that should have been creatively deployed by visionary leaders to catalyze quantum development.
But such high-minded goals have largely remained illusory in a clime suffused with rapacious, selfish and amateur leadership that panders more to prebendal predilections.
That has been the source of the mistrust between the citizenry and their leaders. It is such negative sentiments that are easily evoked each time the government wants the citizens to commit to some modicum of sacrifice.
That was the sentiment at play when the Kaduna State government made public the decision to cut the salaries of workers by a whopping 25 per cent.
Though, the NLC did not openly canvass the issue, it is common knowledge that organized labour is generally opposed to cuts in workers’ salaries because it fears such proceeds will not be properly accounted for and may end up in private pockets.
This feeling also resonated when accountability issues were raised on donations from corporate and private individuals to aid the federal government fight the COVID-19 pandemic.
The argument that is usually put forward when workers are called upon to forgo part of their pay is two-fold.
The first is that Nigerian workers are among the least paid in the world and generally reputed for their serial inability to make ends meet.
With spiraling unemployment and rising inflation, the average worker lives below the poverty line. Any cut in his salary will further push him down the poverty ladder.
Organized labour generally views such cuts as a further way of sentencing the workforce into perpetual servitude.
The other dimension which was mentioned in passing is that many of those who occupy elective and appointive political offices in this country are not trusted by their workers.
The feeling is that our leaders will generally divert public funds into their private pockets. And facts have overtime borne out this suspicion.
So resistance is evoked each time a government toys with pay cut as a way out of its financial problems.
The general feeling is that if governments judiciously deploy public funds and avoid wasteful spending, they may not have cause to tamper with workers’ salaries.
This view is further reinforced given that the salaries of workers pales into insignificance when compared with the huge national resources that are usually frittered away to service non-productive endeavors by political leaders.
The leadership must work hard to disabuse the minds of the citizenry that public good rather than self serving interests are behind their actions.
How to achieve that remains the greatest puzzle even as efforts to fight corruption by the current federal regime have been mired in putrid controversy on account of its observed shortcomings.
More seriously, the Kaduna State government should be more creative in raising funds for the COVID-19 pandemic than easy resort to cuts in the salaries of its workforce.
It is getting clearer by the day that workers face harder times as efforts are geared to ease the lockdown. Some of the measures that will come in place as the lockdown is gradually relaxed will definitely take a toll on worker salaries.
The transport system readily comes into mind as governments roll out measures to enforce social or physical distancing in the public transportation system.
That will mean a reduction in the number of passengers in commercial vehicles. This will obviously come with increase in transport fares.
Great caution must be exercised not to reduce workers as pawns in the chessboard of the COVID-19 pandemic.
MAYBE the word is not lockdown but knockdown. Nigerians are bracing for a showdown with COVID-19, and we want to see after a few weeks on the ring, who will go down, the pandemic or denial?
The statistics bear out the denial. Look elsewhere, and you will say, yes, Nigeria is not doing poorly, we have a few thousand cases where the big nations have many thousand dead. They can afford to pay their citizens to stay home. We are giving pittance in the name of palliatives. Charity here, donors there, but the large majority will go hungry, eventually. Did the character not say in Shakespeare’s play Corolianus, Better to die than famish,?
Why not ease the lockdown, and let the streets flow with the rush and tumble of humans, the factory buzz with hands touching hands, the offices with work spaces where they sneeze and cough and a little fever here and there can spice up life a little.
More of that than a Covid-19 that kills just a few people, while we hundreds of millions as people can conjure a better life, feed and be happy. After all, we have seen many a tragedy before and since. Boko Haram is taking its toll, kidnappers and herdsmen are slurping lives. So, why not, and what else have we got to lose?
In Yoruba is a swansong, “Won fi ku sere,” they are playing with death. Maybe that is what Nigerians need, to have the lockdown undone, and let everyone take advantage of a berth of freedom. We can call it, the freedom to be sick, or even to die, a new chapter in the charter of freedom in the world. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once noted that freedom is not necessarily about what we see as the higher virtues like love, life and joy, but also freedom to be evil. For instance, Boko Haram militants want to be free to kill and coerce. We may not like those freedoms, but those who seek them have sublimated them.
So, as persons go about, they have to contend with the fact that Nigerians have not yet imbibed the discipline of social distancing, or the hygiene of the west. We are a slovenly lot, and careless with the basics of human hygiene. Yet we are going to war with an invicible enemy, whose main salvo is slime. It fights without gunshots or tanks rumbling, but a marksman of cold accuracy and clinical finishes that defy clinics.
Maybe this is what those in high offices are thinking. If they say they want easing, we shall give them, and if the community infections go up a notch or two or many, it may be scary. Many, many Nigerians start not only getting infected but start falling like flies on the streets. Hospital overload, no doctors or nurses, or drugs. Mortuaries shut, backyards not permitted by landlords. Homeless die on the streets. Stench and corpses make both the nostrils and eyes compete.
What will happen in such an apocalyptic scenario? We may see people on their own deciding whether to die or famish, whether to work or stay home, whether to risk or live? We may go into what some philosophers as well as economists call the chaos theory.
We shall see that the lockdown guidelines may not be necessary, and people would retreat home without the help of government orders. We saw this in the turmoil of June 12 when the fear of death and bloodshed sent people into the safety of their homes. In a chaos theory of this sort, people would just decide to find a comfort zone in their home.
What that comfort zone will be, we can never know for now. Will we have most people staying home to starve, or will they obey the jettisoned lockdown guidelines on their own?
By the time this is done, how many would have died, or would have been endangered? How much damage would we have suffered in the economy? We may recall the story of the Egyptian plagues. Only the Jews were told to stay home. But when the plague came, everyone who was caught outside and could make it ran home, even without safety guarantee.
We can look back in history to Colorado where I lived for about a decade. During the Spanish Influenza that scooped up millions of lives in circa 1918, the mayor was pressured by the business elite to reopen. He did. More people died after the lockdown than before the reopening.
So, I pray that we do not go through a horrendous turn. We are a huddled nation, Mushin, Kano, Ajegunle, Nnewi, Onitsha, et al, are full of people who cannot do without touching. It is a touch-and-go pandemic, and pandemics are deadlier than wars.
Nothing seems to shake Nigerians. Not the news of the death of the President’s treasured aide, an infected billionaire’s son , a lawmaker’s goodbye, three emirs six feet gone, eight of a high-profile family in its throes, the infection of three governors. Hardihood like Okonkwo’s flirting with tragedy, or what the literary critic Killam called insistent fatality. The Nigeria Doctors Guild has warned against it. But many Nigerians would never get it until, it seems, they get it. In her novel Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton unveils how a man escapes a fatal turn because he is saved from himself. We need that. After all, Jean Jacque Rousseau said of the French people, “Force them to be free.” It is a hard sell in a democracy, though.
Trump, Fox News and other conservative media denied it in January. America has now had more deaths than the jungle barbarities of the Vietnam War. May that not be our fate!
The consequences of Malam Abba
WE cannot underestimate how we affect even ourselves when we wield power. During the stewardship of the late Chief of Staff, Malam Abba Kyari, a whole ministry was mortgaged to another. The Ministry of Health with its over N10 billion budget was asked to take permission from the Ministry of Agriculture to spend any Naira and kobo. What it meant was that the minister had to report to a fellow minister. That was the way Kyari wanted to humiliate Professor Isaac Adewole, former health minister because of his principled stand on a corruption scandal regarding pensions fund. The late Kyari upturned order on his order. Translation: he exercised power on behalf of his principal, and fulminating commentaries and editorials did nothing to chafe him. A minister begs another minister for money, a cabinet level slavery.
Fast forward to 2020 and Covid-19, and the country needed the most important ministry to have money to work with. The ministry did not have resources. Before he tested positive, he was approached to reverse it, and he would not. We don’t know how much damage his decision has caused the nation, in deaths, in illnesses, in money as well. Now, sources say the decision has been reversed by the president, although the director general of Bureau of Public Enterprises has yet to transmit the letter to restore the old and normal order. Power may be transient, but not its consequences.
Leaks and state worship
A LOT has been made of the leak of the presidential speech, and somehow the media has been blamed for it. Femi Adesina, president’s spokesman and former editor in chief fumed over it. I think this is unnecessary. When there is a leak, it is not the media’s business how it got out. It is the president’s team who should worry. I spoke on this on Jones Usen’s show on Kiss FM and I likened the situation to that of a lion, lioness and their cub on one side and a hyena on the other. The hyena wants the cub. If it succeeds, the lioness has itself to blame for allowing its baby in the hyena’s jaw. The leak material came half-way, before the final copy. Nothing wrong with that. It was a scoop. The only snag was that those who published did not examine it for grammar and consistency. If they did, they might have asked for update. There was nothing special about the speech anyway. In fact, we learn that the speech was done
Femi Adesina
without the president’s input until late. I thought they should have debriefed him first, but it’s their structure. No security threat. So, what was the hoopla about?
Adesina exaggerated by calling them enemies of the state. The media is not supposed to be a friend but a reporter. No one has a monopoly of what is good for the country. As John Locke said, the state is in trust for the people in a social contract. We are not running what the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Von Misses calls the omnipotent state. Or what Gramsci and others have designated state worship or statolatry. In his play, the Public enemy, Ibsen shows how a man who is reviled by the state saves the people. Leaks are a staple of good journalism. It happens everywhere the media holds power to account.
So, when leaks happen, it is the media doing its job, the leaked team not doing theirs.
It has been a week of passionate tributes and intense counter-tributes following the sudden exit of Abba Kyari, 67, who was President Muhammadu Buhari’s powerful and influential Chief of Staff for five years until he died of COVID-19 on April 17.
In a statement, President Buhari said: “Mallam Abba Kyari was the very best of us. He was made of the stuff that makes Nigeria great.”
There were contrary reactions to Kyari’s death. Perhaps the most striking were remarks by former Kano State commissioner for works and infrastructure Mu’azu Magaji, who was sacked for his “unguarded utterances” against Kyari.
Kano’s commissioner for information Muhammad Garba justified Magaji’s removal from office: “The action of a public servant, personal or otherwise reflects back on the government and therefore, the Ganduje administration would not tolerate people in official capacities engaging in personal vendetta or otherwise.” According to him, Kyari “led a life worthy of emulation by serving his country to the best of his ability.”
A report said Magaji “had taken to his Facebook page to celebrate Kyari’s demise, describing it as freedom for Nigeria.” “Writing in English and Hausa,” The PUNCH reported, “Magaji stated, “Win win… Nigeria is free and Abba Kyari ya mutu a cikin annoba… Mutuwar shahada in Har da Imani mutum ya cika.”
“The translation of the post reads, “Win win… Nigeria is free and Abba Kyari has died in the epidemic… the death of a martyr… if he is a believer, the person is complete.”
The report continued: “In a subsequent post, the commissioner said the office of the chief of staff to the President is too powerful and it should be broken into two.
“Magaji wrote, “For the good of Nigeria and Mr President… The CoS office should be split… A PPS (principal private secretary) and a humble manager of his office as CoS… It is currently too powerful for a non-elected official.”
The report also said: “Reacting to comments that his post elicited, the commissioner said it was nothing personal. He said Kyari was only a support staffer at the Presidential Villa and his death should be treated as such.
“Magaji wrote, “Nigeria is bigger than any individual… While praying for the president’s late support staff… Ours is to prevent a repeat of his non-accountable domineering era!
“In institutional democracy, no individual is bigger than the state… Our interest is to get equity and capacity in the highest position of power. It’s not personal!
“I am not a hypocrite and I won’t pretend! While at a personal level I pray Allah to grant Abba Kyari Jannah… I sincerely believe Nigeria needed a better CoS period!”
According to another report, “Magaji, on his Facebook page had written, “It’s very, very important we put things in perspective so that we can save our system from punitive unconstitutional usurpers in the future!
“Democracy & democratic equity does not by itself strive… It must be guarded and protected… One person, just one person can set a dangerous precedence!
“When you are all done with the pretence and crocodile tears, we will do a review in overriding interest of the Nation and its people!
“I am perfectly aware of the storm I am in… The fact however is I know what comes from the heart or that what is purchased! You all will come around.”
Magaji had sounded like a man who knew what he was talking about, and would be ready to defend the things he had said. But when the consequences came, he changed his tune, saying his Facebook posts had been misinterpreted.
”In an emotional reaction to my posting,” Magaji said, “agents around the office of the chief of staff misunderstood my whole meaning, infuriated from the loss of their benefactor, as such petitioned my principal His Excellency Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, the Governor of Kano State, they twisted the narrative with explanation completely out of context and lacing it with religious and cultural connotations that made it necessary for our Principal the Executive Governor to show leadership and solidarity with the dead by relieving me off my position in Kano State as his Commissioner of Works and Infrastructure.”
He explained that “The use of “win win phrase” is basically an attempt to explain the Islamic Promise on the people that died as a result of any kind of pandemic. The late Mallam Abba Kyari was privileged to die as a result of Covid-19, making him among the beneficiaries in Islam. He is conferred with the automatic privilege of martyrdom…By this, the death of Mallam Abba Kyari is a big win for him, which is almost the dream of every Muslim.”
What he said next in the statement gave him away as someone talking out of both sides of his mouth: “On the other hand, Nigeria equally have the opportunity to restructure the office of the Chief of staff, where I called Mr President to ensure that we can utilize the pandemic challenges into more strengths, by disintegrating the power of the office for a rapid administrative flow, which over and above anything, our constitutional democracy is meant to achieve and function so often.”
Magaji’s explanation suggests that he had a rethink, and chose to be politically correct. His effort to explain what he meant was simply damage control. “I am so sorry for any pain I may have caused both the families of the late chief of staff and my boss His Excellency Abdullahi Umar Ganduje. I am forever loyal to my boss; the Governor of Kano State and indebted to all the people of Kano state,” he said.
This drama has shown how freedom of thought and freedom of expression are controlled in the political environment. Magaji’s punishment for his observations on Kyari and the office of the president’s chief of staff does not mean they are untrue. He is a casualty of Kyari’s death who has exposed the Governor Umar Ganduje administration’s game of political correctness.
Paradoxically, perhaps the ultimate tribute to Kyari is that his death is an opportunity for the country to redefine the position of chief of staff to the president.
It is exactly four weeks today President Mohammed Buhari ordered a compulsory lockdown of Lagos and Ogun states as well as the Federal Capital Territory FCT as part of the measures to halt the spread of the coronavirus disease COVID-19 pandemic.
The choice of the two states and the FCT then was on account of the high number of residents who had tested positive to the viral disease. Considering the mode of transmission and speed of infection, the measure appeared the most viable option to stave off further escalation. Before then, some states had shut down all schools to avert the possibility of the most vulnerable population from contracting the disease.
Apparently taking a cue from the president, many state governors also came up with a surfeit of measures to insulate their respective states from the devastating effects of the ravaging virus. As of Wednesday last week, the governors had resolved to further extend the ban on inter-state travels for another two weeks, among other measures to contain the pandemic.
The initial lockdown ordered by the president was meant to last for two weeks. But further assessments at the expiration of that period, showed rather than decline, the pandemic was spreading to more states with the overall figure of national infection on a steady rise. Given this chilling statistics, President Buhari had to extend the lockdown for another two weeks when he reviewed the situation a fortnight ago.
As that timeframe expires today, the nation is full of apprehension as to the further measures the president has up his sleeves to tackle the festering challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. This anxiety is to be expected for a number of compelling reasons. The first is the inability of the government and its agencies to flatten the curve of the disease spread. With the continuing increase in the number of those daily affected, there are genuine worries as to the consequences of easing off the lockdown under such uncertain circumstances.
Conversely, there are also serious concerns regarding the deleterious effects of prolonged lockdown on the economy, the citizenry, and the imperative of survival for a great number of our people. The situation poses a contradiction of sorts. It is a contradiction between the imperative of maintaining the lockdown to stem the disease spread without suffocating out of existence, the very people the policy seeks to protect due to the inability to access basic human needs.
That is the uncanny dilemma in which we are inevitably entangled. That is the difficulty starring the president on the face as he unfolds his plans on the way forward. It is going to be a difficult balancing process especially for a country at our current level of development hosting a burgeoning population that finds it difficult to eat on a daily basis.
Whether Buhari opts for a wholesale unlocking of the lockdown, maintains the existing measures or relaxes them partially are issues to be sorted out when he speaks, possibly today. But if my reading of parts of his national broadcast penultimate Monday is anything to repose hope on, wholesome lifting of the measures is completely out of the way. His mind frame on this can be gleaned from his constitution of a committee of some ministers charged with the responsibility of fashioning out the modalities for the Nigerian economy functioning with COVID-19.
That says a lot about the direction of the president’s thought frame. The fact that no cure has yet been found for the deadly disease, should instruct that we will all have to live with it for the nearest future. This ipso facto imposes serious responsibility on the government to come up with options that will enable life to go on while the war on the pandemic is sustained.
But we have our own peculiarities here. We stand the risk of an exponential rise in the spread of the viral disease such that will make a mess of whatever mileage gained so far. We will have to contend with the possibility of escalated infections overwhelming the decrepit, weak and sub-standard health infrastructure available in the country. Faced with such huge deficits, there is the risk of system atrophy and possible collapse which will prove so dire to bear.
It is also dicey to retain the measures to contain the pandemic in their current form. What we face is a game situation involving choices with far-reaching payoffs. And in such game situations where policy outcomes remain largely fluid, the right choice is that which will minimize our losses in the event of the worst outcome. That is rational choice and rational calculation. This rule instructs a phased and gradual easing off of the lockdown.
The reality is that a lot of our people have been thrown into untold hardship by the current measures, as inevitable as they are. The economy we run is one in which a majority of our citizens live from pocket to mouth. Operating mainly from the very informal sector, they must as a matter of necessity move around daily to find something to eat. Many of them eke out a living either by socializing or begging.
For this group and they are legion, the lockdown is another name for sending them to their early graves. We may be stretching their patience so thin by continuing with the lockdown undiluted. A measure of the lethal threat the continued restriction on movements and freeze on economic engagements pose, is evident in the upsurge of criminal activities in Lagos and some other cities. It is the same reason that accounts for the high number of violations since the exercise began. The situation will definitely exacerbate if some respite does not come soon.
By respite, no reference is being made to the palliatives the various levels of the government are said to be dishing out. Here, we have in mind the imperative to strike a balance between the need for lockdown and some form of relaxation to allow activities resume in some selected sectors of our national economy. For, even with copious claims on the ‘success’ of the palliatives’ distribution, the reality is that it has not even scratched the surface of the suffocating poverty and destitution that pervade the entire national landscape.
The scramble we saw in some distribution centres that gave scant regard to social distancing and other protocols to stem the spread of the viral disease gives further credence to this view.
National president of the Nigerian Labour Congress NLC, Ayuba Wabba captured this dilemma when he called on the federal government not to extend the lockdown. Hear him “This is very dicey. As much as it is important to keep many Nigerians from dying in the hands of corona virus, loss of income and the accompanying destitution can also be a pathfinder for numerous other sicknesses and deaths”.
The issues raised by the NLC chief are in line with the major thrust of this article But we differ with his position if the call on the federal government not extend the lockdown is meant to remove all restrictions to prevent the disease spread. There is no indication now to support that position as it is bound to prove counterproductive. There are still obstacles created by citizens in the current restrictive measures that a wholesale removal will definitely spell doom for the country.
We are all living witnesses to the scant regard for extant protocols during the burial of late Chief of Staff to the president, Abba Kyari, by key officials of the Presidential Task Force PTF on the pandemic, ministers and the media. Though PTF members have apologized, the message of that act of indiscretion should not be lost on us. And it is that our people are yet to properly internalize the relevant preventive measures to warrant total lifting of the lockdown.
The way to go is a gradual re-opening of aspects of the national economy such as government offices, banks, industries and some businesses that can maintain the hygiene of the times. But before that is done, preventive kits such as face masks and sanitizers should be produced in large and affordable quantities. The transport system and the general organization of our markets must align with the new protocols for the situation not to relapse with catastrophic consequences.
