Category: Saturday

UnderTow

With a coronavirus disease infection rate galloping in Nigeria on a daily basis, and deaths inching disquietingly towards the catastrophic, the public and the media have focused almost exclusively on the disease which first broke out in China in December, 2019. Labelled by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as COVID-19, to distinguish it from other forms of coronavirus diseases, it has taken the world by storm and raised a number of other worrisome and tangential issues.

The broadcast media now devotes more than a half of their newscast time to the disease, barely leaving room for any other thing, especially politics at a time and season when politics, elections and governance should take more than 90 percent of public attention. The print media unapologetically emblazons news of the virus daily on their front pages. Nothing will threaten the dominance of the virus in the months ahead.

The Nigerian economy was of course heading for trouble weeks before COVID-19 burst on the scene, with public attention riveted on the nearly $30bn loan the Muhammadu Buhari presidency had planned to take in order to fund their budget deficit. The public had taken issues with the loans, lambasted the government for its obsessive thirst for and reliance on foreign funds, and marvelled at the inurement of their National Assembly to the pitfalls of unbearable and burdensome loans, not to say their vexatious subservience to the executive arm in the manner they authorised the loan application. Not only did Nigerians worry about the ballooning public debt, they also fear that they had lost their parliament which felt increasingly beholden to the executive than the electorate. It took the brilliant force majeure of COVID-19 to halt the finalisation of the bloated loan deal already approved by the parliament after a superficial debate.

Before late February, when Nigeria’s complacency was pricked by the coming of the first index case from Italy, the political sector was buzzing loudly, indeed raucously. The political opposition might have done little but bleated feebly, with the voice of the main opposition party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), barely heard above the soft din. But there was still some excitement in the air. However, the voice of the PDP was not mellifluous or consistent, nor did it pack any significant oomph, but they registered their presence in their constant and perfunctory denunciation of all that the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) stood for.

PDP press releases, whenever they came, often paid more attention to grammar and style than to substance and power. The statements were also sometimes provocative and verbose, and rarely had any impact on the thin-skinned ruling party that mocked their logic and ridiculed the scanty issues they addressed. The statements also seldom caused enough tremors in the ruling party potent enough to arrest the attention of the public or ruffle the feathers of their main rival already ensconced in office and luxuriating in power.

Late last year, a gargantuan effort to unseat the APC chairman, Adams Oshiomhole, was garishly executed. The coup, whose authors were self-professed progressives and ostensible future beacons of democracy, miscarried very badly. The politics of the plot to throw off the yoke of the party chairman, not to say the law of it, arrested the interest of Nigerians, whether PDP or APC, or any other party. The legal provisions relied on by the coupists to actualise their plan disturbed the public but kept them enthralled for weeks, with the proponents of the coup scurrying to and fro the federal capital, Abuja, restlessly, feverishly, and petulantly. Then the politics of the coup itself. It was sheer bliss to party faithful, legal aficionados, and media professionals whose gay copies and thunderous blather on the front pages of their newspapers warmed the cockles of many hearts.

But just when the coup seemed on the verge of succeeding, and with party leaders adding their moral support to powerful voices agitating against the coupists, defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory. The collapse of the coup was spectacular. But no one expected that weeks or months after that collapse, no more news would be heard about the frenzied plots. Alas, it turned out to be the last flickering move, at least for now. COVID-19 had done the job no party or presidency or political chieftain could do. Now, all governors are preoccupied with tackling what the United States president Donald Trump sarcastically referred to as the Chinese (or Wuhan) virus. Indeed, it is proving more difficult for the governors to tackle the virus than to plan coups against one another or against their chairman. Their lack of fecundity has been badly exposed.

Shortly before the disease outbreak, the September and October Ondo and Edo governorship elections sat unchallenged and pristinely on the front burner. In both states, there were a couple of aspirants who made the governors quake in their boots. The Ondo State governor Rotimi Akeredolu had nearly a dozen challengers, a few of whom are not only politically versatile, but also intellectually sound and robust. In Edo, Governor Obaseki, who was numbered among the unrepentant coupists that nearly unhorsed the Edo-born Mr Oshiomhole, had engaged in frenetic politicking to entrench himself and secure a vantage position for the coming polls. More than displayed in Ondo, Mr Obaseki had organised a lot of activities and manoeuvres to wrong-foot and disadvantage his opponents. The result has been varied and uncertain, but he has not been deterred.

With COVID-19 edging out every other news and activities from the front pages, whether politics or religion, or whether society or even crime and the economy, Ondo and Edo have suddenly become the addendum, sometimes on the front pages, and sometimes on the inside pages. Both Ondo and Edo governors are in fact in a dilemma how to respond to their opponents, many of whom have since morphed, in the estimation of the governors, from being mere opponents to implacable enemies.

In Edo, the governor has demolished his opponent’s buildings, attempted to send some of them, including his party chairman, Mr Oshiomhole, into exile, and has made edicts and laws banning this and that, or indeed anything that remotely connects with his enemies or gives them advantage. The Ondo governor has been less grandiloquent, and seems sometimes fragile and lethargic. But he appears prepared to meet his opponents at any place of their choosing, and is eager to give battle as ardently as he can manage. The two incumbent governors’ valiant political efforts have, however, been rendered pianissimo, despite been saddled with the daunting responsibilities of fighting COVID-19 as well as waging re-election battles against opponents who are single-minded.

Even the Buhari presidency, which in the best of times and all through the pre-COVID-19 era had been staid and reclusive in its approach to politics and governance, has on the excuse of fighting the disease shrunk further into gross anonymity and inscrutable silence. A few appointments have no doubt been made, thus giving the impression of an administration still very active, but beyond that they have seemed tremendously pleased that no political challenges have been flung at them either by the opposition or by circumstances. The government is satisfied battling coronavirus. Politics had always seemed to addle them anyway. They would rather fight any other hideous monster than be compelled to respond smartly and adequately to political challenges.

The hugest regret belongs to the PDP. It cannot politicise COVID-19, for that most presumptuous of diseases is no respecter of person or party, let alone the sarcastic. The Kano State Works and Infrastructure commissioner who scathingly denounced the president’s late chief of staff, Abba Kyari, after the latter was bumped off by the impudent virus, is himself down with the virus, having hailed from a state in denial over the disease. Are the states fighting the virus smartly and comprehensively? Not at all. The war is hobbled by incompetence, confusion, and years of mediocrity and negligence. The opposition knows all this, but having ruled for 16 years, it knows it cannot be absolved of blame. So there can be no politicisation of anything; after all, some PDP leaders or members of their families have also fallen victim to the virus.

The solemnity that has characterised politics in the past few chaotic weeks will, therefore, continue for some time to come. Indeed, how Ondo and Edo governorship aspirants hope to campaign, participate in primaries and fight the elections will remain uppermost in the minds of everybody in the two states, including the relevant electoral agencies. For years, the public had campaigned for electronic voting. Now the country must actively weigh that option, even if the Ondo and Edo polls will for now be exempted. Many other things will change in politics, when its engine begins to rev again, but for now, all will remain quiet on the political front, so quiet that the September, October polls will shock everybody by its sombreness.

By Undertow

Barely two weeks after Northern states governors vehemently asserted their reluctance to embrace lockdown as a measure to combat COVID-19 pandemic, they have panicked, embraced the measure, and even embarked on many other desperate, perhaps superfluous, tactics. The decision to oppose a lockdown was taken at a virtual conference by the governors, with their chairman, Simon Lalong of Plateau State, issuing a press statement underscoring the inadvisability of the drastic measure. In the statement, Mr Lalong  argued: “They (northern governors) agreed that at the moment, each state would adopt the measure suitable to its setting because total lockdown of the region will come at a very high cost since most of its citizens are farmers who need to go to farms since the rains have started. Another issue discussed by the northern governors was the issue of palliatives from the Federal Government where they regretted that so far, no state in the region had received a dime as special allocation despite the fact that some of them have recorded cases while others are making frantic efforts to prevent any outbreak, as well as prepare against any eventuality.”

There is of course some logic to the northern states governors’ argument. Lockdown has huge economic costs, and there is in addition no global proof that it is capable of achieving the desired health goal of curbing the coronavirus disease that has infected nearly 2,000 Nigerians and cost more than 50 lives. It is also true that with the advent of the planting season, farms desperately need labourers to kick-start and energise next season’s agricultural cycle. A lockdown would cost the agricultural sector dearly, the governors say, and dispose the region and perhaps the country to hunger, if not needless deaths far more impactful than the novel virus. They are right. So, what has changed in barely two weeks that has led the governors to abandon their distaste for the lockdown measure?

When they robustly denounced the lockdown measure on April 13, only a handful of states in the region had been affected by the virus, and insignificantly few deaths had been recorded. In two weeks, however, only a handful of states — indeed by the NCDC account, just one — have remained unaffected by the virus, with the outbreak in Kano and Borno States filling the governors with horror and consternation, particularly the rapidity with which the virus has spread. The region had many weeks of unhindered advantage to prepare for a worst-case scenario of COVID-19 outbreak. They instead adopted a far more optimistic and rose-coloured perspective of the virus, with both the governments and the governed making light of the disease, pretending to some unearthly immunity, and assuming that a perfunctory approach to the disease and minimal preparation in terms of isolation centres would suffice to rein in a health crisis they were not sure would occur.

While the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) kept warning that an outbreak in the region was only a matter of time, perhaps alarmed that nothing substantial or concrete was being done to prepare for it, the northern states kept stonewalling. Kogi State, for instance, has suggested it had an app with which to battle the disease. The state has, however, not indicated how an app could do the job of forestalling a disease outbreak, nor shown the scientific connection between the disease and a computer programme. Indigenes of some of the northern states, particularly religious associations, have ridiculed public paranoia over the disease, arguing that the region had seen off other epidemics, and are assured that even coronavirus would fall before their invincibility.

Alas, finally, coronavirus has berthed in most of the northern states, bar one or two states by the last count. Kano’s controversial death figures, following a disease they continue to argue is of unknown aetiology, has infused panic into the system. It even seemed that whatever disease is killing off the indigenes of the state is playing a cruel and morbid joke on the powerful and influential, killing off more than a dozen of them in almost one fell swoop. Not only has the state consequently declared a complete lockdown, without graduating from mild or severe restrictions, it has had to embrace a further two-week lockdown imposed by the federal government. Just like the northern states which for over a month did not even have one testing centre bar the one in Abuja, for a few crazy days Kano’s only testing centre, which was erected rather late in the first instance, was out of action. It was restored a few days ago after indecipherable theories of conspiracies had run riot in the state, including one by one Prof Ishaq Akintola who incredulously tied the absence of a testing centre to a plot to depopulate the largely Muslim North.

Testing centres, though late in coming, are beginning to spring up in many states in the North. Better late than never. But vital moments have been lost. Perhaps, now, the true picture of the COVID-19 incidence in the North will manifest as a result of the establishment of more testing centres. By and large, the region is unfortunately not ready to handle the pandemic. But the NCDC and the federal government are beginning to rally to the side of the region, and are expected to pour money and resources to a problem that could have been handled more timely and successfully had they been less superstitious and superfluous in their naive approach to the disease.

The fear in the region and Nigeria as a whole is that the northern states are less prepared or competent, on account of their socio-cultural milieu, to tackle the pandemic. Medical facilities are few and far between. And where they exist, they are not well staffed, nor well equipped. If the outbreak becomes an avalanche, then a tragedy of truly monumental proportion would quickly manifest. Like the rest of the country, and perhaps worse, the gross and continuous underfunding of the health sector will expectedly take a heavy toll on the country. Poverty is also more widespread in the region, and few mitigating measures have been taken generally to address a long-standing health crisis that is now certain to be compounded by COVID-19.

For decades, the northern states, which are plagued by the unremitting almajiri problem, have been lax in addressing many of their outdated and outmoded cultural and religious practices. The almajiri problem has led to the proliferation of thousands, if not millions of youths, who are sent to poorly equipped and unregulated Quranic schools where they must fend for themselves at a tender age. They have often been fodder for violent religious or any other kind of protests. Neither their parents nor their Quranic schools have generally been held accountable for the children banished to religious schools, and not catered for or nurtured roundly into adulthood. They school in overcrowded classrooms and live in heavily overcrowded and abominable hostels. The northern states have for many years spoken glibly of abolishing the practice; but they have lacked the courage and the vision to handle the problem sensibly and pragmatically.

Indeed, early this week, the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Boss Mustapha, bemoaned the neglect to which Nigerian youths, in this case, the almajirai, have been subjected. Speaking during the daily briefing by the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19 last Monday, Mr Mustapha warned: “There is nothing wrong about them learning the dictates of their faith. But we must prepare them equally for the future. Equip them, skill them so that they can become educated in their states and also become productive citizens in the future. If we do not deal with the issues relating to the almajiris, we are building an army that would overwhelm us as a people and as a nation in the future.” The SGF was, in other words, saying that hastily banning the almajiri practice was not enough to mitigate its deleterious effects. There must be a scientific approach to a cancer that had been foolishly allowed to fester for decades.

Kebbi State governor, Abubakar Bagudu, told the media some 10 days ago that northern states governors had agreed that almajirai in the region would be returned to their home states to allow the governors and the states to deal with the pandemic and to tackle a practice they see has evidently become a disease vector. The North is littered with trucks conveying many of the almajiri youths back to their home states, all of them cutting a pitiful picture of abuse and abandonment. It brings into sharp focus the absolute lack of responsibility demonstrated by the affected state governments and parents in dealing with a problem that should never have been allowed to take root in the first instance.

Yet, in all the effort to repatriate the almajirai, little has been said about parents who have wilfully subjected their children to such degrading treatment and practice, a practice sometimes implausibly defended as not being inconsonant with religious precepts. The affected children are being returned to their states, as indeed they should, but the state governments have a duty to fish out parents who deliberately abandon their responsibilities to their children. Surely the states can find a corollary of the law to charge such offending parents in the court. If the mounting COVID-19 cases in the country are a true reflection of the spread of the disease, and not a scheme to finagle the system of the little left in the national treasury due to shrinking oil exports and revenue, it is time then to fight the neglect, irresponsibility and abominable practices that have fostered the rampage of a disease the country should have controlled far better than it did. While the entire country cannot be absolved of blame for allowing the pandemic to run riot, northern governors share a huge and inglorious part of the blame.