Category: Barometer

Barometer

In the coming weeks, notwithstanding the incidence of the coronavirus infection in Nigeria, the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) will find it increasingly difficult to control public and private responses to the virus. It is beginning to look like Nigerians have taken the measure of the disease and are no longer afraid of it. But remarkably, these curious responses are being inspired by governors and public officials, not by private citizens.

Over 5,000 people have been infected so far, according to the NCDC, and close to 180 have died. More than 3,800 people are still receiving treatment. The situation, therefore, remains a little tense. But despite these, four governors in the North, to wit, Borno, Gombe, Zamfara and Adamawa have eased lockdown measures and given guarded approval for religious groups to resume worship.

Read Also: Cleric cautions churches about reopening

The federal government is appalled, and many Nigerians sneer at the affected governors. But it is likely the governors were merely responding to pressures from their publics.

Whether easing lockdown in the four states is reasonable or not, the NCDC and the federal government should gird their loins and be prepared for more egregious responses from other states. More, they had better find ways of being in control of the easing process than to engage in a titanic effort to enforce what may soon become unenforceable.

The world is gradually ending the lockdown measure, resisting being locked down interminably, regardless of the rising incidence of a disease the World Health Organisation (WHO) has said humanity must find ways of living with for the foreseeable future. Nigeria should, therefore, find ways of doing same without hurting the system too much. There is a limit it can swim against the tide.

Barometer

Despite its complacency, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) remains the leading and staunchest opposition party in Nigeria today. It may lose that preeminent position sometime in the future, but today, it is a leader in the opposition. Having ruled Nigeria since the outset of the Fourth Republic in 1999, the party lost office only in 2015 after staying in power for 16 years during which it garnered a great reputation for political spread, resilience, conservatism mixed with pragmatism, and an uncanny ability to take the battle to the opposition wherever it may be found and no matter how well constituted.

But five years after losing office, and many years of playing politics outside the seat of power with an embarrassing lack of sure-footedness, the PDP has become confused and ideologically amorphous. It has, therefore, become urgent to encourage the party to shake off its lethargy and begin to competently play the role of the preeminent opposition party. The encouragement may consistently fall on deaf ears, but for the sake of democracy, the political elite, regardless of where they stand in the country’s political divide, must not be tired of engaging with the party. It is important to help the PDP regain its composure and avert disintegration before 2023.

No issue illustrates the impotence of the PDP as clearly and worrisomely as its response to the rampage inspired by the government of Nyesom Wike in Rivers State. The governor is redefining the rule of law under the pretext of fighting the COVID-19 pandemic ravaging the world, striking fear in the hearts of people, and subverting and weakening the global economy. Mr Wike is a generally impatient politician and governor. Passionate in his commitment of pre-empting the virus from taking root in his state and laying it waste, he has been effusive in issuing executive orders and making ad hoc rules and regulations to fight the spread of the virus in Rivers State. He has fought pilots and airlines, raised Cain with oil workers and allied services, and though a lawyer himself, has upended the ramparts upon which the rule of law rests by accusing, judging and punishing offenders, be they hoteliers or motorists, accused of flouting the law.

Mr Wike has defended himself, howbeit not convincingly, insisting that COVID-19 re-enacts a war situation requiring urgent and extraordinary measures fitting for wartime. He has not provided sound basis for his actions or beliefs, but this has not dissuaded him from peremptorily taking countermeasures which he says are indispensable to these times.

He genuinely believes his exaggerations, assured in any case that the end justifies the means. But what of his party, the sleepy PDP? Surely as a party man, Mr Wike would be subject to the party and not be above censure. Well, not quite. The party instead berates Mr Wike’s critics over the measures the governor has taken as well as his style in fighting what he hyperbolically describes as the COVID-19 war in Rivers State. The PDP justifies his excesses and rhapsodises his commitment to the war.

The PDP’s failure to discipline senior party leaders either openly or secretly has made the party indistinguishable from the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) which critics have accused of grossly violating the rule of law and perpetrating injustice all over the country. Because it is not in office at the centre, the PDP has been less flagrant in perpetrating intraparty injustice than the APC, but it has nevertheless appeared to be even more complicit in subverting the rule of law, particularly in states where it occupies the State House.

In recent years, Mr Wike exercised inordinate power and influence in his party, up to the point of nearly enthroning a presidential candidate. Having wielded such influence, and having deftly won the party chairman, the gentle Uche Secondus, to his side, it is uncertain that anyone within the party could raise his voice against the Rivers governor. No one can summon the ‘impudence’ to rail against Mr Wike, not to talk of openly denouncing him for his rash and indefensible actions in the campaign against the fearsome virus.

Apart from being unable to curb Mr Wike’s open and condemnable excesses, it has also become hard for the PDP to even frown at the foibles of its governors, some of whom have become so anti-democratic that it is not difficult to describe them as lawless. Ebonyi engaged in a needless quarrel with the media a few weeks ago. The country rose as one man to condemn the governor, David Umahi. But the PDP said nothing to or against the governor, not even a private rebuke.

It was, therefore, left to the civil society and the victimised media to force Mr Umahi to walk back his obnoxiousness. Cross River State governor Ben Ayade also put a journalist, Agba Jalingo, on trial for publishing false reports. But the trial was shockingly not about libel; it was for treason, which the governor exaggerated was at the instance of federal authorities. The PDP was wary of intervening. And in what constitutes a redefinition of the law in Akwa Ibom State, a journalist, Kufre Carter, was also detained for about a week, in express violation of the constitution, for making defamatory comments against a commissioner. These anomalies and excesses in PDP states should have drawn the attention and intervention of the PDP. Instead, ghostly silence followed.

If the PDP fails to recognise that these seemingly little steps have dire consequences for its effort to regain office, particularly in 2023, the party may find itself staying much longer out of the presidential villa. There will be no waving of magic wand in 2023. The PDP has made a dreadful botch of its opposition politics, has failed to address the factors that led to its losing office in 2015, has been cowardly in purging its ranks in the past five years, and has not even given any indication that it stands for certain high and noble principles, whether regarding its ideology or its politics.

If it cannot make amends for its failure, or come to terms with its past, how does it hope to inspire the electorate to rally behind its stained banner? How would it assemble a critical mass of people who believe in its cause, or raise the funds needed to fight for office?

Barometer

Kogi State’s defiant governor Yahaya Bello is adamant that his state does not have a single case of coronavirus infection. Officials of the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) think he is living in denial, and that together with Cross River State, which also insists it has no single case, the two states could not conceivably be an island in a nation battling with almost 4,000 cases and a little fewer than 200 deaths.

The NCDC is further worried that Kogi State is embarrassingly unprepared for the virus, has no testing centre or kits, and no standard isolation centre beyond a broken tent supposedly devoted to tackling Lassa fever. If an outbreak should occur, reasoned NCDC, it would quickly develop into the despairing strange disease case witnessed in Kano State in the past few days. Mr Bello is unfazed.

Responding to the NCDC team visit to Kogi late last week, and particularly their breach of COVID-19 protocols, Mr Bello reacted to the offer of help from Abuja by asking the team to go into isolation for 14 days or get out of the state. They chose to flee, said some reports.

This is truly numbing. According to the governor: “Our people are adequately sensitised in all languages and locations throughout the state about Covid-19. As much as practicable Kogites now observe social distancing, hand washing and other protocols for prevention of infection…In the circumstances, we cannot manufacture cases in order to be counted among the states which have recorded same. As a governor I hear there are ‘benefits’ for having Covid-19 cases in your state; well, I am not interested.”

Mr Bello had better hope that the infection does not hit his state, assuming it has not already done so, despite the denial of the state government. Should it happen, Mr Bello will not get sympathy from anywhere. He has always been uncouth and unorthodox, not to talk of infantile and inept. It must remain a mystery how a political system throws up his kind and tolerates him to the galling detriment of millions of Kogites.

By Barometer

Some three days ago, former Kano State Works and Infrastructure commissioner, Muazu Magaji, disclosed his COVID-19 status. He said he had tested positive to the virus. He had got in touch with the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), he moaned, after he felt unwell for close to a week. Nearly a month earlier, Governor Abdullahi Ganduje had on April 18 sacked Mr Magaji a day after making what was described as indecent and unfeeling comments on the death of Abba Kyari, chief of staff to President Muhammadu Buhari. About three weeks after he made the sarcastic comments on Mr Kyari, Mr Magaji was himself diagnosed with coronavirus. He confessed that the test followed persistent fever, cough and headache symptoms which he battled for about a week.

Even though he tried to justify his comments on the late chief of staff to the president, insisting that Mr Kyari occupied a visible and high-profile position in government, which affects all Nigerians, neither the governor nor many Nigerians thought he was wise in venting his spleen so openly and so candidly. He should not speak ill of the dead, they chorused. And now that he too has caught the giant flu, what would he think if others were to mock him, as they are certain to do in the days ahead? Or perhaps, everyone, especially in Abuja, Kano and Kaduna will tread gingerly in making comments on the subject so that a similar fate does not befall them.

On April 18, Mr Magaji had made the following comments on Facebook on the late Mr Kyari, and it is left to the reader to judge the tone: (a) “Abba Kyari is no ordinary citizen. He amassed so much power that decided the fate of my nation and its people…Hence his death is never personal.” (b) “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!” (c) “There is a world of difference between a good person and a good leader…Leadership is an aggregated quality of mass empathy, not personal favours!” (d) “May Allah heal Abba Kyari…But may Allah not return him as Chief of Staff…PMB needs to be his own man.” (e) “It’s 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!”

Realising that the public would judge his coronavirus status in terms of his acerbic comments on Mr Kyari, Mr Magaji quickly opened up on the same social media that brought him some controversial fame. Said he, “Dear all, I do truly apologize for you not getting across to me on phone or msgs….I have been indisposed due to ongoing health challenges some of us are going through in Kano…This morning my NCDC test is out. I have been confirmed Covid-19 Positive.  And have been moved to one of the state facilities…pray for us!” He will be wondering at the back of his mind what the public will think of him, whether they will say it is a case of being hoisted with his own petard, or whether they will be sympathetic to him in contrast to how he punned the death of Mr Kyari in a cryptic obituary.

His suspicions regarding what others might say probably led him to ask his special adviser, Muslihu Yusuf Ali, to quickly issue a statement following his admission of illness. The statement was apologetic and indirectly expiatory. Said Mr Ali, explicating Mr Magaji’s coronavirus status: “Mr Magaji had been complaining of fever, headache and cough for almost one week until he called the NCDC hotline three days back for COVID-19 test. The results came out positive and they had to move him immediately to Muhammadu Buhari Hospital Giginyu on isolation as one of the COVID-19 protocols. His tireless efforts on developmental projects in Kano within very brief time as Commissioner of Works and Infrastructure in the Ganduje administration will never be forgotten by Kano citizens and Nigerians at large. Also more unforgettably is the most recent achievement he laid as a member of the Kano State Task Force Commitee on COVID-19 where he had a fine coordination and supervision of all isolation centres in Kano. The mingling of the workaholic commissioner hand in hand with commissioner of health, members of COVID-19 task force, health professionals, and NCDC caused him to be at high risk of the disease.”

The explanations are well taken; and in any case, it has become risky to mock anyone for testing positive to, or dying from, COVID-19. But Mr Ali’s statement also sadly reads like an elegy, especially the part that lauded the former Works commissioner’s contributions to both the Ganduje administration and the development of Kano State. Does the special adviser fear that Mr Magaji’s positive test result is a death sentence? Hopefully, the former Works commissioner will soon recover, as indeed most afflicted people do. A man of his peculiar gifts, particularly his sardonic scribbles and gallows humour, is sorely needed in these bitter, recriminative and humourless times. Here is hoping Mr Magaji a quick recovery. The nation has had enough deaths from that abominable virus.

By Barometer

Lagos State was already groaning under two weeks of different shades of shutdown when the federal government barged in on March 30 and ordered a two-week lockdown. The feds gave some sort of justification that added no new insight into the shutdown the state had earlier endured with some success for about 14 days. Worse, other than the initial N10bn subvention given the state to prosecute the COVID-19 pandemic war, the feds gave little or no further succour. Lagos State, which had calibrated and graduated its shutdown to stave off every attendant security threat, was left alone to fend for itself and to placate its restless, combative and weary indigenes. Three additional weeks of lockdown at the instance of Abuja pushed the state to breaking point, with both the government and the governed, especially the daily wage earners who were in the majority, swearing that they had reached the end of their tethers.

But the feds are not reputed for learning from history or experience. The five-week lockdown in Lagos had done very little to decelerate the spread of coronoavirus disease infection, though the populace and the elite derived maximum psychological satisfaction from promoting that putative sure cure. The elite seemed to believe that without a lockdown, the state, if not Nigeria entirely, would experience apocalypse.

They had their way, a lockdown was imposed, but apocalypse continued its relentless march. It was shocking, therefore, to see the same feds, as usual playing the laggard, ordering a lockdown on Kano one week after the state had ordered its own lockdown. However, barely four days after the federal lockdown, Kano State governor, Abdullahi Ganduje, has appealed to the feds to ease the lockdown because of its suffocating effect on the hungry and poverty-stricken populace.

Said Gov Ganduje: “We are making this appeal on behalf of our people who are presently running out of food items. We would love the federal government to relax the lockdown for a period of time to enable people stock their homes, especially now that majority of us are fasting. It will also ease the economic hardship in the state.” It is possible that the governor got some disturbing security reports. Unlike Lagos where organised cult groups invaded vulnerable sctions of the society, and found themselves very quickly at the receiving end of angry militia-like sections of the society also pining from the lockdown, Kano’s explosion, should it come, could be cataclysmic.

It is not clear whether the Kano governor got alarming security reports or he was just acting on plain socio-economic reports indicating that the populace was frustrated and set to explode. Whatever the origin of the reports he got, it is clear to the governor that his people could not endure a two-week lockdown, let alone the three-week lockdown they are enduring, or even the possibility of an extension.

Clearly, Kano is in for a very rough time. Not only was the state unprepared for the health crisis that has perplexed it, going by its appalling inaction in developing its healthcare sector, like the rest of the country, it inexplicably wasted three or four weeks window which they could have used to arm themselves in readiness for the virus as states in the southern part of the country became beleaguered.

Nearly four weeks of advance warning since March, the state still did not have a testing centre until the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) erected one. It has taken the afflicted in Kano dropping dead like flies, starting from the wealthy and elitist, to nudge them into frenzied action. But that feverish action has been largely erratic. It will, therefore, take concerted efforts by the federal government, going by what is on ground in the state and their denials and half-truths in the face of mass deaths, to pluck the state from the jaws of inertia.

Nigerians had feared that if the virus were to berth in any of the most populous states in the North, chaos could ensue. Their fears are not misplaced. Indeed Kano should have anticipated the crisis and got ready for the virus. Like the rest of the North, the ignorant and the fatalistic lived in denial, and sang and argued that coronavirus could never get the better of them. Perhaps if the affected states in the North, including Kano, had quickly got down to serious business, found out how the virus behaved and discovered what the vulnerabilities of their people were, especially given cultural and religious strictures, the day might have been saved. But it was not to be.

Kano wants some N15bn to fight the disease. They will doubtless get something huge, as indeed many are speculating the feds have begun to truck thousands of bags of grains to them. They may even get virtually everything they need, though it is not guaranteed that they can deploy those resources more expertly and frugally than sceptics give them credit. But if care is not taken, the country may be gazing long into the abyss in Kano, unsure what merciless hand the virus would deal them, or whether the virus would even respond as quickly as expected to all the panaceas the state in league with the feds might administer.

Some of those panaceas will be harsh and bitter. And if Kano can hardly endure one week of federal lockdown, what might their infamously short staying power tolerate?

By Barometer

Not too long after northern governors described the lockdown response to COVID-19 as impracticable in their states, they have followed up with the counterintuitive measure of bussing (or trucking) beggars and almajirai back to their states of origin.

The new measure, they argue, should make the fight against the pandemic less complicated and perhaps more rewarding. On the surface, they are right. The almajiri system, which involves millions of northern youths apprenticed to Quranic schools under strangulating conditions, has been allowed to fester for too long to the detriment of the socio-economic and political advancement and sophistication of the North. Now, they are so used to it that they are reluctant to end it.

The northern governors are right to conclude that the almajiri system enables a criminally negligent system that frees parents of nurturing their children while at the same time not empowering Quranic schools to adequately cater to the needs of these youths, many of them just emerging from infancy. Whether they like it or not, the states must find a way to deal with this long-standing malaise, and deal with it in a self-sustaining and transformative way.

It is not certain how bussing the almajirai to their home states would conduce to ending the practice without making parents liable for abandoning their children, for abandonment is what it really is. The shock, however, is how the governors came up with the decision to bus these children at a time of lockdowns and when many of them were suspected to be infected with the virus.

Not only does it violate the interstate lockdown declared by the federal government, there is also the more pressing danger of helping to spread the virus to the far reaches of the country, thus compounding or even defeating the purpose of the so-called deportation.

It is constitutionally impossible to bar states from proceeding with the almajiri bussing measure. But they must be told that it makes little sense, despite their lean resources, and it is definitely not the solution to defeating the virus. It is a temporary measure of doubtful utility, not to say reasonableness.

Barometer

A little over a week ago, Southwest governors resolved to enforce the wearing of face masks by south-westerners in order to further enable the fight against COVID-19.

Despite all their efforts, infections had continued to rise, thus prompting the governors, through the Southwest Governors’ Forum, to compel their states to wear masks.

The decision was taken at a virtual conference organised by the governors. They gave approximately one week notice.

Said the governors in a statement signed by the Ondo State governor and Chairman of the Southwest Governors’ Forum, Rotimi Akeredolu: “The entry points of our six states (will) be closed forthwith to contain the spread of COVID-19 pandemic.

That the state governors agreed that people involved in essential services or dealing in medicine, water and consumable items, in particular traders and market men/women, should endeavour to wear nose masks while outside plying their trades to minimise the spread of the deadly virus.

The governors further agreed that wearing of nose masks will be made compulsory for everybody coming out of their homes effective from Friday 24 April, 2020 in their respective states.”

Read Also: ‘No evidence’ virus recovery stops reinfection, says WHO

The governors are right to embrace any measure they think would advance the fight against the disease, and the fight, it must be admitted, is indeed urgent.

But to give one week deadline to a people burdened by weeks of lockdowns, a people groaning under much privations, is doubtless abrasive and a little insensitive.

It is harsh to blackmail them by suggesting that reluctance to wear the masks by the deadline is tantamount to their not appreciating the life-and-death situation months of official lassitude and tardiness in the COVID-19 war has brought upon the people.

The Southwest used to be more advanced than the rest of the country in formulating policies, paradigms and initiatives in human development and governance.

Now, the national pastime of uninspiring governance has caught up with them. Wearing masks may be an important component of the fight against COVID-19 pandemic, but the Southwest could have handled the mask policy and other policies like interstate lockdowns with far better timing and aplomb. Perhaps they didn’t because they are no longer able to.

Barometer

 

LAST week, for the umpteenth time, policemen were caught on camera violating their rules of engagement, this time, assaulting a woman accused of violating lockdown regulations.

The woman, Tola Azeez, a resident of Iwo in Osun State, was on her way to get drugs and relief materials for her family when she was accosted by two police officers, Inspector Ikuesan Taiwo and Corporal Abass Ibrahim, and flogged for being disrespectful.

A video of the incident went viral, leading police authorities to order the arrest of the officers. They have been tried by the police in line with service rules and are awaiting the decision of their employers. But what if there had not been a video evidence.

The video of the incident is unsightly, and clearly points to some of the fundamental problems militating against the operations and image of the Nigeria Police Force.

Until those fundamental problems are addressed, the police will find themselves trapped in a pirouette of malfeasance and punishment involving their errant officers.

Nothing suggests that the police are any nearer resolving these contradictions that have considerably hobbled their operations and given the law enforcement agency a bad name.

The police may have reacted quickly to douse the controversy and disgust triggered by the Osun flogging incident, but that prompt response has, however, not suggested that something was being done to avoid a repeat in the near future.

In fact, hardly a day passes without the police being mentioned in one atrocious behaviour or another, whether it has to do with extrajudicial killing or extortion, or even framing innocent citizens for crimes not committed.

The police authorities have nearly always reacted to such grave infractions by investigating, arresting and disciplining offending officers.

The problem is that whatever the police have done has not meant that institutional deterrence has been infused into the force.

Everything points to a fundamental default in the training and deployment of police officers. For even when they are not involved in flouting their own rules of engagement, they have been deficient in acting with the professionalism and impartiality integral to police operational procedures.

In the states, they have sometimes been inseparable from tyrannical governors, and in the streets, they have sometimes connived at crimes, sided with the guilty, favoured the first complainant, and subordinated themselves to the rich and influential.

Clearly, the police must firmly and decisively changed their operational paradigms. That change must begin at the training schools, and the country’s political leadership as well as the police hierarchy must find the boldness and vision to birth a very fundamental change.

Nigeria’s political structure is weak, tentative and susceptible to fragmentation. No matter how bright the police leadership is at the moment, that needed paradigmatic shift in the force is unlikely to happen anytime soon because of the structural inadequacies and contradictions in the system.

The country will, therefore, content itself with cosmetic changes such as the country has unfortunately become inured to, one in which police officers who demonstrate poor and egregious judgement are cashiered.

Over the decades, each police Inspector General has found it practicable to coax the nuisance handed down to them, hoping that nothing tsunamic would happen to disrupt handing down the same nuisance to their successors.

Read Also: Police arrest husband over wife’s death in Jigawa

 

The public must reconcile themselves to the disappointing fact that they are unlikely to get the police force they crave — a police establishment that is independent, policemen who are proud of their profession, firm, experienced, tactical, responsible, patriotic, fair, humane and visionary — indeed a police force among the very best in the world.

That is perhaps a chimera too distant and too abstract. However, they must never tire of campaigning for a great police force, regardless of the painful fact that the country’s political structure and poor leadership make that goal unrealizable.

Indeed, the irony was probably lost on many Nigerians last week that the controversial and cantankerous traditional ruler of Iwoland, Oba Abdulrosheed Akanbi, weighed in on the flogging incident to counsel the police and sue for public restraint.

Said Oba Akanbi: “The act and action of the police against an Iwo woman, Tola Azeez, is condemnable. It is an unacceptable and barbaric display.

Iwo is civilized beyond such incivility. The palace has for time immemorial devised necessary machineries to ensure the community and the police co-habit peacefully for effective security.

I’ve intervened, the police have gone to her place with the DPO of the affected division to tender their apology formally.”

But Oba Akanbi was the same traditional ruler who physically battled a fellow oba in the presence of top police officers, as the law enforcement agency proved powerless to do anything about the fight, not even to bear witness to the truth about the brawl between the two feuding obas.

The rot in the police and the society has taken long to crystallize; it will take deep and fundamental changes to find the antidote to what has probably become a cancer.

By Barometer

Lagos State had the distinguished responsibility of formulating the earliest response to the COVID-19 global health crisis. It moved more quickly and sure-footedly than the federal government in isolating infected patients and treating them, in the process achieving a high survivability ratio.

It had moved progressively from advocacy — hand washing, use of sanitisers, adoption of social distancing measure, etc. — to a gradual shutdown, and was in the midst of developing more focused responses, perhaps not excluding a lockdown, when the federal government butted in and ordered a lockdown. The federal action unfortunately disregarded the economic, social and crime realities of Lagos, not to say also failing to take pre-emptive measures to counter the lockdown’s harmful effects.

A lockdown, at some point, was unavoidable. But it was necessary to prepare the ground for it, no matter how urgent the measure was, and to design economic and social intervention measures that would anticipate the anti-social propensity of criminal elements in the state. It was also necessary to find a balance between the lockdown measure designed to save lives and the economic wellbeing of the people without which the state would erupt in disruptive activities potentially capable of paralysing the state’s economy and counteracting the gains of the COVID-19 war.

The federal government paid little attention to such details, particularly the steps that needed to be taken before a lockdown was ordered. Instead, it rhapsodises the gains of the measure and issued a brusque order, after which it has done very little to obviate the crises that have accompanied and militated against the restrictions.

Now, Lagos is battling almost a full-blown social revolt by young cultists who have been growing in number and ferocity in the past few years. Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu seems to think those who poured out into the streets last week to rob and maim did so because they were pure criminals, not hungry youths. It really does not matter. The fact is that the cults are now ubiquitous, partly because the wrong police force had been saddled with the task of reining them in.

The policemen have been very unsuccessful discharging the task assigned them for reasons that are connected with the political structure of the country. Now the cults are numberless, and are increasingly more daring. Lagos has a responsibility to put a ministry and commissioner in charge of that peculiar social anomaly, empower the ministry, and set targets to extirpate or reduce the influence of cults to the barest minimum.

The state has now seen just how much obstreperous youth cults can attenuate sound social and economic policies. It is a huge problem with the potential of creating in the state and the South generally the northern version of bandits and banditry. The lockdown crisis and outbreak of criminality should be an incentive to the state and the region not to let the problem degenerate further.

By Barometer

The clearest indication that Nigeria’s COVID-19 response is devoid of coherence and leadership is how the states are prosecuting the war against the disease and, as they put it, passionately defending their people.  Some states have imposed a lockdown; others have gone one degree or the other towards a shutdown. But whether shutdown or lockdown, many states have inadvertently portrayed Nigeria as a pastiche of independent entities almost to the total exclusion of the federal government. The federal government has not helped matters, as it seems overwhelmed by the disease and scared of its progression.

No one of course expects that states would not have their peculiarities, which should shape their responses to the disease. But due to the inconsistency of responses, it has become harrowing to transport humans and goods across state lines, thereby stymieing economic activities and creating needless tensions. Some states bar or delay trucks conveying agricultural products, with traffic gridlock stretching long distances; while other states turn back travellers on federal highways who are merely commuting through states on lockdown. Ondo State has barred travellers passing through their state, and Niger State has ordered a truck from Lagos en route Kano to return to Lagos. The confusion was avoidable if the federal government had taken the initiative to harmonise the fight against the disease while taking cognisance of local laws and peculiarities.

The federal government has not fared better in harmonising the federal-led fight against the disease. It would, therefore, be hard to expect it to set examples for the states. On his own, Rivers State’s Governor Nyesom Wike has mistaken legitimate commitment in the fight against the disease for fanatical defence of state rights in a health crisis that admittedly has local peculiarities. Ogun and Lagos States should wage a harmonised war against the disease in view of the ties between their economies. But dissonance has crept in. The federal government admitted the existence of such ties, and both states at first seemed to have acknowledged the ties, but almost immediately drifted apart.

The disharmony and lack of leadership in the COVID-19 war are exacerbated by the appalling unprofessionalism of a significant section of the law enforcement agencies, especially the military and the police. When Mr Wike shut down Rivers State borders, soldiers at checkpoints interpreted his orders to mean the complete cessation of movements between the state and other states, irrespective of the economic activities involved. Even newspaper delivery vehicles were barred from travelling between states, with press vehicles disabled and drivers traumatised. Some states have recorded casualties due to the heavy-handedness of security agents who violently confronted those alleged to have defied the lockdown orders. Some other victims escaped with injuries or summary incarceration.

Responding to the violence that threatened to unravel the COVID-19 war, the presidential task force on the disease and other supervising agencies of government at the federal and state levels have ordered the security agencies to be civil but firm in their policing of the lockdown/shutdown. Nevertheless, more than a dozen people have reportedly lost their lives, depressingly almost equal to the number of Nigerians who have lost their lives to the disease. This is, of course, indefensible.

The killings reflect the fault lines exposing the country to the forces of chaos, if not disintegration. The problem is not that the task force or some of the state governments do not have an instinctive understanding of how to police the lockdown; what they are battling with are security agencies whose cultures over the past few decades have become abhorrent and counterproductive to the survival and stability of the country.

Having failed for decades to remedy the professional shortcomings of the security agencies, the country finds itself embroiled in a health crisis that needs sound policies and measures from the governments as well as highly professional and patriotic law enforcement and security agencies. There is no half measure. It is in fact disgraceful that heads of the security agencies had to continue reiterating to their men the need to approach their policing work with the highest degree of professionalism and patriotism, asking them in addition to reserve their strong-arm tactics for criminals who take advantage of the lockdown to unleash mayhem on the civil populace.

Hopefully, the federal government will later do a post-mortem of the COVID-19 war and recognise that one of the problems that hampered the early resolution of the crisis was the behaviour of those asked to police the various panaceas administered to curb the spread of the disease. The authorities should indeed wonder how they would police the next crises, especially the severe ones that need both the right panaceas and professional policing.