Olatunji Ololade

 

 

THE city attains dazzle by the exploits of both the government-activated mogul and the syphilitic slattern, but isn’t everyone some form of diseased hustler in the Nigerian city? Isn’t the wild and dirty ‘hustle’ the point of the metropolitan dream?

From Lagos to Port Harcourt, Jos to Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory, the city extends its reach, channelling perverse sheen of modernness, by raping the countryside.

It was hay, however, that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York, writes Dyson.

Hay was responsible for Nigeria’s first brush with economic glory. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates that between 1962 and 1968, Nigeria’s major foreign exchange earner was the agricultural sector. Palm oil and groundnut made up around 47% of the country’s exports. However, Nigeria’s position as an agricultural powerhouse declined through its oil boom.

Understandably, President Muhammadu Buhari sought to revivify the country’s agricultural economy at his assumption of office in 2015, and then, 2019.

Despite Buhari’s rural preachment, the country’s fixation with oil renders her a whited sepulchre sullied by wastefulness and vice, the soot that will not out.

Nigeria needs agriculture, and there are good reasons for the administration to focus on agriculture. Agriculture employs about 70 percent of the population thus it can be used to drive sustainable growth prospects via a value chain that turns raw commodities into processed goods for domestic consumption or export.

The government must seize the moment to fund diversification of agriculture to make it more appealing to a vast youth population that is spiritless about farming but might be attracted to processing, marketing, and other business opportunities along the value chain.

The food emergency in northeast Nigeria brought on by the Boko Haram insurgency, infrastructure deficits, and COVID-19, and the government’s response to them emphasises the need to expand the agricultural sector to guarantee food security and nutrition.

But while the rationale for prioritizing agriculture is sound, many reforms will have to be enacted if the sector is to flourish, argues Robert Downie. These reforms must also include measures to save rural Nigeria by the sheen continually sponged off its greenery by the city.

‘I wonder what they teach them in the city.’

‘That’s easy,’ announced Chonkin. ‘To live off the fat of the countryside,’ intones Vladimir Voinovich, Russian novelist, in his literary classic, The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin.

  Some truth, according to COVID-19

Between craft and credulity, the voice of reason is stifled, writes Burke. I would say, that, somewhere at the crossroads of bêtise and discernment, the voice of reason gets bludgeoned and smothered to death by the raucous din of the Nigerian hordes – comprising government and civil societies.

Nigeria should be different when the coronavirus is done with us. In truth, we have more to be thankful for through the pandemic. Much are the blessings that are very difficult to see whilst running the rapids on the river of life but they become apparent once we’re eddied out like now, the spirited Curmudgeon would argue.

For instance, the streets enjoyed relative peace and less pollution by the lockdown – save for the few instances, when bandit-youth and hungry urchins invaded our neighbourhoods to dispossess residents of their hard-earned savings even as they robbed the kitchens of left over soup, semovita, garri and yam flour.

Thanks to COVID-19, the world, and Nigeria in particular, have attained a better understanding of the essential and non-essential things of life. Nigerians now understand that nothing about the English Premiership, Spanish La Liga, German Bundesliga, among others, is essential to their existence.

The African Cup of Nations, European Nations League, World Cup, like club tournaments are actually worthless endeavours, notable only for their hyperbolic chants of broadcast rights, player worship, and gladiator culture.

Nigerians now understand, that, the Big Brother Naija reality show, among others, and its mob culture of cult-worship and media frenzy are worthless to our survival and existence as a nation.

Now, we know how impotent, self-serving and incompetent most public officers via the government’s infestation of the country by COVID-19 as it refused to shut the airports and other entry points in order to let their wards return home from their overseas travel. We also know how assiduously the citizenry could work to trade their civil liberties to the impotent, incompetent government for a false sense of security.

Thanks to COVID-19, we finally understand the extent of the affluent’s detachment from their supposedly charmed life: overseas shopping binges, vacation travel, and exclusive shindigs and ‘statement soirees’ abroad are all part of a perverse, wasteful, childish, performance theatre, often ill-conceived and worthy of scorn.

Now, we know how recreant, corruptible, acquisitive, and fake social media is. We have realised the limits of science, its delusions of omnipotence, and fear of being shown-up or challenged by traditional herbal medicine.

COVID-19 heroes

The heroes of an epoch, writes Hegel, must be recognized as its clear-sighted ones; their deeds and their words are the best of their time. The true heroes of this epoch are the farmers sowing and harvesting our food, without protection and under persistent attacks by murderous herdsmen; they are the transporters and truck drivers, traders, and neighbourhood grocers making sure food gets to the markets and our tables.

The true heroes are the medical personnel waging a seemingly endless war on the frontlines, against COVID-19, without appropriate protection and incentives from the government. The true heroes are the street sweepers keeping our highways clean; they are the police and civil defense officers, and other paramilitary manning our neighbourhoods and interstate boundaries; they are the military fighting to rout terrorism despite the pandemic.

Lest we forget the journalists; the reporters, correspondents, writers, editors, columnists, and newscasters, who leave their homes daily without appropriate incentives and protective gear, to report from the trenches, the true nature and ravage of COVID-19.

 

 

The dormant Ministry of Works

 

IT is the height of transgression for a government and its functionaries to shirk their responsibilities to the people in times of need. Consider, for instance, the government’s refusal to repair the country’s bad roads during the lockdown.

The Federal Ministry of Works is disconcertingly dormant, comatose, perhaps; for that could be the only explanation for its decision to leave major highways in a permanent state of disrepair through the lockdown.

The badly cratered stretch of the Lagos-Abeokuta highway, among others, has become commuters’ major nightmare. Trucks somersault continuously at deadly gorges at Ajala bus stop, Meiran, Caaso, Agbado Kollington Bus Stops through Ajegunle, Dalemo, Temidire, Sango Ota.

Lest we forget the deadly chasms that stretch from underneath the Sango bridge through Ota, Itele. En route Ifo, Abeokuta, Ogun State, the highway collapses in deep gorges at Ijako, Owode, Iyana-Ilogbo, and Papalanto, to mention a few.

The Ministry of Works is dormant. The Minister of Works must be on vacation. Perhaps they await reportage and photographs of civilian deaths along the perilous paths and bypasses of the Lagos-Abeokuta expressway.

By Olatunji Ololade 

The Nigerian city achieves epic sweep. But it is superfluous to the country. That is why economic activities in most cities got grounded in the wake of COVID-19 as if industry and metropolis didn’t matter – ask the Curmudgeon in his attic.

The same could hardly be said of the countryside; as the pandemic persists, so does its rural economy. Yet cities parasitise the labour of the countryside; they sponge off rural sweat for ponds of sheen, and Nigerians wade through the lustre, bewitched. Cities charm residents. They turn citizens into metro pets and auspicious leaders into silhouettes.

Cities deify sponge bobs but like Virgil would say, fortunate is the man who has come to know the gods of the countryside. Such a man, I would say, must have wandered its groves before its roads became too dangerous to traverse. Before cash crops and wildflowers were decimated by herdsmen and their ruck; before bucolic treasures frothed with pesticides and fishes floated belly-up in Ewekoro and the oil creeks.

Cities don’t produce food. They depend on the countryside to provide it. Save their food distribution systems, cities can quarantine, shut-in, and shut-down, so long as the countryside doesn’t, the Curmudgeon would chirp.

True. A deeper look at our fate through the pandemic reveals how worthless the Nigerian city is, with its parade of glitz and chug-chug of industry. But for the country’s agricultural economy, Nigeria would starve.

Were he clairvoyant, President Muhammadu Buhari would commit more vigorously to improving the agricultural economy. While his administration makes a great show of doing that, its federal pronouncements and gazetted schemes may become self-impeding calcifications, in time.

The ongoing agricultural revitalisation, for instance, stifles by its magnification of tropes as truth, and slogans as change theory. Ask its touted and supposed beneficiaries. It’s all slick insentient theatre, majorly.

Perhaps the problem is not with the city; after all, what are cities but manufactured monoliths? City institutions, symbolised by government and industry, are built to serve individuals.  Depending on the quality of leadership, however, their impersonal walls may deafen to the farmer’s cry and street sweeper’s sigh.

Of course, the Anchor Borrowers Programme (ABP), the Presidential Fertiliser Initiative (PFI), shutting the land borders against import and smuggling, and other protectionist policies are admirable in their mixed blessings but the skyscraper, big business, drone technology, and glorified slums become Nigeria’s face: abstract, mechanical, lifeless.

It takes a tremendous degree of lifelessness for corporate and government-fabricated Edens to thrive amid hedges of state shanties cum low-cost housing schemes and countrified dystopia.

It will be said of this administration too, that it found Nigeria a land of promise and rendered her promiscuous, if President Buhari fails to curtail the countryside’s ravage by the city.

The city unfurls as a plague; it is diseased because its sensuality is both morbid and commercial. It’s hidden graces unclad, like the proverbial harlot, self-exiled from the village but always returning under cover of night to stalk and prey the countryside.

Cities do nothing for the countryside. Knowing this, Buhari announced his decision to resurrect the country by endowing its peasant, agricultural economy with remarkable fillips. He proceeded to do this, forgetting that his team and tools, like Thel’s worms, are corrupt pathogen miming his change mantra.

Buhari must understand that his government cannot achieve agricultural boon simply by pronouncing passion to resources. He must thoroughly examine if resources are pronounced to his passion.

Agreed, the picture was grim pre-Buhari. At his arrival, he boosted productivity via such schemes as the PFI by which he supplied farmers with discounted fertilisers. At his intervention, fertilisers became available to farmers at ¦ 5,500 per bag, a significant cut from the ¦ 9,000 per bag initial regime. And to provide peasant farmers access to credit, the ABP was established. Between 2015 and 2018, ¦ 174 billion was reportedly disbursed to about one million farmers. The total repayment as at the end of 2018 stood at ¦ 21 billion. No thanks to corruption.

Buhari’s agricultural initiatives look good on paper but there is a lack of clarity on their actual impact on the economy. Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Muhammad Sabo Nanono, recently stated that the Federal Government has concluded plans to distribute over 10,000 tractors, valued at N150 million each, and inputs as soft loans to farmers in the 774 Local Government Areas (LGAs) in Nigeria, to be repaid in an 11-year plan.

“What we need is that the beneficiaries must be genuine farmers and indigenes of the participating Local Government Councils,” he said, thus venting a major snag to the initiative. Asides debate on the cost of each tractor, ethnic bigotries, and administrative inefficiency may pose major bottlenecks to the initiative.

Recently, the government’s rice production initiative birthed Lake Rice but the scheme hasn’t attained the widespread success and cumulative impact anticipated of it. Nanono, however, enthuses that Nigeria will be a rice exporter by 2021 because of the border closure. But a border closure won’t resolve infrastructure deficits of recurrent power outage, bad roads, and inadequate storage facilities. It won’t eliminate governance shortfalls of bureaucracy, corruption, and overlapping responsibilities among the three tiers of government. It won’t resolve policy confusion, like a constantly shifting list of items that are prohibited from being imported.

To truly improve the fortunes of the agricultural sector, government must eliminate the structural impediments of unreliable power supply, dilapidated irrigation systems, overcrowded ports, and poor roads. For example, it takes an average of six to eight days to move a truckload of tomatoes along the country’s main transport corridor, from Jibiya in the far north to Lagos in the southwest. Unless the cargo is refrigerated—and invariably it is not—it will perish before reaching Lagos port.

There are hopes, however, that the ongoing rail transportation venture would eliminate the challenges associated with transportation.

At the moment, poverty has risen in Nigeria with almost 82.9 million people living on less than one United States dollar per day, according to a National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) May 2020 report. The figure represents 40.09 percent of the total population, excluding insurgency-ravaged Borno, and the bureau predicted that this rising trend is likely to continue.

According to the report, 52.10 per cent of rural dwellers are living in poverty while the poverty rate in urban centres is 18.04 per cent. But going by the UN’s definition of extreme poverty as a condition characterised by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education, and information, 82.9 million is a highly conservative estimate.

Yet government assails the citizenry and its global audience with fantastic stories of growth and agricultural rebirth. So doing, Nigeria rejects the strife of contraries by which its innards convulse.

At the outbreak of COVID-19, Nigeria’s fabled artifice ended in hysterical retreat, as the country leapt from her tinsel perch and dashed, shrieking, back to her native valleys.

What was hitherto regarded as an underprivileged fetish, or a peasant preserve, has become the nation’s major source of sustenance and rebirth. Nigeria weeps but does not recognise her own tears.

 

Olatunji Ololade

 

MATERIALISM has failed the world over. Compulsive philistines and prescient think-thanks attack grievous social problems- mostly self-inflicted – with paper bullets. They are peashooters trying to collapse Gibraltar.

In Nigeria, however, we see combustive ‘change’ pulse with lust and self-interest among political personae. But the electorate does not know better. They fall for the same ruse, repeatedly.

Both politicians and electorates are caught in a familiar cycle of political cannibalism, often enacted by characters, who attack and retreat in obsessive rhythms of victory and defeat.

The electorate has Sappho’s fever thus their suicidal instinct to self-destruct by recycling familiar tormentors in the public office via the ballot box. They have caught Olohun Iyo’s bug hence they sway to the melody of supernal choirs, and vanish to the lure of infernal conductors – or sweet-tongued politicians if you like.

The politics of domination by deceit, violence, and deep pockets is implicit in Nigerian culture, and this escalates at charged historical moments, like the present. Even in the throes of the coronavirus aka COVID-19, large segments of the electorate ignore the ravage of bad governance, and go to war, online and offline, to defend the honour of presiding oligarchs. Ultimately, they guard their tormentors’ right to keep exploiting and dominating them.

We have seen this happen in successive ‘civilian’ governments from 1999 to date. Its a function of ignorance. I would call it the ritualisation of eye and mind to witlessness.

The bêtise of such heedlessness manifests around us in real-time. The eye and mind elect narcissistic, bigoted personae as galvanizing objects, and then formalise the relation via votes at election time.

Ignorance is the first rung of the ladder leading to death. It precedes the plunge to nothingness. Nigeria must be guided by this truth through the pandemic. Our increasing vulnerability to COVID-19, for instance, is yet another manifestation of our plummet down the steep vale of ignorance.

It was ignorance that drove state governors to acquire toxic chemicals to rid the public space of COVID-19 via fumigation. Against the rule of wisdom and uncommon sense, they are dumping toxic chemicals on communities in their domain as a preventive measure and solution to COVID-19.

They conveniently forget that cleaning with simple disinfectants and providing sanitisation stations in public places present cheaper, better alternatives.

It is hilarious to see supposed state agents flaunt fumigation gizmo in exaggerated onslaughts against COVID-19 in public space. It’s about time the government understood that disinfectants are ill-suited for dispersal via fogging machines, they are solvents applied to surfaces to kill microbes argues Paul Erubami.

Rather than drown the citizenry in poisonous fumes, the governors should redirect their energies at more simplified testing, humane quarantine measures, contact-tracing, physical distancing awareness, and efficient distribution of palliatives.

Ignorance stirred the initial reluctance of the health and science ministries, to explore opportunities presented in the nation’s herbal endowments, and Madagascar’s COVID-Organics.

Prominent public functionaries revealed a source, wish that Madagascar’s herbal therapy fails at clinical trials. They are wary of losing contingency funding and lootable loans accessible via international lenders, she said.

The contingency fund of NGN984 million ($2.7 million) reportedly released to the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) and the additional NGN6.5 billion ($18 million) mooted afterward must be closely monitored by the media and civil societies.

Likewise, the N500bn COVID-19 Crisis Intervention Fund purportedly established for the upgrade of healthcare facilities at the national and state levels, must be closely monitored to prevent fund administrators from embezzling such monies.

Right now, there are no social safety measures and intervention schemes for society’s handicapped: the deaf, blind, homeless are left to the ravage of the elements. Leprosariums, orphanages, geriatric homes, to mention a few, are ignored in ongoing intervention efforts.

Before COVID-19, Nigeria grappled with terrorism, kidnap for ransom, child and sex trafficking, armed robbery, homelessness, mental health problems, divorce, collapse, and corruption of the family unit. These are social problems requiring sustainable welfare policies but the country’s lack of a visionary and humane leadership denied the citizenry such benefits.

There is currently no social welfare programme that offers health care assistance, non-discriminatory entrepreneurial loans, food stamps, and unemployment compensation, among others to deserving citizenry divides. The absence of such initiatives wreaked untold havoc on the citizenry at the outbreak of COVID-19. Bandit youth attacked Lagos and Ogun suburbs and rural areas, robbing folk who already had too little or nothing to survive by.

While government intervention efforts focus on the poor citizenry, presumed middle-class segments have lost their jobs, suffered arbitrary salary cuts, and lack of access to welfare relief that could help them cope with the economic hardship foisted by COVID-19. There are no housing subsidies, energy and utility subsidies, and assistance for other basic services to individuals that are most affected by the pandemic, notes Peterson Ozili.

At the backdrop of these challenges, the numbers of the unemployed sky-rockets. A 2019 World Bank report shows that Nigeria created about 450,000 new jobs in 2018, partially offsetting the loss of jobs in 2017. And while over five million Nigerians entered the labour market in 2018, the number of unemployed increased by 4.9 million in 2019.

More radical estimates indicate that over 18 million youths were unemployed by the end of 2019. Many more have lost their livelihoods in the wake of COVID-19.

Recently, President Muhammadu Buhari approved the employment of 774, 000 youths as part of a Special Public Works Programme aimed at cushioning the economic effects of COVID-19. As usual, this is a knee-jerk reaction to rising unemployment and the pandemic.

Nigerians must use this crisis as an opportunity to reconstruct the power equation, redistribute social privileges, reinvigorate civil societies, and dormant economies.

The public healthcare system must be overhauled with better social safety nets and driven to earn foreign exchange. And this can never be achieved by recycling the incumbent ruling class in power, come 2023.

Something’s got to give. Renaissance hierarchies are dramatized in the noisy climax of gladiator politics. The average voter must re-emerge decisively as political personae of a renaissance Nigeria, come 2023.

He must re-emerge as the culture hero and worker of marvels: the farmer, painter, plumber, sculptor, street trader, student, unemployed graduate, and manual labourer must reprise their roles as fearless change-makers, irreconcilable to visions of them as pawns and inferior social elements.

Their task is well laid out. COVID-19 has reorganised human behaviour around survival instincts. In the ongoing duel with the pandemic, the ultimate purpose of families, states and nations, is to breathe. Its a sublime irony: man labours to breathe in an atmosphere corrupted by his labour for material wealth.

The relentless drive for profits birthed COVID-19, the nondescript virus that tamed the champions of industry, nuclear warlords, mortal destroyers of the ecosystem, political minions, and juggernauts.

In order to keep breathing at a time like this, the Nigerian voter must quit participating in heavily choreographed elections, in which the demands of corporations, individuals, and banks are paramount.

He must vie to tilt power to the citizenry divide. It’s time to take back what’s ours. As Omoyele Sowore would say, it is time to “take it back.”

But how? Slogans and scathing bromides are hardly the way to go in reclaiming Nigeria’s soul from the fangs and talons of raptorial oligarchs.

 

By Olatunji Ololade

Modern Nigeria, drained of compassion, is mortally dead. As the Coronavirus aka COVID-19 spreads among the citizenry, the government’s cold-walled corridors remain evidently passionless.

Cold, spectral personae, spanning the various State Houses and government agencies, parade pitiless game faces, like itinerant gamblers, whose rule of time is enforced by immoderate lust, greed, Mammon and death.

Save the doctors, nurses, janitors, pharmacists, store-keepers, and other health workers, slugging it out every day, in a perilous fight, Nigeria may be worse off in its fight against COVID-19.

It was a given that the rate of infection would escalate and the figures would incite alarm among the citizenry. As you read, more people are getting infected, more are taking their last gasps in the vice-grip of COVID-19.

Raging at China over coronavirus would do us no good. After all, the federal government, moving against the tide of reason and protest by Nigerian doctors, brought in Chinese doctors, purportedly to help fight the coronavirus – even while the country suffered no severity in terms of the scourge. The jury is out on the wisdom of the government’s decision amid the toxicity of ineffectual leadership.

It’s about time we scrutinised our own government. How sincere is the Nigerian government in its ‘fight’ against COVID-19? If the federal government is truly sincere in its campaign against the virus, why did it rule out, until recently, the possibility of looking inwards for a cure?

Why did some state governments go through the trouble of purchasing fumigation tools and publicise intent to disinfect their domain’s public places only to desert the initiative shortly after?

Why did the government fail to seize the opportunity of the lockdown to repair the country’s bad road network, given that, bad roads cause vehicular traffic, and protracted hold-ups manifest dangerously as contamination points?

There are issues of compassion and efficiency. The government has so far, botched medical and social intervention programmes meant to alleviate the impact of the pandemic on vulnerable segments of the population.

Its scandalous lack of vision and cowardice in fighting the pandemic has so far, incited citizenry angst and conspiracy theories of government’s insincerity in fighting the virus.

In fighting the pandemic, I reiterate that the Nigerian government must look inwards and explore the innumerable opportunities offered by traditional, herbal medicine.

If they won’t, medical NGOs and civil societies must unite in finding affordable, alternative traditional therapy in treating COVID-19. The preventive and curative therapy generated thereby would serve the interest of millions of Nigerians, who stand the risk of untimely death by the disease, due to lack of a functional health system, lack of bed spaces, and a cruel government.

Madagascar’s COVID-Organics may yet be Africa’s major elixir in fighting COVID-19 and ridding the continent of its scourge. This is hardly the time for intellectual subterfuge and random bullying by the government of brilliant scientists and advocates of traditional herbal medicine. It is time to seek synergy between western medicine and traditional herbal medicine.

Last week, I mentioned how China evolved Artemisinin as a potent antimalarial drug. Known in Chinese as qinghaosu, and derived from the sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua L.), Artemisinin was only one of several hundred substances discovered by a young Chinese medical researcher, Tu Youyou.

Jia-Chen Fu, Assistant Professor of Chinese, Emory University states in a piece for Conversation Africa, that, Tu and her team were recruited as part of Project 523, by the Chinese government. Project 523 was a covert operation launched to fight chloroquine-resistant malaria, and Tu and her team culled from Chinese drugs and folk remedies to evolve one of the most powerful and effective antimalarial drug therapy to date.

The original three-year plan produced by the People’s Liberation Army Research Institute aimed to integrate Chinese and Western medicines while taking Chinese drugs as its priority.

Highlighting the significance of the Project 523, Jia-Chen Fu notes that it had three goals: the identification of new drug treatments for fighting chloroquine-resistant malaria, the development of long-term preventative measures against chloroquine-resistant malaria, and the development of mosquito repellents.

To achieve these ends, research on Chinese drugs and acupuncture was integral. The decision to investigate Chinese drugs was not without precedent, however. Back in 1926, Chen Kehui and Carl Schmidt of the Peking Union Medical College published their original paper on ephedrine, derived from Chinese herb mahuang. It inspired more than 500 scientific papers on ephedrine (for asthma relief) around the world by 1929.

In the 1940s, the interest in the Chinese drug changshan and its antimalarial properties led to the establishment of a state-funded research institute and experimental farm in Sichuan province. Project 523’s embrace of Chinese materia medica – the traditional body of knowledge about substances’ healing properties – is a more recent example of the efforts to “scientize” Chinese medicine through selective appropriation and detailed investigation.

This ensured that qinghao research proceeded within a climate in which scientists, “who themselves had learnt the ways of appreciating traditional knowledge, worked side by side with historians of traditional medicine, who had textual learning.”

Nigeria may emulate the Chinese model exploring the benefits of synergy between western and traditional herbal medicine. So doing, appropriate processing and dose regulation must be sought to improve drug efficacy and reduce drug toxicity.

Considerable amounts of data can be acquired through clinical experiments, but is Nigeria fully equipped for such a venture, given its significance in the development of modern drugs?

Through its use of natural products, traditional medicine, according to health experts, offers merits over other forms of medicine in the discovery of lead compounds and drug candidates, examination of drug-like activity, and toxicological characteristics among others.

In recent years, traditional medicine has gradually gained considerable approval as complementary or alternative medicine in Western countries. Chinese herbal medicine, for instance, is currently used in the health care of an estimated 1.5 billion people worldwide.

It should be noted that in traditional medicine, several herbs and ingredients are combined according to strict rules to form prescriptions, which are referred to as formulas (fang ji in Chinese). Commonly, a classic formula is composed of four elements—the “monarch”, “minister”, “assistant”, and “servant”—according to their different roles in the formula, each of which consists of one to several drugs. Ideally, these drugs constitute an organic group to produce the desired therapeutic effect and reduce adverse reactions.

At its foray into the country, COVID-19 capitalised on Nigeria’s underlying conditions and exploited them ruthlessly. A corrupt political class, a dysfunctional health system, and a disillusioned citizenry.

It took the scale and intimacy of the pandemic, as Nesrine Malik, would say, to expose the severity of our shortcomings and shock us with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.

The crisis demanded a swift, lucid, response but the government reacted with institutionalised lethargy and pitilessness; cruelly leaving the borders open as a leadership deadened to the finer aspects of tact, reason, and responsibilities of a visionary government.

The unfolding dystopia calls for urgent intervention by well-meaning Nigerians and civil societies in the interest of the collective. The presiding oligarchs lack the maturity, native intelligence, and wisdom to curtail the spread of COVID-19.

They lack the tact required to drive Nigeria up the path of rebirth and progress.

Olatunji Ololade

 

NIGERIA’s lockdown symphony is a dirge of intricate threat and appeal: government warns ‘hungry’ citizenry to stay at home, claiming the imperative of fighting COVID-19 trumps every other consideration. The intent could hardly be faulted.

Then, President Muhammadu Buhari, in his Monday address, extended the two-week confinement by a week and declared a curfew from 8 pm to 6 am from May 4. Nothing in his speech hints at a solution, purposive steps at finding a cure or collaboration with a more visionary partner to create one. That’s flawed leadership. And worthy of rebuke.

As the pandemic persists, the fabric of life is spun and torn by the talons of Nigeria’s raptorial leadership. Somewhere between their pretensions at curtailing the pandemic, a tragic lyre amplifies the horror of our rising funeral pyre. Their pleas and threats are crafty and fickle thus re-establishing their roles as misery merchants, malefic dealers, and undertakers.

To alleviate hardships imposed on impoverished and most vulnerable segments of the citizenry, federal and state governments make a comic show of distributing food and money. But who gets to choose the most vulnerable? How did they identify segments of the citizenry deserving of support?

In determining the vulnerable, they resort to ill-informed and arbitrary categorizations thus rendering large segments of the citizenry disgruntled and hopeless.

The over-hyped palliatives resound the parable of the sower in the sewer. In performing the roles for which they were elected and for which they claim outrageous compensations, public officers demand a ceremony of appreciation and re-investiture, come 2023. It’s a classic tale of leaders as dealers: steamrollers masquerading as hope-runners.

The greatest virus is Nigeria’s leadership, many of whom have learned to feign compassion that they do not feel. It is an open secret that the reigning oligarchs are committed to the anti-COVID-19 campaign because the storms stirred by the virus tears at their gated paradise.

In the race for solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic, Senegal has developed a test kit that costs $1. Even more amazing is the fact that these test kits could have results ready within 10 minutes, in an easily readable format; probably something like the line that appears in a pregnancy test kit.

At the backdrop of Senegal’s initiative, Madagascar flaunts a herbal cure named COVID-Organics. Despite condemnations and disclaimers of the country’s traditional cure, the United States (US) government recently awarded a grant of $2.5 million to strengthen the country’s health response to the COVID-19 outbreak, according to the US ambassador to Madagascar, Michael Pelletier.

Nigeria, however, obsesses about rising figures of the infected, the deceased, and cured. The country’s leadership has so far, re-established its perverse fetish for control, and refinements of domination – there are fears that public officers may be exploiting the pandemic to steal public fund even as they cement their authoritarian rule.

While Nigeria’s leadership plays servile and flummoxed in its campaign against COVID-19 to western donors, Madagascar’s leadership has attracted a handsome donation to boost an ambitious home-grown remedy, its COVID-Organics herbal tea. It would be recalled that Madagascan President, Andry Rajoelina, officially launched COVID-Organics , a herbal remedy developed by the Malagasy Institute of Applied Research and branded COVID Organics and believed to prevent and cure patients suffering from COVID-19.

In Nigeria, there have been flashes of enterprise by daring individuals, like Prof. Maurice Iwu, whose claim of a cure to the virus, was promptly dismissed by the Minister of Science and Technology, Dr. Ogbonanya Onu. Onu stressed that the United States is conducting tests on a ‘chemical compound’ isolated by Iwu, as a possible cure for coronavirus.

Why couldn’t the NIMR work with institutes and labs across Africa to investigate Iwu’s claims and explore veritable means of finding a cure for the virus? Onu may argue that its practical and appropriate, perhaps, to send Iwu’s ‘cure’ to a western lab with better facilities. But how come Nigeria lacks modern lab technology on his watch?

It would be recalled that Prof. Augustine Njoku-Obi, who discovered a potent cholera vaccine in the 70s faced inexplicable hostilities from government and peers even though his invention was verified in the US and adopted for use. Lest we forget Dr. Jeremiah Abalaka in 2000, whose claim to have found a cure to HIV was also roundly discredited by government and peers.

Its about time the government and scientific community become less spiteful of initiative and encouraged daring exploits of Nigerian researchers.

While asserting that there is no known cure yet for the COVID-19, the Centre Director of the African Centre of Excellence for Drug Research, Herbal Medicine Development and Regulatory Science (ACEDHARS), University of Lagos (UNILAG), Prof. Olukemi Odukoya, recently stated that scientific investigations were ongoing on some herbs that had been identified to possess antiviral activities and might be potential candidates for the management of COVID-19. What is the quality of support given ACEDHARS by the government?

Notwithstanding Odukoya’s claim, doctors know-it-all and western medicine enthusiasts, severely hobbled by hybris, bare their fangs against the possibilities of breakthrough via renaissance medicine, at finding a cure for the coronavirus.

They chant the perceived dangers of traditional medicine, often quoting an increasingly confused and suspect World Health Organisation (WHO). They allege undue pagan influence on the empirical process of medical orthodoxy. They forget that orthodox medicine itself is pagan to the roots and very ‘ungodly’ in its invasive science and empiricism fetish. Traditional medicine practitioners equally view western medicine as a product of man’s bloated ego, striving against God and nature.

There is no basis for contest. Orthodox medicine must seek synergy with its traditional counterpart for the benefit of mankind. For instance, a number of chemical compounds with remarkable antioxidant and chemopreventive properties have been isolated from the Bitter Leaf (Vernonia amygdalina) and the Bitter Kola (Garcinia kola). Their mechanisms play pivotal role in chemoprevention which appears to be a more pragmatic and rational approach to the prevention of cancer, argues Farombi and Owoeye in their 2012 study.

Of course, they recommended further studies and long-term clinical trials to showcase the potential benefits of Bitter Leaf and Bitter Kola-derived constituents as cancer-fighting agents.

It is notable that a lot of plant-originated drugs in clinical medicine today were derived from traditional medicine. Artemisinin, known as qinghaosu in Chinese, was borne of traditional medicine in 1972 after North Vietnam requested China to help tackle its malaria problem. Eventually, artemisinin was derived from Artemisia annua L. in 1972. Compared with previous antimalarial drugs, artemisinin has the merit of high efficiency, quick effect, and low toxicity, according to health experts. Thus its global acceptance and prevalence even in Nigeria.

Nigeria’s leadership remains disconcertingly oblivious of this fact owing to its lack of vision and native intelligence, and incurable servility to colonial powers.

In respect of COVID-19, Onu said he and peers will inform the president with the facts by which the latter would make an informed decision. The quality of facts presented to the president, apparently, birthed the ‘informed decision’ of an elongated lockdown and curfew. These are, at best, knee-jerk reactions to the pandemic.

The Buhari leadership must commit resources to the research and development of a possible cure to COVID-19. If not, it’s best he scraps the Ministry of Science and Technology and NIMR, and contract their presumed functions to China or the United States.

 

Olatunji Ololade

Before COVID-19, medical tourism was Nigeria’s guilty pleasure. An ambiguous sick rose coveted by the ruling class and privileged segments of the citizenry. Its a cavern of the unseen, where deathly tools manifest deficient healthcare and secret crimes of black market operators comprising quack doctors, organ harvesters and traffickers.

Knowing this, President Muhammadu Buhari urged Nigeria to wean her heart of lusts for medical tourism abroad as Wordsworth urged England to wean its heart from poisonous food in ‘October,’ a sonnet of 1803.

Like Wordsworth, Buhari waxed lyrical, urging Nigeria to shun patronage of overseas healthcare. Tough luck, Buhari; Nigeria is on her knees, enraptured by illusions, she sucks from the wrong spigot.

Deficient healthcare corrupts nature. It violates the physical and psychic frames of its victims. Ultimately, it kills. Speaking at the Second National Health Summit of the Nigeria Medical Association (NMA) in Abuja, in November 2019, President Buhari, represented by the health minister, Osagie Ehanire, highlighted its dangers, stating that medical tourism would reduce if Nigerian hospitals offer quality service.

Besides costing the country a whopping N400 billion annually, many risk falling victim to organ thieves and traffickers. They also suffer exposure to quack doctors and substandard healthcare.

Simply put, embarking on medical tourism abroad was akin to hopping from a frying pan into the fire, sometimes. Picture Nigeria as the frying pan, how hot does it get?

Just recently, photos posted by a certain Sawaba FM Hadejia, generated buzz online as they purportedly reveal the shocking incident of a surgeon performing an operation on a seriously injured patient on the corridor of the Hadejia General Hospital, Jigawa, with a torchlight, due to power failure.

The imagery manifests as a sad commentary on Nigeria’s comatose health sector where hospitals are understaffed and doctors perform surgeries using torchlight due to frequent power cuts.

Notwithstanding, President Buhari restated his resolve in his new year speech, to continue reforms in water sanitation, education, and healthcare sectors. He stressed his government’s liaisons with international partners such as GAVI, the vaccine alliance, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to access support for his social welfare initiatives.

A few months earlier, Mr. President said there was an urgent need to address brain drain in the health sector. He said the Federal Government would like to dialogue with doctors and nurses, “to study ways of retaining our skilled workforce, trained at great expense to the state, as determined by the Postgraduate Medical College.”

Perhaps he truly meant well. But Mr. President’s “candid” and perhaps heartfelt homilies deflected the moral questions triggered by substandard healthcare.

It parries disconcerting queries arising from inadequacies of medical initiatives thus establishing the nation’s healthcare system as a major index of rising inequality, social injustice, profligate governance, a depressed economy, political corruption, and maladministration.

Notwithstanding, Buhari persuades citizenry of means to ditch overseas healthcare and patronise Nigeria’s inadequately funded and understaffed public health facilities or rather, the extortionate private hospitals often manned by poorly trained staff.

More significantly, he mocks the fate of the poor, unemployed masses, whose sad fate it is, to wither and die on the deathly corridors of public health centres. Some may encounter a conscientious, diligent doctor, who would pull all the stops to accord them a semblance of satisfactory healthcare from time to time. Oftentimes, they won’t.

Yet health indicators decline in the absence of aggressive interventions to stop the medical brain drain. The Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) estimates that of the 75,000 doctors registered in the country, about 40,000 practice outside Nigeria. In the UK alone, it was estimated that 12 doctors from Nigeria are registered every week, with more than 5,250 Nigerian doctors already working there.

The proposed 2020 budget of the Federal Ministry of Health was N427billion, which amounts to about 4% of the budget. This is despite a 2001 pledge of 15% of the national budget towards healthcare by member nations of the African Union at a meeting chaired by Nigeria.

In sharp contrast, Rwanda has risen from the ashes of its genocidal past to evolve the most sought-after healthcare system in Africa. The country’s budget ensures that the health sector gets over 20 percent of funding juxtaposed to the Abuja declaration of 15 percent.

The World Health Organization regards countries with less than 10 doctors per 10,000 people to have an “insufficient” number of medical personnel.

Thus Nigeria’s doctor-patient ratio estimated at 1:6000 is regrettable when compared to the ratio of doctor-patient in India (1:2083) and in the United States (1:500).

Currently, less than 5% of Nigerians are covered by the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS).

Federal response to the anomalies has so far, being feeble. If Buhari means well, can he vouch for his kitchen cabinet, the legislature, and medical tourist governors? Can he show over 190 million Nigerians or thereabouts how his administration cuts back on frivolities and tames the profligate lusts that drive public officers to seek medical care abroad?

The country’s poorest are worst hit by the state of the health system as primary healthcare centres (PHCs) lie comatose from inadequate funding, lack of equipment and medical personnel.

Enter COVID-19 and Nigeria enjoys donations from presumably well-meaning politicians and corporate citizens. While we commend the generosity of donors, Nigerians must never shy from probing the quality of the donors’ citizenship as public officers and corporate citizens.

What are their antecedents in public space? And why are the donations offered in eggshells of narcissism and artifice? Of the corporate donors, Nigerians must ask, “What is the actual nature of their corporate citizenship and social responsibility beyond the cloud of conceit and doctored media reports?”

There are truths that no degree of spin by Public Relations units of government and big business could stifle. It is noteworthy that Nigeria is in this current mess because previous and current public officers, governments and corporate partners failed woefully in addressing the problems of the health sector.

It is sheer chicanery for a governor or lawmaker to donate half of his salary, knowing it represents a minute fraction of his undeserved monthly take home.

Consider the curious case of a lawmaker, for instance; if hypothetically, a senator’s salary is about N750, 000 per month, and his sitting allowance is N13 million per month. By declaring half of their salaries as donation to fight the pandemic, each would be donating N375, 000 to the cause.

It would make better sense and manifest as worthy sacrifice if they give up their outrageous and undeserved N13 million sitting allowances for the rest of the year.

How grateful should Nigeria be to a political donor who has taken more from the people than he has ever given to them. How thankful should we be to a corporate donor whose entrepreneurial exploits has impoverished several communities and destroyed large swathes of land?

Some of the donors constitute the reason large segments of the citizenry cry out to God at night; by their exploits, Nigeria suffers neutered dreams and the escalation of citizenry deaths, from dusk through dawn.

 

Olatunji Ololade

 

NIGERIA’S leadership handles the country as a funeral economy, where the public officer is a slayer and pallbearer.

Think of him as ‘His Excellency’ who refused to build good roads but scurries to accident scenes to mourn the dead.

Think of him as a mass murderer, who embezzles security and health funding thus afflicting the country with lingering terrorism and rising maternal mortality.

Think of him as a cold cook, the mortician who denied Nigeria a functional health system that he might exploit citizenry panic, to steal, in the throes of a global pandemic, like the coronavirus.

Ultimately, he fulfills the role of a grim-reaper. Apology to the honest, humane public officer, if he truly exists.

As the coronavirus aka COVID-19 presents in full bloom, it offers the random public officer and his billionaire associates in the private sector interminable prospects as patriots and saviours, mourners and providers.

For public officers in the executive and legislative chambers, COVID-19 conveniently becomes a vehicle of compassion. Every gesture of love is, however, an assertion of power. They affect neither selflessness nor self-sacrifice, only refinements of self-love and domination. The guiltless may speak for themselves.

Through the pandemic, Nigerians expect the government to stabilise and strengthen the nation’s economy and healthcare systems. Saudi Arabia’s bold, swift response to COVID-19 offers valuable lessons. For being decisive and proactive, there have been, so far, minimal cases and only one death in the country.

Compare this with the casualties in neighbouring Iran, where the death toll has exceeded 3,000 with 138 new fatalities. As the virus strikes terror across nations and class divides, one crucial element is its manifestation among the political class.

There is the joke in Nigerian circuits, that, had the pandemic started in the country, claiming the highest casualties, the political class would abscond from the country with their families and govern by proxy, through civil servants.

However, a curious thing has happened; their usual destination points overseas are the pandemic’s flashpoints. The death toll in the United Kingdom has risen by 563 in the last 24 hours, a record jump that brought the number of patients who died in hospital to 2,352. In the United States, the death toll has exceeded 4,000. Globally, more than 42,000 people have died, about 860,000 have been diagnosed with the virus, and some 178,000 have recovered, according to Johns Hopkins University.

In Nigeria, 12 new cases of COVID-19 were confirmed by the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) thus increasing the tally to 151 cases. Nine patients have reportedly been discharged and just two deaths have been recorded by the affliction in the country.

As Nigeria effects Day 3 of its lock-down in Lagos and Abuja, the government would do right by the citizenry to imbibe a strategy that would protect lives and preserve public peace. The virus flourishes because the government failed to check traveller influx, particularly from COVID-19 hot zones – certainly because they needed their families, living abroad, to return to the country before shutting the nation’s borders.

Frantic measures by the government to shut schools, markets, shopping malls, and public gatherings, should have been taken in previous weeks, before the virus attained notoriety as a pandemic.

That would have given the citizenry ample time to acquire food supplies, provisions and services, in an atmosphere devoid of panic.

At the moment, government assaults the citizenry with mixed messages and enforcement of the lock-down has been heavy-handed and driven by uncouth resource staff. It’s astonishing to see COVID-19 taskforce assault the citizenry, chanting that Nigerians need ‘iron hand’ and the government has empowered them to use the gun, baton and horse-whip on defaulters during the lock-down.

If anybody needs whipping, it should be the public officers on whose watch Nigeria became a talking point of the pandemic.

Its about time government evolved an enlightenment strategy founded on gentle encouragement and practical palliatives rather than authoritarian instructions. Government must evolve more coherent strategies driven by humane concerns to save lives.

This minute, the nation’s health system is in shambles. Senior doctors with tertiary health facilities affirm that the quality of response at the nation’s hospitals is very poor; operations are hampered by a dearth of essential personnel and medical consumables.

Pre-COVID-19, patients were forced to buy plaster, gloves, gauze, syringe, other consumables at secondary and tertiary hospitals. These are unavailable even in the throes of the pandemic. With seven test centres for over 190 million Nigerians, public officers enjoy easier access to test facilities.

Nigeria had it coming, given her paltry health funding estimated at four percent of the annual budget vis-a-vis the recommended minimum of 15 per cent. Notwithstanding the political class divert crucial funding to the purchase of official cars and outrageous allowances. For the newly elected public officer, governance commences by the entombment of truth and his campaign promises. To circumvent the public trust reposed in him, he deploys artifice, and artifice flowers robbery.

He pilfers public chest via phantom projects; sometimes, he resorts to armed robbery, using militarised state security to rob the citizenry of their rights and freedoms.

The citizenry, on the other hand, aren’t without fault. Large segments of the electorate, the youth in particular, have in time foisted upon the country the worst forms of tyranny and inefficient leadership by selling out at the polls.

The media, supposed voice to the nation’s voiceless, equally celebrates politicians and public officers for their ability to hoodwink and hover at the crest of their leaps, even as they sever ties to electorate earthlings.

Emboldened by a docile citizenry and fawning media, the public officer mutilates his conscience to remain inhumanly shrewd. And COVID-19 offers him priceless opportunity to hoodwink or chisel off awareness atop the citizenry’s growing dissent.

Thus the flagrant display of compassion by governors, lawmakers, who have declared half of their salaries as donation to the anti-COVID-19 campaign. Banks and billionaire entrepreneurs equally hop on the bleeding saints’ wagon, donating generously to the cause.

Predictably, large segments of the citizenry heap plaudits on the donors, extolling their seemingly noble actions. Of course, such actions should be praised, for they are the stuff patriots and national heroes are made of, especially in a crisis situation.

The question Nigerians have failed to ask is: “How selfless and patriotic are the donors outside a crisis situation?”

Consider the health system, for instance, why were the donors conveniently blind to its dismal state, pre-COVID-19? Several bank chiefs, governors and the president, attained notoriety for hopping on a plane to enjoy medical tourism abroad, until their supposedly safe havens, became the most dangerous zones of the world. Shaken and scared silly, they are scrambling to improve Nigeria’s health sector, making frantic donations.

Amused, the citizenry needle them in vicious humour celebrating every news of the political class’ affliction by the virus. They are excited that the ruling class would finally enjoy a dose of their own poison. They have become vulnerable to the perilous health sector they failed to develop.

But this isn’t the time for schadenfreude. What the gloaters forget, is that, when push comes to shove, the public officers and their families would enjoy first dibs at premium medical care and bed-space before an average citizen and the impoverished.