Category: Thursday

Jide Osuntokun

I had thought I wouldn’t be writing on the Coronavirus pandemic again after writing about five columns at different stages as the coronavirus pandemic hit Nigeria. I was in lockdown for four months in the Redemption Camp. I thank the Almighty God who gave the vision of the camp to Pastor E. A. Adeboye, the General Overseer of The Redeemed Christian Church of God. I also thank Pastor Adeboye who executed the vision with clinical flourish. When the inter-state roads were open, I quickly dashed to my house in Ibadan. What I saw in Ibadan worried me enormously. There seems to be no awareness of the morbidity and seriousness of this virus. I asked myself whether the people on the roads have misunderstood the now false impression that the virus only affects old people. It has now been proved that the virus is no respecter of age, gender or race.

As I drove from Molete to my house in New Bodija Extension, a distance of about 10 kilometres, I saw very few people wearing the recommended protective face masks. Not until I reached old Bodija did I see people following the established safe protocols being promoted by the World Health Organization (WHO). This raises immediately two issues, namely, the absolute failure of government to enforce its own recommendations or is it absolute lack of government? Some people said the government was scared stiff about what the people might have done if the government imposed a total lockdown as was done in Lagos and Ogun states. The second issue is a class division in the understanding and prevention of the coronavirus. The poor masses feel the coronavirus cannot touch them because, as some of them said, it is the disease of the rich! It cannot possibly be that the masses cannot find reasonably-priced scarves to fold into face masks to cover their faces to prevent infecting people and being infected by others. Many of us old people who are scared to death by the coronavirus see what is happening globally perhaps because of our exposure to international media which perhaps the masses do not have access to. But is it not the duty of government to get their media to overwhelm the masses with information on mass education of our people about the coronavirus?

The whole world is living in mortal fear of a medical problem that has no solution yet. There may be therapy and vaccines in future but no one is even certain any measure will work against the plague and yet we Africans are roaming about unprotected and asking the virus to come and get us. This makes black lives look cheap in the eyes of the international community. It reminds me of what the British colonial officials in Nigeria used to say about Nigerians not being concerned about lives. This made Sir Fredrick Lugard to give his soldiers orders to kill as many Nigerians as possible whenever there was a whiff of rebellion anywhere in the country.

I was told that the Oyo State government was never really determined in its enforcement of measures to prevent the spread of coronavirus pandemic and its confrontation against the coronavirus and in its forcing the people to obey the well-established protocols against the coronavirus. This was unlike the measures taken in some of the neighbouring states like Ogun and Lagos states. Ekiti State also took draconian measures in imposing a lockdown on the people in other to protect them against a disease that has no cure. If we do not have original home-made strategy against the disease, we can at least borrow from international best practices. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. I personally have kept relations and even grandchildren who are silent carriers of the virus away and at arms’ length from my home because as difficult as it may appear, I am following scientists’ advice.

This  is the wrong time for anybody to die because of the fact that even one’s relation would be kept away from the sick person and if one dies and if the protocols are enforced, attendance at one’s burial will be kept only to immediate family members who in Lagos must not be more than 20 in number. If our people were made aware of this, they will take the situation much more seriously. If this problem has gotten out of hands in the United States and at one time in Italy, Spain, France, Great Britain and Russia with all their might and resources, one can only imagine what the situation will be in Nigeria where we have neither resources nor the manpower or discipline to confront this pandemic if we allow by our carelessness to let it  get out of hands. Many will not live to regret whatever errors of omission or commission we would be guilty of.

I don’t think it is too late to make amends nationally but most especially at state and local levels. The federal government may have to declare a state of siege or emergency and invoke war powers that will give the president powers to issue executive orders to protect Nigerians. I suggest that everyone should be FORCED to wear face masks. This is because there is incontrovertible scientific evidence that wearing masks prevent transmission from the wearer to whoever he may be near and the wearer is also protected against infection. It follows therefore that nobody has the right or licence to infect another person with a disease that may lead to death.

This disease is so novel that it has now been established that those who were infected and had regained their health do not develop herd immunity for more than a month. If we are not to suffer fatalities of about half a million souls who died in Nigeria during the 1918/1919 influenza virus when our population was less than 20 million, we must take extraordinary measures against this plague. If the same proportion that died in the influenza pandemic of 1918/1919 were to die as a result of this coronavirus pandemic, about five million people will die in Nigeria. God forbid!

So, our governments owe us the duty of protection against this pandemic. It must therefore enact laws to make it mandatory for all citizens to wear masks. If the process of enacting laws is too cumbersome then the president and the governors must come to the protection of the citizens by giving executive orders which should be enforced by the enforcement agencies particularly the police and the law courts. It will then be left to those in charge of the police and the judiciary to ensure that their people do not turn this assignment into their cocoa farms!

Perhaps imposing a fine on the spot as they do in Francophone Africa will reduce the bureaucracy of arrest, prosecution and judgement. Face masks can easily be sewn by tailors and it is also not too much for governments to buy face masks for the poorest of the poor. This will certainly be cheaper in the long run to massive deaths and even our inability to give the dead the decent African burial each person by tradition deserves.

On the issue of stimulus for the economy, the federal government is not doing as much as it can do or as much as other governments in Africa are doing. It should be possible to ask the legislature to slash its expenses by 50 percent to free funds for this national emergency, the worst in our lifetime. Other arms of government should be called upon to make sacrifices. The humongous donations by the private sector should be properly accounted for and about 50 percent of it should be distributed on state basis to support the poorest of the poor. Failure to do this is courting future trouble and peoples’ rebellion.

A stitch in time saves nine!

Jide Osuntokun

In Path to Nigerian Freedom,  Obafemi Awolowo (Faber, London 1947) said there were no Nigerians as there were French or Germans and that the country was a mere “geographical expression” parroting the way prince  Klemens Wenzel Napomuk Lothar Metternich-Winneburg zu Bellstein, the Austro- Hungarian  Foreign Minister From 1809 and chancellor from 1821 until 1848  derided the Italians  agitating for the creation of Italy out of the amorphous Austro- Hungarian empire. The Italy of their imagination however became a reality in 1861.  Awolowo’s scepticism was again echoed by no less a person than the only Nigerian Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka in the late 1990s when Nigeria was living under the jack boots of General Sani Abacha. Nigeria, the territories around the valleys of the Niger and Benue rivers was christened Nigeria in the 1890s by Flora Shaw, Sir Fredrick Lugard’s  girl friend who later became the wife of the first Governor- General of Nigeria after the two halves of the country and the Colony of Lagos were merged together to form a large expanse of territory as a protectorate under the British crown.

At the emergence of this important and promising country by size and population, the “Nigerians “were virtually absent from the table where the feast was being served. With the exception of a few educated people described by the late Professor Ayankanmi Ayandele  as “deluded hybrids “(Ayandele: The Educated Elite in the Nigerian Society,  University of Ibadan Press 1974) few were aware of being in a new country. The Emir Of Kano  Sarkin Abbas and the Alaafin of Oyo, Gbadegesin Ladigbolu brought into the Nigerian Council to represent “native” interest  and  opinion and who could not communicate with one another were pieces of curio to entertain the British officials and Nana Dore an Itshekiri merchant, with smattering knowledge of English, who Lugard co-opted into the Nigerian Council entertained everyone  in the council since the only thing he always said was” I concur”.  The point I am making is that no deliberate effort was made to excite the interest of Nigerians at the formative stages of the development of the country.

In the distant past and in their myths of origins, of course myth is not history, there were contacts among the Nigerian peoples. Civilization came into Hausa land from the “East” from where the mythical and eponymous ancestor of the Hausa States Bayajjidah came to Daura, killed the snake that was bothering the people and married the Queen of Daura and fathered the so-called seven Hausa states. Pre-Islamic Hausa land experienced the influence if not power of the Jukun of Wukari who also influenced the peoples in the Benue valley, the Bauchi and Jos plateaus and down to the Cross River valley. The Kanuri influence on pre- and post-Islamic Hausa land was profound. Islam and horses came into Hausa land from Borno and these two factors facilitated the emergence of states in Hausa land. The Kanuri also had “joking relations” with the Oyo empire which got horses from them and these horses were critical to wars of movement responsible for the expansion of the empire. Oyo had consanguineous relations with the Hausa state of Gobir and with the Nupe. People in the Oyo empire traded in Kolanuts and  grains  with the Hausa and  bought horses from Hausa land for hundreds of years  before 1800 and the Nupe people migrated in large numbers to as far as . One of the most powerful Alaafin of Oyo, Sango, had a Nupe mother. The Benin and Oyo dynasties shared a common origin in Oduduwa of Ile -Ife. The Benin empire extended to Eastern Yoruba land and western Igbo land. Large parts of northern Igbo land were under Igala political and cultural influence while the dynasty of the Itshekiri which wielded a lot of influence and commercial overlordship over larger ethnic groups like the Urhobo and Ijaw (IZON) in the Niger Delta had a Benin origin. The point I am making is that Nigerian people were not total strangers to one another. They of course did not belong to a common polity; they were separate from one another and no one state had overarching authority over the Nigerian peoples. The Nigeria imposed by the British was a strange imposition. People continued to see themselves as Hausa, Fulani, Yoruba, Igbo, Urhobo and others of the over 300 or more clusters of languages and tribal tongues in which people communicated with themselves or related with one another as ethnic groups. Their horizons did not go beyond their city principalities, emirates or kingdoms. Many years later and by the 19th century, the overlordship of the Fulani Sokoto “caliphate” in Hausa land was grudgingly accepted. In fact, the British did more to build the Sokoto caliphate than the Fulani because the caliphate was on the verge when the British came. This overlordship of the Sokoto caliphate did not include the vast area of the middle belt of Nigeria. In the South of Nigeria, the two sisterly empires of Benin and Oyo did not encompass the entire area. The small ethnic groups of the Ibibio Ekoi, Ijaw, Urhobo and large Igbo group were segmented into clans and villages with very limited political horizons. Ethnic identity did not develop until much later in the first decades of the 20th century when pan Yoruba, pan Igbo, pan Hausa and others began to grow and as this crystallized, the pan Nigeria feeling was yet to develop. Nigerianness was an outside perception for a long time and it remained in the dreams of a few educated people on the coast. Even at that, these budding Nigerians knew very little of the country. Sir Hugh Clifford the successor to Sir Fredrick Lugard In 1920 dismissed the notion of common Nigerian nationality and that some of the lawyers in Lagos calling for constitutional changes to usher in independence would be embarrassed if they were to be taken to their primitive compatriots in Abakaliki and left there without the long protective hand of the colonial administration. What can be said up to the 1930s is that the concept of being a Nigerian was still a mere idea that had not sunk into the minds of the Nigerian people.

The railways built by Sir Percy Girouard, a Canadian railway builder, when he was governor of northern Nigeria (1907-1909) no doubt opened up the country to commerce. With commerce came movement of people from one part of the country to the other. Nigerians were recruited to work on the trains as drivers and artisans. Most of these were mission educated people. Missionary enterprise had created a new class of educated Africans who were working as clerks in European firms and businesses on the coast and as agents in the hinterland. The Christian missions were however restricted to the southern part of the country on the grounds of not annoying Muslim emirs of the north of the country.  Lugard had decided that for security reasons it would not be wise to allow Christian evangelization of northern Nigeria. He actually felt many of the Christian missionaries in the country were demonstrating more enthusiasm than wisdom. The country was large and there were few British officials available for the work of administration in the tropics. It was therefore out  of enlightened self-interest that the British decided to rule the  vast north through the administrative structure already in existence in the emirate and to freeze them in time with little modifications to remove apparently objectionable practices to  British  mores and tradition. Because of this policy and in order to prevent any contamination from southern Nigerians who had gone to work as clerks and railway workers and messengers in northern colonial administration, they were prevented from living in the northern cities (Birane) and were confined to places outside the towns known as Sabongaris or strangers settlements or new towns. Same policy applied to northern traders who came to the south. Thus, began the history of two Nigerians deliberately fostered by the British who kept them apart from each other. This was of course a deliberate policy to prevent consciousness of a common citizenship or a sense of oneness or national feeling. Over time, there developed vested interest in keeping Northern and Southern  Nigerians apart to the point where  Sir Hugh Clifford, the Governor General said in 1920 that if somehow, Nigerians disappeared from Nigeria, civil war will break out between the British administrations in the North and South. For many years after this comment, the increasing dichotomy between the north and the south continued to fester. Even after independence, Sir Ahmadu Bello, the premier of northern Nigeria publicly stated that his policy was to employ where there were no northerners, first Britons, then Asians and lastly southerners on contract to hold the job until there were northerners ready for the jobs. To an outsider, Sir Ahmadu Bello may appear not nationalistic but he was a realist who felt his first remit was the protection of northern interest in competition with the much more educationally advanced southerners. But this policy reinforced the yawning gap in nationalist feelings in the country between northerners and southerners.