The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Cross of COVID

    Cross of COVID

    By Gabriel Amalu

    As the world roils under the crushing weight of the coronavirus pandemic, Christians this week, journey with Christ to the Golgotha. Known as the holy week, it represents the most significant week in Christianity; a faith founded on the doctrine of the suffering of Jesus Christ on the cross and his resurrection which took place about 2000 years ago. In 2020, COVID-19, has become a cross, for many families across the world.

    This week, the Church celebrated the Palm Sunday, without replicating the triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. On that entry, the Jewish people celebrated Jesus, as the Messiah, throwing palms as he rode triumphantly on a mule, singing Hosanna in the highest, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. But few days after, the same people when aroused by the envy of their local leaders, chorused crucify him, crucify him, when asked by the Roman overlords what to do with Jesus.

    According to Rev. Fr. Ehusani of the Lux Terra Chapel, this week the Christian community celebrate the tremendous love of God that saved the world through the death of his son. He emphasised that it is love that transformed the violent death of Jesus into a good thing. As the world carries its excruciating cross of COVID 19, can the world find love in her suffering? Perhaps, charity can be a source of showing love to a world in pain. Even as we wait on God to once again show his love, we also hope the scientists would find a cure to save the world.

    But there was no person willing to save Jesus on his way to the Golgotha. He was abandoned to his faith, by all those he fed freely, those who received his miracles and heard his wise preaching. Even the closest of his followers abandoned him and ran for cover. Peter whom he gave the keys to his church, denied ever knowing him on three occasions. It was only John the beloved that followed all the way to the cross; and of course, his mother and some female disciples.

    Jesus rewarded the female diehards with the privilege of being the first to witness his resurrection. But before that, one diehard, Veronica, stood to be counted when it was very dangerous to associate with the condemned Jesus. The Bible tells of how Veronica went close enough to wipe the face of Jesus, as he carried his cross to Golgotha. That was a great act of heroism. Interestingly, there are modern Veronicas who push fear aside to do great things.

    Dr. Stella Adadevoh was a modern Veronica, during the Ebola epidemic. She stood to be counted. There are also many veronicas presently fighting the cross of corona virus pandemic. The Chinese doctor who raised the first alarm about the impending pandemic eventually paid the ultimate price. Several other medical personnel in the world, courageously waltz through the danger of COVID 19, and some have paid with their lives.

    In Spain, Italy and United States of America, the pandemic has been most merciless, like the Roman soldiers were on Jesus Christ. Sadly, the three countries account for more than half of the world corona virus cases. The pain and anguish have been unimaginable. Everyday people die in several hundreds, such that citizens do not even have the opportunity to mourn the dead, as countries are more concerned with safely burying the dead, so as to limit the level of infection to the living. In some South American countries, relatives abandon their dead relations, as the government is overwhelmed.

    New York has been the epicentre of the pandemic in US. Both the governor of the state, Andrew Cuomo, and the president of the country, Donald Trump, have been warning their citizens to expect an even more painful week ahead, as they predict a lot of deaths. While the death rate in the country are still below 6000 as I write, the leaders are warning that up to 200,000 persons may die from the pandemic. What a scary news.

    Perhaps this may be the first time in the history of United States that the life of their country men and women are being threatened, and the awesome machinery of the state while acknowledging the impending doom, appears helpless. Of course, the country’s medical personnel are working tirelessly to reduce the number of casualties, while the officials keep warning that thousands more will die. For Jesus, he knew on the way of His cross that death was imminent, but continued on the inevitable trajectory, in obedience to his father’s will.

    Luckily, our country is nowhere near such monstrous state of helplessness. Unlike New York, the reports on the level of infection in Lagos and Abuja have rather been a message of hope. While the curve has not flattened or deepened, the feared steep rise has not happened. Governor Sanwo-Olu of Lagos especially, bears the message of hope. If we continue on the slow rise for the rest of the week, Nigeria can beat her chest for managing one of the best containment programme, as even attested to by the United Nations.

    Going forward, the most feared type of transmission is the community transmission, which we understand refers to the transmission from community to community, instead of from identifiable individual to another. The fear is genuine, and even everything humanly possible should be done to avoid that. It is better imagined what would be the faith of our dear country, if like Boko Haram, COVID 19 prowls in the remote parts of the country where access has remained challenging. Our experience may become like what we see in some Latin American countries.

    Yet, like Jesus’s cross, the weight of COVID 19 has been most excruciating. Many countries have fallen economically, and unlike Jesus, many may never get up to the finishing line in the near future. Jesus fell three times, but each time, got up and persevered. At a stage, he was helped to carry the cross, and of course, both in the spirit of Easter and because of the pandemic, this is a time to help one another to survive the unfolding world tragedy.

    Like Simon of Cyrene, who helped Jesus to carry his cross, we have the big donors like Aliko Dangote, and other billionaires who have been doling out billions, to help the government carry the heavy and dreadful cross of COVID 19. There are also lesser mortals, who are helping their neighbours, friends and relations. While washing hands regularly and maintaining social distance is key, reaching out to help someone, is a cross we should all covert to carry. Happy Easter dear readers.

  • Opposition in emergencies

    Opposition in emergencies

    By Olakunle Abimbola

    When the COVID-19 public health emergency dawned, the opposition reflex suggested it was the sitting government’s problem.  Such posturing offered high prospects for political mileage; and free opportunities for sundry thunders.

    But that’s probably true across the partisan aisle — show me a politician, after all, and that penchant to grandstand; that rank opportunism to game, is probably not far away!

    Besides, the government here is the opposition there.  So, that mutual push to beat partisan manoeuvres, comes with the political territory.

    Even then, there was something ultra-cheeky about how the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), Nigeria’s leading opposition party, spurned the earliest advisory over social distancing.

    It was perhaps the political equivalent of reaction to Noah and his ark.  Noah screamed and bawled: enter the ark; for with the coming flood comes certain death!

    But the more he shrieked, the merrier they partied, the harder they haggled and the more total their scorn, at his grating.  Yet, alas!

    In the earliest social distancing advisories, the PDP appeared to have located a partisan dummy, sold by a partisan shaman, to con a partisan enemy — a plot they were partisan-bound, to gloriously spurn!

    So, they conjured up own emergency rallies, elective party congresses, local government poll campaign, or even empty pre-mature declarations — anything to work up a crowd; or scream fond exceptionalism, in a season of global health peril.  But alas!

    Well, such partisan rascality is coming home to roost — and it isn’t at all pretty!  That grim error, of mixing politicking with governance, particularly where the opposition themselves are lords of the manor, is scowling at everyone!

    The classic, of course, is the Oyo case.  To welcome Ekiti’s Segun Oni, in his latest crossover to PDP, the ever politicking Seyi Makinde, the Oyo governor, conjured up a “South West Unification Rally”.

    Starry-eyed delegates came from Kwara and Ekiti; from Lagos, the budding local epicentre of Coronavirus; and even as far away as South-South Bayelsa, from where Governor Duoye Diri, flush from a judicial mandate, made an impassioned appearance.

    An excited Makinde, regarding the wonders of his own wondrous politicking, even made a loose partisan joke about the virus.  To be fair, barely 24 hours later, he would recant and apologize.

    Days later, however, Makinde would himself announce he had contracted the same virus he had dismissed as no more than partisan fib and bluff; and that he was self-isolating for treatment.

    While in there — and Ripples heartily rejoices with the governor at his speedy recovery — Oyo COVID-19 cases have flared to 9, though the index case has, like the governor’s, been nursed back to full health.

    Still, Makinde had better pray it doesn’t get much worse in the state.  Otherwise, he would have cropped a near-eternal partisan hobble.  Politicians, with elephantine memory for partisan mischief, forget nothing!

    Still, whatever error you push Makinde’s way, his apology would come to his aid.  That cannot be said of other PDP governors, guilty of bad judgment, in this season of COVID-19.

    On March 21, Rivers’ PDP at the Obi Wali Cultural Centre, in Port Harcourt, held its state elective congress when COVID-19 social distancing, which advised a gathering of no more than 20 persons, demanded a postponement.

    Rivers Governor, Nyesom Wike, has apologized to no one — not the Rivers people, that the governor’s partisan choices put at risk; not the Federal Government, that days later,  Wike’s partisan grating would try to soil — but more on that presently.

    Still, perhaps to slake his troubled conscience, he has gone on a manic shutting of Rivers’ “borders”: restricting state entry and exit to travellers — and what might that be?  A vigorous cure when easy prevention would do?  Or securing the prison gates, after the prisoners have bolted?

    In neighbouring Cross River, the professorial state of Ben Ayade, and its budget of “Olimpotic Meristemasis”, it would perhaps appear a local government electioneering of “Olimpotic Meristemasis” — COVID-19 and social distancing be damned!

    Though Mike Ushike, Cross Rivers State Independent Electoral Commission (CROSIEC) chairman, announced on March 20 that the March 28 local government polls would hold, the state government, on March 24, announced its indefinite suspension, while locking down entry and exit points, among a general lockdown.

    So far, there is no reported COVID-19 case in Cross River.  But who knows what harm those unguarded campaigns could have put folks in that state — and for a routine election that finally got postponed?

    That takes the case to neighbouring Akwa Ibom. On March 21, obviously facing down local partisan alarmists, Governor Udom Emmanuel told his people there was no need to shut down schools, since the state had no COVID-19 case.

    But viola! By April 2, all that dramatically changed: the governor was declaring a 14-day state-wide lockdown!  This followed a National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) announcement that a test just confirmed Akwa Ibom had 5 COVID-19 cases.

    At first, the governor disputed the result — which made not a few to ask, not without wry humour: were they election results, that only the courts must pronounce?

    In fairness, Governor Emmanuel took every precaution, save shutting down the state at earliest opportunity.  He also explained the cases were basically medics, put in harm’s way, by a patient.

    Still, did the guilt, of possible bad judgment, force him to the comic disputing of a clinical result?  In which case, did the governor lean more towards politicking, and less toward governance, in his COVID-19 decisions?

    Akwa Ibom’s flare from zero to 5 underscored that lack of strategic thinking, by many governors, on the Coronavirus pandemic.  In a very volatile situation, the fact that you have no present case doesn’t mean your people may not be at risk.

    That takes the matter to the latter-day howling of Rivers Governor Wike, alleging “politicization” of the COVID-19 national “largesse”; in a state broadcast claiming his state had been short-changed.

    But why does the governor grate like a Rip Van Winkle that has lost touch, so  sounding off key; nevertheless employing scalding emotions to contrast Rivers (with one case) to Lagos (with, as at April 5, 120; out of a total national count of 232), because Lagos received a N10 billion federal grant?

    Does it not make common sense that you must deploy resources to a crisis epicentre, to stave off the mass infection of other areas?

    Besides, these governors spurned earliest social distancing advisories, emanating from these same central authorities, flexing federal muscles — to be sure, no constitutional crime!

    Why then this latter-day lament, of alleged if roguish claims, of being elbowed from the central COVID-19 “largesse”?  Talk of pseudo-federalists with a rentier mindset!

    PDP are no devils any more than APC are angels.  But the disturbing partisan trend, in these troubled times, shows opposition could be played with more humanity, and far less rascality, for the general good of common Nigerians.

  • Conspiracy theories unlimited

    Conspiracy theories unlimited

    By Sanya Oni

    It is a season of conspiracy theories. Thanks to a germ said to be 100 times smaller than bacteria; the world, it seems, has finally persuaded itself that it is on to a new era very much unlike those before it! That is more than 120 years after the Russian scientist Dmitry I. Ivanovsky and his Dutch counterpart Martinus W. Beijerinck availed the scientific community, nay the world, of their groundbreaking work on virus.

    Here is what Gates told CBS News at the 2017 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland some three years ago on the  then looming crisis: “The impact of a huge epidemic, like a flu epidemic, would be phenomenal because all the supply chains would break down. There’d be a lot of panic. Many of our systems would be overloaded”.

    He would re-echo the same concerns at the Massachusetts Medical Society’s annual Shattuck Lecture a year later: “Given the continual emergence of new pathogens, the increasing risk of a bioterror attack, and how connected our world is through air travel, there is a significant probability of a large and lethal, modern-day pandemic occurring in our lifetimes.”

    Prescience? Some would rather smell conspiracy.

    Conspiracy or not; the world now knows better. With body counts to the virus barely short of the 10,000 mark in United States on Monday and with projection that thousands more will succumb to the virus, even the typically obdurate Donald J. Trump has been forced to eat the humble pie!

    We can only wish, at least for humanity’s sake, that those with the wherewithal, somehow find the cure for a disease that has in the last three months infected 1.2 million people of which more than 70,000 has since died.

    Now, if the world ever paid attention to the dire warnings of Billionaire Bill Gates spoken three years ago, or humanity’s lack of preparedness to handle it whenever it berths, isn’t it strange that some now do so only in the context of the sprawling narrative of a so-called digital implant or ‘digital certificates’ which some, insist, equals the Biblical mark of the beast to usher in the reign of the anti-Christ?

    Understandably, the claims and counter-claims by activists and their allies on the different sides of the scientific community spectrum are certainly not about to end; not the boundless controversies spawned in the endless search for the vaccine in a world increasingly suspicious of the agenda of the Big-Pharm ingeniously packaged as scientific solution.

    Talk of a rich season of conspiracy theories, last week, Britons woke up to another chapter – an alleged link between 5-G masts and the ravaging pandemic – with a number of masts brought down by obviously misguided activists based on the unproven claim of linkage between the two.

    Here is how the The Guardian reported the destruction: “Three recent mobile phone mast fires around the UK are being investigated as possible arson, amid concerns that people are attacking telecoms infrastructure because of a conspiracy theory linking 5G technology to the spread of coronavirus”.

    To Liverpool Mayor, Joe Anderson “The suggestion that Covid-19 is somehow linked to 5G is patently beyond the realms of credibility – utterly bizarre”.

    An equally exasperated National Health Service (NHS) director Stephen Powis, would go further: “I’m absolutely outraged and disgusted that people would be taking action against the infrastructure we need to tackle this emergency”.

    Expressing frustrations at the sheer ignorance of the people behind the destruction Mayor Anderson would note: “In Liverpool these masts are being upgraded and ironically the very people that are using this technology are the ones who are believing these theories. I was mildly threatened yesterday by someone telling me to take them down.

    “The reality is there is huge pressure on the network at the moment with so many people at home and that’s why engineers are upgrading it. The idea that I have entered into some kind of Machiavellian plot with the government is ridiculous.”

    And that is coming from the good old Britain!

    As for Nigeria, some elements have somewhat resolved not only to put all of the elements of the theories together, but to run with it – taking care to blend harebrained ignorance with spurious eschatology, to deliver the most outlandish of cocktails – or is it cock-tales – on the link between the budding 5-G technology and the Covid-19 pandemic!

    Leading the pack is Pastor Chris Oyakhilome, founder of Believers Love World, aka Christ Embassy. On his TV network recently, he claimed that the virus was created to popularize the 5G network across the world. Asserting without proof that many people are sick due to the 5G network, he claimed that COVID-19, 5G network and the vaccine soon to emerge, are a part of the devil’s schemes to connect the entire world with the mark of the beast!

    And his authority? He points at Revelation Chapter 13!

    “All these happenings”, he was further quoted as saying “are the plan of the antichrist for a new world order which include one-world government, one world religion and one world economy!”

    Mercifully, not every Christian leader agrees. To Pastor Matthew Ashimolowo, Founder of Kingsway International Christian Centre, the man is talking nonsense. Warning Christians not to join Christian leaders in promoting conspiracy theories, he says the talk about a correlation between 5G and end-time signs is pure bunkum.

    “If coronavirus is caused by 5G, why is it in places that does not have a 5G…It has always been the nature of Christian leaders to plant fear in their members whenever there was going to be a major world occurrence.

    “The church”, in his view, “should be more concerned about preparing their members for the Second Coming of the Lord instead of condemning a major technological breakthrough.

    “It’s fake news to associate 5G to coronavirus,” he said.

    To this I say – well said!

    As it is, Nigerians must have lost count of the endless tales being spun to force fear down the spines of the followers in what is increasingly, an unedifying instrument of mind-control by religious leaders.

    Nigerians should have no problem locating the culprits should our masts suddenly come tumbling down – whenever the country deems fit to sign on to the cutting edge 5-G technology.

    Here’s wishing my dear readers a solemn Easter celebration.

  • Obahiagbon writes back

    Obahiagbon writes back

    By Olatunji Dare

     

    First, a preface to the epistle.

    Four columns ago, I dispatched from this platform an open letter to my aburo and kindred soul, (Patrick)
    Osahon Obahiagbon, Esquire, attorney-at-law, former federal lawmaker and most recently Chief of Staff to the former Comrade Governor of Edo State, Adams Oshiomhole, desirous of communing with him after a prolonged intermission that had eventuated against my best will, no less against his.

    Because of the constraints of space and time, and even taking into account his capacious mind, his fecund imagination and his capacity for throwing up the most penetrating insights, to say nothing of the amplitude of the lexical arsenal with which he expounds his thoughts, one can go only so far in wantonly inflicting one’s reminiscences on him, though I must hasten to insist that even at that conjuncture, you will find no one more accommodating, more obliging than Himself the Igodomigodo.

    Challenges bring out the best in him, as his reply to the dispatch aforementioned, issued under his own hand within 48 hours of receiving it, not through an amanuensis, indicates powerfully. He never disappoints.

    I have not sought his permission to share it with the public. Something tell me that he will welcome my doing so, in the hope that it might generate some mirth that could dispel, however slightly and fleetingly, the foreboding loosed on the land by the malignant novel coronavirus.

    It is certainly to be preferred to the inane conspiracy theories and the quack remedies being peddled by shamans decked out in various guises and disguises.

    It is especially gratifying that no one has invited the researcher Professor Maurice Iwu to the miracle drug he claimed to have devised many years before the virus even had a name.

    Better to allow him to prepare his legal defence against sweeping allegations by the EFCC that he misallocated billions of Naira in public funds during his last outing as chair of the Independent National Electoral Commission.

    Over.

    My Big Brother:

    I must pontificate with humility, abovo, that your usual generous coruscating panegyrics as to my humdinger abilities where I senatorially perched, this time got me inebriated in an aqua of salubrious narcissism and thanks for it, because emanating from your very fastidious, critical philosophical and encyclopedic observatory, it was indeed a refreshing anodyne from the epicaricacy that malodorously swamps the political atmospherics.

    But rest assured that we are consensus ad idem with Professor Wole Soyinka when he asseverated that “man shall achieve his authentic being through confrontation with the vicissitudes of life.”

    Is it not bewildering that at the time of your excogitation arising itself from your seminal and ceaseless lucubrations, Muhammadu Sanusi 11, may have been skedaddled out of the throne of his forebears and that is because Nigeria unravels de die in diem?

    I certainly didn’t find comfort in his alleged luxuriating in partisan ensconcement, but he has my imprimatur in his feisty and quixotic reformatory and sometimes revolutionary temper in speaking truth to power over time in spite of his own hedonistic and epicurean privileges. No doubt he exhibited some traits of intellectual and ideological megalomania but it always found anchorage in a genuine utilitarian
    And transformational desire.

    What rankles is that if he was dethroned for his “bad verses” and because the system could not be latitudinarian enough to accommodate his gadfly proclivities, must he be banished against the backdrop of section 35 of our Constitution that guarantees personal liberty and in view of the Court of Appeal’s sacrosanct position in the case of Attorney General Kebbi State versus Alhaji Al Mustapha Jokolo, in which the court unequivocally affirmed the illegality and unconstitutionality of such archaic practices?

    My verdict is that citizen Muhammadu Sanusi should be accorded all his constitutional rights and privileges going forward.

    I continue to remain an advocate for true federalism as a passe-partout in part resolution of our National Question. It is indubitable that the National Question has gnawed at Nigeria’s solar plexus and threatened its existence at various times. It was not hyperbolic when Suberu and Agbaje stigmatized Nigeria’s federalism as being plagued with “paradoxes, pathologies and irregularities.” I only need to add that we are a “federation without federalism,” apologies to Jan Erk.

    The Nigeria federal system exhibits a high ossifying and asphyxiating degree of centralization that has occasioned eschewable roforofo between the component units and the Centre and among the component units themselves that we can do with some restructuring that broadly accommodates the creation of a federation which efficaciously enhances our collective identity and distributive political economy and addresses a system that promotes equity, justice and equality amongst the multinational and ethnic groups.

    It is within this context that I perceive the audacious and laudable attempt by the Southwest state governors to berth AMOTEKUN under the auspices of the Western Nigeria Security Network and also the initial furore it generated. What gives me the heebie jeebies, I must admit just now, is the fact of the political class now deploying the fight for restructuring as a smokescreen for elite politics and objectives.

    My joy was boundless when 29 new words that were either borrowed from Nigerian languages or are “unique Nigerian coinages” that have been in circulation for a period of aeons got cosmopolitan canonization in the trusted bible of the English language, the OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY.

    If etching some of our colloquialisms in the Oxford English Dictionary invests upon us some positive world attention of which we are in humongous deficit, then we can pro tempore bask in the sunshine of Nigerian colloquialisms but not without observing that they did not get it right in my opinion with the meaning ascribed to chop chop.

    I am also to add that I will invite you my Senior Brother to a bacchanalian party if someday the Oxford English Dictionary decides to smile on me by also adding my own special coinage of the type of government we have run in Nigeria since independence which I stigmatized elsewhere as KAKISTOMOBOPLUTOCRACY.

    My worry about our electoral jurisprudence in caboodle which gives me mental pabulum is the judicial coup d’état of if you like call it coup de grace where the judiciary can by sheer judicial deus ex machina foist willy-nilly an electoral state of affairs violently antipodal to the electoral verdict of the people as we have seen in Zamfara, Bayelsa and some other states in all the categories of elections without limiting it to the governorship elections.

    The extant laws and our Constitution need a rejigging to accommodate this anti-democratic gorgon medusa.

    The concatenation of events both in the national level and in Edo State that has brought the APC National Chairman under bold relief is a combination of our prebendal politics, crass perfidy, impunity and revanchism which must be deprecated.

    Whereas certain political power centres are fighting back the intrepid and pertinacious iron-will determination of Comrade Adams Oshiomhole to stop the reign of impunity and thus restore party discipline and supremacy which are the hallmark of party democracy no matter whose ox is gored, and substantially removing the party levers from the suzerainty of strong individuals back to the rank and file of party members, others are also apprehensive of the fact that the APC National Chairman may not lend himself to malleable manipulations of 2023 presidential and power calculations.

    There was no way Oshiomhole was not going to have obstreperous, raucous and riveting resistance from the power behemoth steeped in the reign of party capture before he became National Chairman of the APC. What is happening in the Edo home front is regrettable, opprobrious and sardonic because there is no basis for it at all.

    All Comrade Oshiomhole said, advised and insisted on was the need to run an all-inclusive government capable of delivering the dividends of democracy to the people and at the same time strengthening the party. How this position became anathematous to the extent of subjecting him and his loyalists to state terrorism, political pugilism, obscurantism and pariahism leaves a caustic taste in the buccal cavity of any objective bystander.

    Let me again thank you immensely from the bottom of my heart for finding time to tickle my sensibilities and sensitivities, in spite of your crowded intellectual engagements. You make me feel important even when am conscious of the fact that I am just a student.

    Thanks Sir, and best.

    Sincerely

    Osahon Obahiagbon

  • Where was the President?

    Where was the President?

    Olatunji Dare

     

    FULL disclosure:  I was juggling the words in what was supposed to be the opening paragraph for this week’s column provisionally titled “Ina mai gaskiya?” when the news flashed across my laptop screen that President Muhammadu Buhari was to broadcast to the nation several hours later.

    At last, I sighed, relieved.

    Mai gaskiya — the Truthful One —is of course the name by which his adoring multitudes call the president.

    Since the coronavirus took on the shape of an incipient pandemic, he had for all practical purposes been missing in action. Nor was he any more visible when the pestilence was thus officially certified, and it was no longer if but when it would land in Nigeria.

    The question on the lips of Nigerians yearning for leadership – forthright, hands-on and reassuring  leadership at a time of national uncertainty and threatening doom was:  Where is Buhari?  In the North, that enquiry translated into: Ina mai gaskiya?

    Where, indeed was the Truthful One?

    Were lesser officials who issued statements from time to time speaking for him, or were they taking his name in vain?

    When facts are unavailable, rumour will proliferate.  In the absence of facts concerning Buhari’s whereabouts and his condition, the rumour mill went into overdrive.  He could not address the nation, it was bruited, because a sudden ailment had rendered him permanently speechless.  Otherwise, they said, why would he not talk to the nation and rouse it to great endeavour in the face of imminent peril?

    “We are at war,” French president Emmanuel Macron had declared forcefully at the earliest manifestation of the virus on French soil.  “Nous sommes en guerre,” he said over and over again March 16, while announcing a two-week lockdown in France to prevent the spread of the dreaded virus.

    Never one to let a disaster go to waste, U.S. President Donald Trump, who had waived off the roaring menace as something that would wash off just as suddenly as it had appeared, declared himself a war-time leader two days later. Even he finally accepted that the coronavirus was for real.

    But in Abuja, it was business usual – minus Buhari.  The Presidency was in lockdown, or so it seemed.

    A picture of Buhari in media outlets with the Minister of Health Dr Osagie Ehanire and the Director-General of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu in the foreground — the one to his left and the other to his right, separated by the length of a basketball in keeping with the distancing that has become the iron law of social relations in the age of the coronavirus, was hardly reassuring.

    It could have been produced by anyone who has basic familiarity with the computer application programme PhotoShop.

    In the circumstance, the best thing, it seemed, was to wait for the promised broadcast.

    It was Muhammadu Buhari all right, not the spectral Jubril Al-Sudani whom the fugitive Biafran leader and his deluded followers claim is ruling Nigeria, the real Buhari having departed this realm long ago.  But don’t count on Kanu and his crowd ever emerging from their crazy world of alternative facts.

    Buhari wasted no time in debunking the insinuation that he had been missing in action.

    The moment it became clear that COVID-19 was metastasizing into an epidemic, he said in his televised address, the Administration, proactive as ever, had begun devising prevention, containment and curative measures in the event of the coronavirus hitting Nigeria.

    Apparently while they were kvetching and wallowing in fear and anxiety and grim foreboding, Presidential Task Force was already at work devising a National Response Strategy that was being reviewed on a daily basis.  Nor was that all; the government had been monitoring the situation closely and studying the various responses adopted by other nations.

    People of little faith!  This is what you get when you do not trust your leaders and institutions even while they are striving mightily to save you from the dreaded coronavirus, hunger, poverty and insecurity.  It must be accounted a thing of joy that the authorities have never allowed and will never allow such ingratitude to stem their determination to take the country to The Next Level.

    In his broadcast, Buhari dwelt on what was already well known about the coronavirus, its ominous arrival on Nigerian soil with 97 victims and one fatality at the last count, its lethal and as-now incurable nature, the standard precautions for reducing the risk of contracting it – precautions that cannot be repeated too often.

    He announced a sharp curtailment of movement in Lagos and Abuja, and also in Ogun State because of its contiguity with Lagos, and perhaps more importantly because it was in the state that the first case of the coronavirus was detected in Nigeria.  He also announced sweeping restrictions for two weeks, apparently in the first instance, on inner-city and interstate travel to contain the spread of the disease.

    Also, no movement over the same period of commercial passenger aircraft and private jets without special permit, which will be granted only under the most stringent terms consistent with the emergency.  Message:  those thinking of hopping into their private planes and chartered jets with their families and streaking across the south Atlantic for some exotic enclave in the Caribbean or South America that has been spared the ravages of the coronavirus:  perish the thought

    No such escape will be allowed, gentlemen.  We are all in this together.  This being the only country we have, we must stay here and together salvage it.

    Whatever happened to the speechwriters who composed those immortal and inspiring lines for Buhari’s maiden broadcast on assuming power following the military coup of 1993?  What became of the Buhari who had delivered them with such passion and conviction?

    The verdict, I fear is going to be:  Too little too late.

    To frazzled citizens who had felt abandoned and were fearful that they would be left out to their own devices in the face of the problems the coronavirus would pile on the existential issues they grapple with day after wrenching day, the President had words of comfort.

    Supply lines for basic necessities would be kept open.  The pump price of gasoline had already been slashed.  Even with educational institutions closed, the school-feeding programme would be sustained.            A three-month moratorium on repayment of government loans would come into immediate effect.

    Conditional transfers to the most vulnerable in society for the next two months would be furnished immediately just as food rations for two months would be delivered to persons in the camps for the internally displaced persons

    In the face of the privations Nigerians face daily, the 2.5 per cent increase in Value Added Tax allegedly mandated by ECOWAS was and remains a provocation.  This is the time to abolish it.

    It remains to say that what runs through Buhari’s broadcast is a bureaucratic mindset, not a sociological spirit. It was not entirely lacking in empathy, but it hardly connected with the listener.  The personal pronoun that establishes a relationship between the speaker and each person in the audience figured infrequently and almost imperceptibly in the text.

    That is not the way a father would talk with his beleaguered children gripped by fear and uncertainty.  It wasn’t exactly cold, but little in it could move the listener to believe that he or she could face the future with confidence.

    The president’s speechwriters should have done better.  Given the unpredictable properties of the virus and its utter contempt for walls and deadlines, they will have an opportunity soon enough to help the president deliver the kind of speech that these challenging times demand.

     

  • Random notes on Okowa’s Delta

    Random notes on Okowa’s Delta

    Sanya Oni

     

    WITH the ravaging coronavirus pandemic displacing virtually other items on the news menu in recent time, it was little surprising that the development, even merely for its symbolism, passed, almost unreported: the introduction, earlier this month, of body cameras and breathalyzers into the state’s traffic management system by the Ifeanyi Okowa-led administration in Delta State. In a society where outlawry walks on all fours; where the boundaries between law-enforcement and law-breaking are increasingly ill-defined, yours truly considers the event as not only worthy of celebration but deserving of consideration by other agencies charged with traffic and security management.

    Now, some might argue about the ranking of the initiative in the hierarchy of the state’s needs at this point in time. That, certainly is a matter of opinion. The point is that the good thinking behind it would be difficult to assail. In any case, most Nigerians would appear to have long appreciated the imperative of such simple but elegant devices in moderating the conduct of both state officials and the general public in testy moments. Whether it is in Lagos where worrisome numbers of traffic officials have been murdered in the line of duty after minor disagreements; or on the federal highways where the police and personnel of the Federal Road Safety Corps, acting like the lords of the Manor, routinely cast professionalism and decorum into the mud-pit; to aver that relations between motorists and traffic managers have not always been an easy one is to understate the depth of their mutual antipathy. Left to one, the other would rather be dead!

    So why not deploy the simple and tested technology to ensure than the erring party in a traffic feud is called to account? Okowa’s Delta seems to have finally provided answers to the question.

    You ask – why has the FRSC and the police in particular not thought about it? Or, would it strip the duo of their legendary insularity?

    To be honest, yours truly does not pretend to have the answers!

    Here is what Navy Commander Azubuike Idah (Rtd), the Director-General of the state traffic agency – DESTMA said of the devices: “the body camera acts as a deterrent for all drivers in the state who may be tempted to violate the traffic law; it provides documentary evidence during a traffic stop, and protects all parties involved against false accusations, assault and overzealous actions of DESTMA officers….”

    The devices, he further noted will “reduce violent confrontations, reduce assaults of DESTMA officers, hold DESTMA officers accountable for their actions and increase public trust. It will also help us provide safe roads for all road users in Delta State while refining the attitudes of DESTMA officers when dealing with the general public.”

    Note the emphasis on the two-way traffic of deterrence and public accountability!

    As it appears, good thinking by the Okowa administration goes a long way back. Few months after its inception, the administration undertook a rather ambitious initiative in universal health care coverage for people living in the state. And the initiative: the state-supported health insurance programme which came by the Delta State Contributory Health Commission Bill signed into law in February 2016. Its by-product, the Delta State Contributory Health Commission (DSCHC) comes with the grand mission to “ensure access to quality healthcare and financial protection for all residents of Delta State using a healthcare financing mechanism structured through a mandatory pooling of cost and risk with fair utilization of all available resources and private sector participation that leads to an equitable distribution of healthcare across the state for an efficient healthcare service delivery”.

    The big story here is that the individual, under the informal health plan, is only expected to pay a premium contribution of N7,000 for a period of one year to enjoy comprehensive health services.  And still talking of good thinking, the scheme has, according to reports, churned out 677,071 enrollees as at December 31, 2019.

    Finally, I move to the educational sector – a sector which most Nigerians readily concede has long lost its bearing. Today, with most of our so-called tertiary institutions churning out products often described as unemployable, perhaps only few of our current occupants  government houses still live under any pretensions that the strictly unilineal  6-3-3-4 educational structure still holds much hopes for our teeming youths.

    At least not in a state like Lagos where a robust agency – Lagos State Vocational Education Board, LASVEB – currently drives the vocational education segment and certainly not in Delta where a Ministry of Technical Education was created by the Okowa administration in 2019 to give impetus to vocational education.

    Today, the ministry has six functional Technical Colleges in Agbor, Sapele, Ofagbe, Utagba-Ogbe, Ogor and Issele-Uku and six Vocational Education Centres in Asaba, Sapele, Ozoro, Agbarho, Bulu-Angiama and Otor-Owhe to superintend over. Hence,   the state is not only moving deftly to reskill the youths in the state for the emerging world of work, the leadership is at once driving a new paradigm in which “tech-preneurship”, as against the old but worn emphasis on certification would assume primacy.

    Again, I call that brilliant thinking.

    I close with the views of Matthew Lauer, Head, Strategy, Mercuria Energy Group on the subject – future of work. Writing in a recent World Economic Forum article, he notes: “The real challenge of the Fourth Industrial Revolution… isn’t the robots – it’s that we aren’t properly training humans for the available jobs”.

    He went further to note that “while the outlook for jobs is positive, on average, 42% of skills requirements are expected to change by 2022 alone. Reskilling is one of the major necessities and challenges of our era.

    “Many of these skills” he went on “can’t be learned in the university lecture hall. The skills required for the skilled job at the auto factory aren’t taught in the traditional university – and you can throw an intelligent, highly educated graduate with a business or math degree on a commodities trading floor, and there’s no guarantee they’ll succeed”.

    “But if you put the intelligent, intuitive individual on the factory floor or trading floor to learn the complex supply chain and shadow the most skilled in the business, then you not only give them a well-paying job with growth potential, but you also give them the bespoke skillset to flourish in the role and the industry”.

    He calls the model – apprenticeship. I agree.  In this, Governor Ifeanyi Okowa has blazed the trail for others to follow.

     

  • Pandemic, not scourge; patients, not victims

    Pandemic, not scourge; patients, not victims

    Olakunle Abimbola

     

    IN a period of crisis, it’s often a wonder how the media often slinks in with herd fear, that leads nowhere but confusion and perdition.

    Yet, it is expected to clarify it all, leading everyone to redemption.

    Might the psychologists then be right: that a crisis exposes, with a jolt, innate temper unfairly screened by cultivated social pretences?

    Media specific: might the 4th Estate be manifesting that notorious knowledge gap, of basic reportorial etiquettes it often gets away with at normal times?

    Check that COVID-19 reportage in front of you.  It is either teeming with scary adjectives: “dreaded” or “killer” Coronavirus; or describing those down with the pandemic as “victims” or “sufferers”.

    To be sure, those are routine in everyday jabbering in perilous times, among sympathy-filled folks; acute pain-intolerant animals, trying to bond with the afflicted.

    But as reportorial tools, these adjectives become subversive sympathies, driving nothing but scare-mongering and blind panic.

    In that blind but hard ride, a pandemic becomes a “scourge” or “pestilence”; and the multiplying patients are “victims”!

    But victims of what, exactly?  Of breathing in contaminated air — for that is what Coronavirus basically is, since you inhale the virus, in the course of routine breathing?  How can you be victim of breathing, without which you are dead?

    Or of touching surfaces, infected with the virus, and following that up with touching your eyes, nose and mouth? Ever wondered at the natural reflex of touching your own body — and the countless times you do that in a day?

    Besides, if you are no victim of malaria, tuberculosis or even cancer, how can you be a victim of COVID-19?  Is it because it’s the latest pandemic, that you must howl in panic — a clear delusion, to be sure — to curtail?

    After HIV-AIDS, and the havoc insensitive reporting wrought, the Nigerian media ought to have been better equipped for this one, in terms of compassionate reporting, via a carefully thought out reportorial and analytical register.

    HIV-AIDS came with a severe sexual censure.  That gifted the free-wheeling moral police, bristling with holy Armageddon, the unfettered right to gloat, and the morbid mandate to flay.

    If you sleep around, then deal with your comeuppance, they grated with severe triumph, much as if you do the crime, do the time! HIV’s main transmission mode is by reckless coitus.

    Pronto, the skull-and-cross-bones became its instant symbol.  You mess around with HIV, you crop instant death, no story!

    Those who cropped HIV became “sufferers” and “victims” of their own unrestrained libido, whose self-inflicted afflictions ought to be a dire lesson to others.  Some faith powers and principalities even introduced, as regular menu of their severe sermons, AIDS and sure peril.

    The media more or less flew with that harsh, merciless and judgmental general temper.  For TV, skull-and-bones became standard illustration for HIV; with most — and this cut across all tiers of journalism — lumping HIV and AIDS as one and the same, which they were not.

    Why, Nollywood also outed with many doomsday movies, one of which was the scary Goodbye Tomorrow. The film portrayed how a promising young family wilted and died because a spouse contracted the virus, and infected the other.

    That fear-driven hysteria depressed thousands, that had tested positive to HIV; and sent even many more, that might have contracted the virus, scampering away from tests to clinically confirm their status!

    That stigma of sex and holy condemnation, and foreboding to others unsure of their status, claimed many lives that otherwise could have been saved, had there been more restraint and empathy; and better institutional and group support.

    It was not until international aid agencies launched specific programmes, in media advocacy and appropriate reportage, that the thick pall of HIV-AIDS began to disperse.

    That intervention, rooted in aggressive projection of scientific facts, as distinct from popular HIV-AIDS myths, had a superlative effect — as calming as the old fear-mongering was apocalyptic.

    That intervention also got most to know sex wasn’t the sole means of HIV infection (as the case of Arthur Ashe, the American tennis prodigy who eventually died of AIDS but got HIV by blood transfusion).

    It also made the world realize that with proper diet and management, HIV need not end with AIDS (witness Earvin “Magic” Johnson, another American basketball prodigy, who never went down with AIDS, despite announcing, in 1991, his HIV status. Magic Johnson, now 60, lives, having finally retired a third time from basketball, after two come-backs).

    Why this rather long tie-back to HIV and AIDS?  Just to draw attention to the imperative to appropriately report Coronavirus.

    Right now, things are not that encouraging, starting with the notorious “Breaking!”, mostly in the social media.

    Each time you see “Breaking!” (for breaking news), and it’s on COVID-19, be sure it is to announce — with glee — that another person high up in government hierarchy, federal or state, some business mogul or even some uppity “abrodian” (Nigerians globe trotters) had cropped the virus.

    A frenzy greeted the announcement that Abba Kyari, the presidential chief of staff, had been diagnosed with the virus.  Now, many chirped, the president too must have it — aren’t the twain always together?  And if the president  is not announced to have had it, he surely must be hiding his status!

    So the goading and insensitive game began — who are those Kyari had mingled with?  Kogi Governor Yahya Bello!  Yes,  Kyari was with him, during his mother’s funeral!  Ha, Aliko Dangote!  He too must go for a check pronto!  Vice President Yemi Osinbajo?  The ministers?  All of them must go for test o!

    Somewhat, the presidential image makers succumbed to this herd unreason, by expressing joy that the president tested negative.

    For private communication, that relief was understandable.  But for official communication in times of crisis, hardly so: for that presidential joy could turn blight for stigmatized other positive cases, and throw them into blind panic.

    Yet, COVID-19 is no automatic death sentence.  For one, its common cold symptom, which could snowball into pneumonia if badly managed, has the hot climate here to contend with, contrasted to Europe’s bitter cold during winter.

    For another, the respiratory complications, another key symptom hallmarked by violent coughing, has not recorded any fatality here so far, save the late Suleiman Achumugu, former Petroleum Products Marketing Company (PPMC) chief, who went abroad to treat cancer and diabetes, before COVID-19 infection triggered an opportunistic crisis, that proved eventually fatal.

    It might be early days yet. Still, there is absolutely no need to start stigmatizing cases of COVID-19, thereby throwing the general citizenry into panic, beyond the present awareness blitz to curb its spread.

    The media, therefore, has a crucial role to play: report with tact, shun sensationalism and stigmatization, and be an epitome of compassion, in whatever news pushed out.

    That is how the media can make a refreshing difference, and rein in a general hysteria, that could worsen, instead of improve, a crisis situation.

  • Dis coronavirus sef

    Dis coronavirus sef

    Olatunji Dare

     

    LIKE most institutions of higher learning in the United States, Bradley University, in Peoria, Illinois, where I was a professor of journalism until I retired in 2015, closed two weeks ago for a weeklong spring break.

    Students and faculty alike look forward to the break, a respite from the daily grind of learning and teaching and research  and the relentless stream of assignments and projects to be completed under deadline, to say nothing about tests scheduled and unscheduled.  Without it, they would be teetering    on the brink of nervous exhaustion well before the semester ends some seven weeks later.

    For students especially, it is time to fan out to the warmer climes of the southern United States and the Caribbean to “make out” with friends from college, chance acquaintances or outright strangers with the minimum of inhibitions, confident that “what happens on spring break stays with spring break.”

    One week later, they would go back to the usual routine.   The library, the labs, term papers and all-nighters.

    Many of them were probably still on the way to their spring-break destinations when the University announced in a mass mailing and on its website that they could add another week to the vacation, in   view of the developing situation regarding the coronavirus outbreak.

    The more perceptive would have seen this unsolicited additional timeout as ominous.  Most will have welcomed it.  I can tell you from personal experience that nothing gladdens a student’s heart as a break from schoolwork.

    Scarcely 48 hours later, the university announced via a video posting on its website that formal instruction for the academic year was ended.  Lectures would now be imparted online.  Commencement – Convocation, as we call it in Nigeria – had been cancelled.  Students living on campus should await instructions regarding when to return to collect their personal effects from the dormitories.

    That was it.

    For thousands of students here, and tens of thousands on other American campuses, Commencement, perhaps the most significant event of their education, their preparation for life and living, came to an abrupt end.  They will not know the joy of marching attired in their academic costumes, of the photo-op and congratulatory handshake with the university president, the gifts from friends and relations that usually pour in on such occasions, and the pride of the parents and guardians who had supported them all along, expressed most eloquently in their collective attendance.

    Perhaps most painfully in a tight job market, they will miss out on a last chance to meet recruiters looking to hire from the graduating class.

    This is not how college was supposed to end.

    But in the time of the coronavirus, that is the way it is ending.  Nor does the disjuncture fall on graduating students only. Previously, returning students and freshmen could count on starting new academic year in August.  In the time of the corona virus, that too is not guaranteed.

    If the foregoing seems like sentimental mush in the grisly manifestations of these times, take the setting and stretch it across every platform of life – the office, the playground, ball park, the assembly line and shot floor, the mall, the retail shop, the theatre, the airport, the bus terminal, the train station, the home and indeed wherever two or more persons are gathered in cities across the world, and you have perfect calendar of human misery unfolding on a scale almost beyond imagining.

    The grisly bulletin of deaths from the virus issuing from China, Italy, Spain, Iran, the UK and the United States, the thousands receiving treatments in hospitals where doctors are often forced to engage in the macabre calculus of rationing care between those who have a chance of surviving and those who are too far gone to deserve the attention that has become a scare resource, the exponential spread of the infection, and the tens of thousands in voluntary or forced quarantine across the world are but the horrid indications of the coming cataclysm.

    A virus that has been traced to stalls selling live rodents in a market in China and dismissed blithely at its onset as a hoax by U.S. President Donald Trump who sets a greater store by blind and stubborn belief than by the scientific evidence has given a whole new meaning to globalization.

    It has been said the September 11 2001 terrorist attack on the United States “changed the world forever.”  The same claim can be made now with greater truth for the ongoing pestilence.  Under its brutal regime, the only certainty is that nothing is guaranteed.  And according to the best experts, we have not seen the worst yet.

    A great many of the students whose college careers have been peremptorily foreclosed will not return to school.  Many of the restaurants and bars and hotels and establishments now shuttered will not reopen.   Thousands of employees now forced to work from home may never return to their previous work routine.  Hundreds of athletes, performers and entertainers will not return to form.  Thousands of literary, artistic and musical works in progress will not be finished.

    Our social and cultural life (No Owambe!) and our culinary habits will change markedly, and so will our modes of production.  For better and for worse, many a political career will founder and die, just as many will flourish.  The severe downturn in the economy will bring the depredations of the corona virus up close  and personal.

    On the whole, according to the best sources, things will get worse before they get better.

    As casualties mounted and deaths piled upon deaths and patients in varying conditions of distress spilled over from hospital wards into corridors and waiting rooms and all evidence pointed more to deterioration than respite, I sought refuge in the disorganized book cases in my study.

    There, I fished fish out The Plague (La Peste in the French original) Albert Camus’s haunting and evocative 1948 novel about the bubonic plague that ravaged the city of Oran, a port on Algeria’s Mediterranean coast.

    I had read the book back in 1967, and my recollection of the men and women and prevailing circumstances chronicled in it has been dimmed by the passage of time.

    But not its horrors, understated though they were, nor its ironies, especially the fact, as I remember             it,  that the plague afflicted with devastating consequences the stronger, more virile persons in the community and generally spared those with weak constitutions.  Nor the atmosphere, of which our  unfolding circumstances are eerily reminiscent.

    The coronavirus, on the other hand, they say, spares the young and persons of sturdier constitutions for the most part, while felling older persons and those whose immune system has been compromised by preexisting conditions.

    Neither the one was to be preferred to the other, to be sure; nothing indicated that dying from the one would be less horrific that dying from the other.  Still, if you belonged in my age group — I am four months shy of 76 years — you surely suffer from one preexisting condition or more unless you are a freak of nature.  You are therefore bound to take note of the especial malignancy of the coronavirus toward our group, unless you are past caring.

    In this viral conflagration, what are our prospects?

    Nobody knows for sure.  To paraphrase the poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, coronavirus is in the saddle and rides humankind.

    In the days ahead, I will be rereading The Plague with painstaking attention.  Illinois, my state of residence, has gone into lockdown in response to the rapidly escalating menace of Covid-19, the killer disease spawned by coronavirus.

    Then, like millions of other residents, I will be watching and trusting that hope will triumph over the experience of those who also waited and watched and took the right measures but are unfortunately no longer with us.

    What are Nigeria’s prospects?

    If through Abuja’s acts and omissions coronavirus brings avoidable suffering and death on a staggering scale, thus compounding the Nigerian condition, it may well strengthen the desire and growing resolve of some of the constituent units to take their destinies into their own hands and seek their fortunes in a different setting that could hardly be more stultifying than the present one.

  • Wages of propaganda

    Wages of propaganda

    Olakunle Abimbola

     

    THE wages of relentless propaganda?  Political self-destruction.

    If you doubt, watch Seyi Makinde, the Oyo governor dash, with willy-nilly propaganda, to politically self-destruct — his latest fiddle clearly Covid-19.

    Did Nero fiddle while Rome burnt?  Well, you could say Seyi rallied — Coronavirus be damned! — while global health decreed the extreme opposite.

    Why, the governor even essayed partisan wit, which sent his deluded PDP crowd, rolling in partisan mirth!

    “I want you,” the governor quipped, “to take two things home.  And the first is: they are of the opinion that we should not have staged this rally because of the Coronavirus pandemic but it was,” he joked, to cacophonous applause, “one of their leaders who said Coronavirus had already entered their party” — yet another thunder of applause —  ”We all know,” came the sententious clincher, by Seyi the Wise, “that there is no Coronavirus in our own party”!  Ringing, rousing applause!

    But some 24 hours later, the governor was eating crow. Now, was that God confounding the wise?  Or the foolish, passing wiles for being wise, reaping the fair comeuppance of combative folly?

    Hear a subdued Makinde cringe, akin to bolting the stable doors, after the stallion had galloped clear: “That rally should never have held.  It was a lapse of judgment for which I take full responsibility.”

    Just as well — for there is always nobility in apology.  So, give the governor some credit.

    But he isn’t about getting away with gubernatorial garrulity and equal opportunity recklessness in perilous times, just to corral needless political mileage.

    Ibadan’s Covid-19 index case test just returned positive, as announced by the governor himself in a tweet, @seyimakinde Twitter handle: “The Covid-19 confirmation test for the suspected case at Bodija has come back POSITIVE.  The result was released at 17:35 pm of March 21, 2020.  Oyo State public health officials are collaborating with the University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan’s team on the case.”

    Now, Coronavirus appears the beginning of the end for Governor Makinde’s populist charm, which craves good news, good news and more good news!  The wages of relentless propaganda!

    Yet, that bit of APC having Coronavirus and PDP having none, was meant to start —and end — as a campaign ground joke.

    It was a witty, though wily, pun on Asiwaju Bola Tinubu’s quip, that APC elements that wanted to unhorse Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, the APC national chairman, had caught a blind power virus, akin to Coronavirus, en route to 2023.

    Yet, it was needless gubernatorial flippancy, that could peak in costly gubernatorial consequences.

    Indeed, given all we know about Covid-19, the governor’s frivolity was shocking, especially to a large gathering, that could spur its spread, and claim needless lives.

    In a classic case of fiction trumping reality, to hazard clear and present danger, Dean Koontz, in The Eyes of Darkness, had written: “They call the stuff ‘Wuhan-400’ because it was developed at their RDNA labs outside the city of Wuhan, and it was the four-hundredth viable strain of man-made microorganisms created at that research centre.”

    Credible conspiracy theory, in a globe swirling with mutual Sino-Western hostile propaganda?  Relax!  The Eyes of Darkness was published in 1981 — 39 clear years before the current pestilence, though Coronavirus did break out of Wuhan, China!

    Even then another excerpt, from that same fiction, simply leaves you numb and dumb!  ”… the Chinese could use Wuhan-400 to wipe out a city or a country, and then there wouldn’t be any need for them to conduct a tricky and expensive decontamination before they moved in and took over the conquered territory.”  Can that be true?

    Again, a credible conspiracy theory, even if fictive?  Or the West just being haunted by long shadows, of own past imperialist crimes?

    But leave Koontz and flip to Sylvia Browne’s End of Days, a scientific stuff, published in 2010 by Dutton-Penguin Books, USA.

    “In around 2020,” Browne predicted, “a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments.  Almost more baffling than the illness itself,” he continued, “will be the fact that it will suddenly vanish as quickly as it arrived, attack again ten years later, and then disappear completely.”

    Relief?  Or fresh alarm that Coronavirus could come ravaging the globe again by 2030?

    But even more chilling, and closer to Koontz than to Browne, is an account credited to an unnamed Chinese military intelligence officer, making the rounds on cyberspace.

    It claims Coronavirus was a biological warfare experiment gone awry, to hobble Hong Kong, and slow down its democracy hell-raisers.

    It claimed the plague broke out in Wuhan because its remote experimental base was near there; and that the Wuhan dead were simply collateral damage, even if the victims were mostly alleged Chinese dissidents and government critics, carefully handpicked.

    The unnamed Chinese soldier decided to squeal because his co-Chinese operatives allegedly gave his only child, a boy, polluted mouth/nose masks.  The boy caught Coronavirus; and is being nursed on his deathbed.

    His final chilling verdict: Coronavirus, he alleged, may as yet have no cure.  So, all the talk about heat destroying it are fibs from the sweet-lying Chinese government!

    Some conspiracy theory, from inside China itself, suggesting the very Armageddon?  You can’t but break out in cold sweat!

    This then is the very serious issue, rippling with life-threatening uncertainties, that the Oyo governor chose for his propagandist fiddle.  It’s good he duly apologized.  But what good would that do, if people from that gathering got infected, and became agents to spread the virus, in other South West states — and even beyond?

    Still by the apology, the omi tuntun (fresh and refreshing spring) wonder boy is miles ahead of his unthinking party.  The PDP had moved from the Ibadan South West zonal rally, to local government polls campaign in Cross River and Rivers PDP elective congress in Port Harcourt, Covid-19 be damned! Hardly any surprise.

    Makinde is so, so reminiscent of Otunba Gbenga Daniel (OGD) in his Ogun gubernatorial years.  OGD was the classic Afenifere-PDP, a neophyte more authentic than the Afenifere-AD original!  In his glory days, OGD media votaries belted out merry acronyms, in praise of their god: OGROMA, OGADEP, OGRA-GRA, … zealous chirps to spread the good news.

    But if OGD earned a second term before he unravelled, Makinde appears unravelling fast even before his second year!  The perils of eternal good news and the wages of propaganda!

    Tinubu on the other hand, that Makinde tried to ridicule in his unfortunate Coronavirus joke, logged his own due share of bad news.  Indeed, early in his Lagos governorship, he was a devil dutifully nailed to the cross, by impatient Lagosians, to echo Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s novel, Devil on the Cross.

    Still, at the end of it all, he built enduring legacies for Lagos, so much so that during the Ebola crisis, and now Coronavirus, Lagos is never found wanting.  Indeed, it is to Lagos, that other states look for direction!

    Governor Makinde had better use his ill-fated Coronavirus joke to turn a new leaf.  It’s time to shun cheap showboating and face serious business.

  • Muhammadu Sanusi vs the North

    Muhammadu Sanusi vs the North

    By Olakunle Abimbola

    Imagine the taciturn Emir Ado Bayero, as voluble as Omoyele Sowore, bristling, swashbuckling and hell-raising?

    That was the royal peculiar mess that was Emir Muhammadu Sanusi II!  It was doom foretold. Yet, completely shattering, when it came!

    The tragic fate of Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the newly deposed Muhammadu Sanusi II, 14th Emir of Kano, tracks back to two of history’s most famous quips.

    One, by George Santayana, the Harvard philosopher, famous for sundry aphorisms: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” — often with tragic consequences.

    That bunches, in a historical gargoyle, the deposition of Emir Sir Muhammadu Sanusi I, KBE, (December 1953 – April 1963) and grandson, Emir Muhammadu Sanusi II (8 June 2014 – 9 March 2020).

    Sanusi II obviously didn’t remember the slip, or learn from the fall, of Sanusi I.  So, he too cropped Grandpa’s plague: avoidable deposition?

    The second, by Karl Marx, in his famous essay, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, written between December 1851 and March 1852, in which he quipped: history repeats itself, “the first as tragedy; then as farce.”

    Now that the shattering fall of Sanusi II is tragic encore of the royal collapse of Sanusi I, any chance of a future Sanusi III?

    Indeed, grandpa lasted 10 years; grandson, barely six.  Would a Sanusi III somewhat come to redeem the Sanusi Kano lineage, or just confirm its farce, while their Bayero royal cousins thrive?

    Now, the two tragedies of the two Sanusis have rather eerie parallels.

    Sanusi I shared combative visibility with Sir Ahmadu Bello, Sokoto blue blood, 1st Republic Premier of the North and foremost political figure of that region, surpassing even Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa.  He burnt his fingers.

    Sanusi II, in preening and combative feuding, nettled Kano Governor, Abdullahi Ganduje.  But Ganduje was only a synecdoche for the northern conservative order, or even the British-rigged pristine Nigerian state.  Both share common DNA with the North’s feudal system, prime jewel of the British indirect rule in colonial Nigeria.

    Now, the ex-Emir ought to be a tested and trusted royal keeper of that heritage, warts and all.  But a fatal delusion turned him its tormentor-in-chief.  He burnt his throne!

    The Sar’dauna despatched Sanusi I under the smoke of alleged financial incontinence, from the findings of the 1963 David Muffet inquiry into the alleged seedy finances of the Kano Emirate Council, even if everyone knew the real cause was the no love lost between the assertive Premier and the colourful Emir.

    Governor Ganduje, without much ado, despatched Sanusi II for alleged serial “insubordination”; and for profaning sacred traditional northern ethos.  In a grand historical deja vu, the Kano government further forages for alleged sleaze, worth N3.4 billion via a parliamentary probe, for the final nail, on Sanusi II’s royal coffin.

    Still, everyone knows there was no love lost between the flamboyant Fulani Emir and the unforgiving Hausa governor.

    The only blip perhaps, in the running tragic parallel, is the differing federal temper, then in Lagos, now in Abuja, towards the Sanusi depositions.

    Prime Minister Balewa cautioned Premier Bello not to move against Sanusi I, for Kano might burn — an advice the premier spurned.

    For taciturn Muhammadu Buhari, it would appear presidential ambivalence: if he didn’t push the Kano governor to depose the gadfly Emir, nothing suggests he cautioned him against it.  That fatal ambivalence further cooked the Sanusi II goose.

    In both depositions, 57 years apart, Kano didn’t burn.  It appears to just have moved on, calmly watching the high-octane emirate drama, of sudden dethronement and instant enthronement.

    Indeed in the current case, if anywhere did “burn”, it was hustling politicians seeking capital, ever excitable southern busybodies, going ga-ga over a northern problem via skewed southern lens, and the southern conventional media, awash with subversive dirges, but only to pummel northern feudalism, as the bane — and pain — of modern Nigeria.

    Still, not a few have knocked the president for alleged culpable complicity, if not in the Sanusi dethronement, then in his arrest and banishment to Loko and Awe in Nasarawa State, which a court has since declared illegal, null and void.

    On this score, however, the sympathy orchestra missed the point.  The president exercised his discretion however he wished.  But the real culprit is the Sanusi hubris, in which frothing brilliance, and colourful crowing to rub it in, hardly equated any wisdom.

    You don’t drench yourself with petrol, knowing some fellas are hell bent on roasting you, do you?  But then, that was the long and short of Sanusi II’s royal wisdom!

    Read Also: Sanusi dethronement: Count me out, says Malami

    Still, on the score of citizen rights, Muhammadu Sanusi II looks set to escape the fate of Muhammadu Sanusi I, in terms of life-long banishment to internal Siberia, for biting the feudal finger that fed him.  That appears good progress in Nigeria’s eternal ding-dong between democracy and feudalism.

    Still, there is a limit to which folks, even SANs mouthing intimidating legal jargons, can push on that lane.  The Nigerian Constitution is democratic and libertarian.  But its sociology is feudal — pristine or cultivated — and constricting.

    Nigeria is a Federal Republic.  But its land space, East, North or West, is strewn with feudal potentates, pushing their democratic rights to reign without question, sell ancestral lands without query, and levy handsome fees for chieftaincy titles for the grovelling elite, in a fit of feudal parasitism.

    So, a republican Nigerian state is constrained to cohabit with this thriving feudalism, pleading the hegemony of culture and the legitimacy of tradition.  It is this delicate cohabitation that Sanusi I and II tried to rupture, with fatal consequences.

    So, our legal heavyweights had better be wary of pushing, too hard, this rights agenda; lest another crazy set of Nigerian citizens charge at these same courts to accuse the government of conspiring with the feudal elite to betray — and criminally too — the republican ethos of the Nigerian Constitution!

    A citizen that savoured the sweet gravy of feudal pleasure should stoically bear its bitter torture if things turn awry, shouldn’t he?  Instead of dead-panning as an injured, common republican citizen?

    That famous legal-speak nails it: he who comes to equity must come with clean hands!

    But away from feudal hubris and royal folly, Muhammadu Sanusi, now twice deposed, and maybe risking putative banishment from the Kano throne as some northern voices are suggesting, remains a potent voice, haunting the North for sweeping reforms.

    Colourful Grandfather, Muhammadu Sanusi I, romped as unfazed local Caliph, of the Sunni reformed Tijaniyya order of Senegalese Ibrahim Niass, with spiritual fount at Kaolack, Senegal, against the religious sensitivity of the Sar’dauna, more in tune with the Sultan of Sokoto-led, and more conservative, Sunni Khadiriyya.

    Flamboyant Grandson, Muhammadu Sanusi II, frothing brilliance, cutting intellect and rousing gift of the gab et al, ripped, without mercy, at the laggardness of the North, calling for urgent and sweeping reforms — or else …

    Both earned humiliating deposition for their royal audacity.  So, twice in 57 years, the messenger is unhorsed.  But is the message unhinged?

    Muhammadu Sanusi versus the North — who finally blinks?  That nestles in the womb of time!