COVID-19: Looking inwards for a cure (2)

Olatunji Ololade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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