Chika Ugwuodo, Abuja
Sir: The world is at war, but unlike the World Wars and other bloody domestic conflicts, the enemy is a fast-reproducing virus, and in its armoury are tanks and state-of-the-art bombs against the human race’s measly Dane guns and blunt machetes.
Gaping holes have been exposed in the global health systems and in the ability of public health authorities like the World Health Organization to contain a pandemic.
More so, the thin thread stringing together the comity of nations have been stretched even further by distrust and propaganda.
Three states, Lagos, Abuja and Ogun are in complete lockdown. In other states, other forms of social distancing measures are in place manifesting as movement restrictions, partial lockdown and curfews.
Even though lots of businesses have been shut down, some public firms like eateries, shopping malls and banks, are operational in many states.
These places are known to pull crowds due to the essential nature of the services they offer. It was imperative therefore, for their management to devise systems that would make it possible for service delivery to remain undisrupted while avenues for the virus to transmit are limited.
In virtually all these public places, you would see materials for handwashing, hand sanitizers, workers donning face masks, thermometers and protocols for ensuring social distancing.
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These protocols, which are to say the least, ineffective, expose the sad reality in Nigeria where creativity cannot be sufficiently deployed to solve basic challenges.
Visitors to these operational public businesses in this period, wearing no protective equipment, are lined up for handwashing, during which time, there is unrestricted body contact in a cloud of shared droplets.
Inside our banks, social distancing protocols are being sufficiently implemented whereas outside, crowd of customers are huddled up in a blanket of wanton disregard for safety, resentment and frustration.
This is the situation in shopping malls as well. Even though some of these public places do as much as make regular announcements and leave spacing markings on the floor, it all ends up being a futile mockery of efficiency.
In all of these settings, customers are fully exposed, getting within intimate distance of one another and sharing objects and surfaces.
Are there acceptable excuses why these firms have failed to engineer workable systems for safeguarding their workers and customers in the face of this pandemic? None.
Not even the overwhelming failures in our national systems which seem to incapacitate component setups or the arrogant indiscipline of the average Nigerian.
It is time to integrate creativity into our national consciousness, to the extent that when faced by any challenge, at private or public level, our prime instinct is to sit and create rather than hide under “international best practices” to copy and paste protocols from other countries not suited to our specificities, or at worse conjure up garbage-allergic ideas.
Chika Ugwuodo, Abuja.
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