Olatunji Ololade
The COVID-19 calls for a reckoning. It reveals hard truths; that Nigeria may attain healing through pestilence, and rebirth from death’s bowels.
It reveals that wealth’s conceit soon stifles to shredded corpse and power’s prideful strut eventually cripples to a hobble. Ask the ‘Excellencies’ whose diplomatic passports and stashed loot have been rendered worthless by the virus.
COVID-19 blooms by mirroring previous plagues, afflicting the old and young, rich and poor, the powerful and weak, government and the governed alike.
It began like a signal fire bouncing across Asia, Europe and American power summits. Despite being blessed with the gift of a head-start, Africa again plays catch-up. In the absence of proactive leadership and preventive measures, Africa catches the bug, but for apocalypse, not evolution.
Pathogen asserts mortality in Europe, rides America roughshod, and strips Asia to wild nature, tearing families apart, reducing society to a trickle. Civilisation relapses to wild nature. Even in Nigeria, the affliction progresses like an infectious agent on demolition derby.
If government continues to gamble with the citizenry’s lives, Nigeria too, may fall to her knees before COVID-19’s savage spread. The United States, Italy, United Kingdom, Iran, Spain, Turkey, to mention a few, have bent the knee before the pandemic.
As the pandemic persists, the random traveller becomes invader and plague, harbinger of disease, bleakness and death. Nations shut borders against invisible transmission; super-powers cower and cringe despite their stockpile of nuclear warheads.
Through the crisis, Europe’s left and right wings pick sides, projecting narratives that suits their cast of mind, yet Nigeria’s government and her cynical public embrace the wild side. They jointly project a doomsday theory weaponised to create panic and accelerate the onset of dystopia.
The greatest focus is on numbers; everybody obsesses about the statistics of death and the infected. Add that to the lockdown political circus by the government vis-a-vis rising citizenry angst and dissent, and you have a perfect recipe for disaster.
It doesn’t matter what the stats are, what could it profit us to indulge in a game of panic and numbers, of which the only victors are the country’s ruling class?
The virus reveals more bitter truths in real time; that the incumbent leadership, like its predecessor, lacks the competence, humaneness and will to protect and serve the citizenry.
If the worth of a government is truly known in time of crisis, this government has done too little to assert its worth through the COVID-19 pandemic. Asides issuing caustic and juvenile retorts to national treasures and citizens of the world, like Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, through its spokesperson, President Muhammadu Buhari’s leadership has been lethargic and inept at addressing the impact of the lockdown and pandemic on the citizenry.
The greatest focus is on numbers; everybody obsesses about the statistics of death and the infected. Add that to the lockdown political circus by the government vis-a-vis rising citizenry angst and dissent, and you have a perfect recipe for disaster
Save Lagos, the crisis’ epicentre, where Governor Babajide Sanwoolu and his team are working against the odds to provide palliatives to citizenry affected by the lockdown, very few states have showed convincing resolve to contain the pandemic and its impact. And yes, while Lagos could do better, more worrisome is the federal government’s ill-fated approach at distributing palliatives to citizenry affected by the lockdown.
Just recently, the leadership of the National Assembly criticised the approach adopted by the federal government to distribute social grant to Nigerians suffering the brute end of the COVID-19 lockdown.
Calling for legislation for the programme in line with global best practices, the Senate President, Ahmad Lawan, and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Femi Gbajabiamila, expressed their concerns at a meeting with the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, Sadiya Farouq, and some top officials of the ministry on Tuesday.
The meeting, convened by the leadership of the National Assembly, was against the backdrop of the ongoing federal government intervention initiatives aimed at reducing the impact of the pandemic on the most vulnerable Nigerians, following the 14-day lockdown order issued by President Buhari, on March 29, in Abuja, Lagos and Ogun States.
It would be recalled that in the wake of the lockdown, the president stated that the most vulnerable segments of the citizenry would be compensated. The Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs subsequently announced the distribution of the first tranche of N5 billion compensation to the vulnerable segments but Lawan and Gbajabiamila noted that the programme needed a reform to make it more efficient and effective.
Lawan, rightly, identified issues with the conditions and guidelines for the intervention programmes, that requires beneficiaries to go online, through the internet or BVN, even though majority of prospective beneficiaries have no access to power or the internet. Many have no bank account let alone the BVN.
“In fact, many of them don’t even have phones and these are the poorest of the poor. Yet, some of the conditions or guidelines which you set inadvertently leave them out,” he argued, and added that the poorest of the poor have not been sufficiently captured by the programme thus calling for a review of the process.
Gbajabiamila also stated, that, “We need to put on our thinking cap and work out some strategies on how to identify the poorest persons in Nigeria.”
Indeed, among other truths, the COVID-19 has revealed that national governments, as David Runciman opines, really matter. It really matters the nature of government you find yourself under, he argues, stressing that though the pandemic is a global phenomenon, the impact of the disease is greatly shaped by decisions taken by individual governments.
We are at the mercy of our national leaders. That is something else Hobbes warned about: there is no avoiding the element of arbitrariness at the heart of all politics. It is the arbitrariness of individual political judgment.
What is the quality of judgment of Nigeria’s political leadership? How arbitrary or humane are Mr President, the state governors and lawmakers in their political judgment? We are past seeking answers to such rhetoric, Nigerians should instead seek the safest pathways out of the valley of death into which we have been led by generations of bad leaders.
Pertinent questions we must ask include: Why is COVID-19 less devastating in the country and Africa? What are the factors responsible for this? How do we exploit these factors to protect ourselves and fight off the virus?
Why the astonishment over the pandemic’s slow pace at decimating Africa? How can Africa protect herself from affliction by a more severe strain of the virus? Irrespective of so-called conspiracy theories alleging deliberate maleficence in the evolution and spread of the virus, Nigeria and other African nations must evolve measures to check influx of foreigners from nations established as hotspots of the pandemic on any pretext – this isn’t the time to welcome foreign doctors, scientists and other medical experts into the country.
And if we must truly be on lockdown, government must enforce lockdown with a human face, knowing that such measure can only be effective with viable income replacement among vulnerable populations.
Given that Nigeria can’t afford to massively scale up her welfare systems in a short time, as Rachel Strohm rightly suggests, its combination of donor support and targeted interventions to keep markets open while protecting vulnerable people, may keep people from going hungry while also reducing the spread of the pandemic. People will only follow social distancing measures if they can meet their basic needs while doing so.
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