Lockdown and Kano’s explicable weariness

By Barometer

Lagos State was already groaning under two weeks of different shades of shutdown when the federal government barged in on March 30 and ordered a two-week lockdown. The feds gave some sort of justification that added no new insight into the shutdown the state had earlier endured with some success for about 14 days. Worse, other than the initial N10bn subvention given the state to prosecute the COVID-19 pandemic war, the feds gave little or no further succour. Lagos State, which had calibrated and graduated its shutdown to stave off every attendant security threat, was left alone to fend for itself and to placate its restless, combative and weary indigenes. Three additional weeks of lockdown at the instance of Abuja pushed the state to breaking point, with both the government and the governed, especially the daily wage earners who were in the majority, swearing that they had reached the end of their tethers.

But the feds are not reputed for learning from history or experience. The five-week lockdown in Lagos had done very little to decelerate the spread of coronoavirus disease infection, though the populace and the elite derived maximum psychological satisfaction from promoting that putative sure cure. The elite seemed to believe that without a lockdown, the state, if not Nigeria entirely, would experience apocalypse.

They had their way, a lockdown was imposed, but apocalypse continued its relentless march. It was shocking, therefore, to see the same feds, as usual playing the laggard, ordering a lockdown on Kano one week after the state had ordered its own lockdown. However, barely four days after the federal lockdown, Kano State governor, Abdullahi Ganduje, has appealed to the feds to ease the lockdown because of its suffocating effect on the hungry and poverty-stricken populace.

Said Gov Ganduje: “We are making this appeal on behalf of our people who are presently running out of food items. We would love the federal government to relax the lockdown for a period of time to enable people stock their homes, especially now that majority of us are fasting. It will also ease the economic hardship in the state.” It is possible that the governor got some disturbing security reports. Unlike Lagos where organised cult groups invaded vulnerable sctions of the society, and found themselves very quickly at the receiving end of angry militia-like sections of the society also pining from the lockdown, Kano’s explosion, should it come, could be cataclysmic.

It is not clear whether the Kano governor got alarming security reports or he was just acting on plain socio-economic reports indicating that the populace was frustrated and set to explode. Whatever the origin of the reports he got, it is clear to the governor that his people could not endure a two-week lockdown, let alone the three-week lockdown they are enduring, or even the possibility of an extension.

Clearly, Kano is in for a very rough time. Not only was the state unprepared for the health crisis that has perplexed it, going by its appalling inaction in developing its healthcare sector, like the rest of the country, it inexplicably wasted three or four weeks window which they could have used to arm themselves in readiness for the virus as states in the southern part of the country became beleaguered.

Nearly four weeks of advance warning since March, the state still did not have a testing centre until the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) erected one. It has taken the afflicted in Kano dropping dead like flies, starting from the wealthy and elitist, to nudge them into frenzied action. But that feverish action has been largely erratic. It will, therefore, take concerted efforts by the federal government, going by what is on ground in the state and their denials and half-truths in the face of mass deaths, to pluck the state from the jaws of inertia.

Nigerians had feared that if the virus were to berth in any of the most populous states in the North, chaos could ensue. Their fears are not misplaced. Indeed Kano should have anticipated the crisis and got ready for the virus. Like the rest of the North, the ignorant and the fatalistic lived in denial, and sang and argued that coronavirus could never get the better of them. Perhaps if the affected states in the North, including Kano, had quickly got down to serious business, found out how the virus behaved and discovered what the vulnerabilities of their people were, especially given cultural and religious strictures, the day might have been saved. But it was not to be.

Kano wants some N15bn to fight the disease. They will doubtless get something huge, as indeed many are speculating the feds have begun to truck thousands of bags of grains to them. They may even get virtually everything they need, though it is not guaranteed that they can deploy those resources more expertly and frugally than sceptics give them credit. But if care is not taken, the country may be gazing long into the abyss in Kano, unsure what merciless hand the virus would deal them, or whether the virus would even respond as quickly as expected to all the panaceas the state in league with the feds might administer.

Some of those panaceas will be harsh and bitter. And if Kano can hardly endure one week of federal lockdown, what might their infamously short staying power tolerate?