By Idowu Akinlotan
The excitement with coronavirus will soon end; and humanity will get on with the business of living and surviving. Apart from Ogun State governor Dapo Abiodun who is still waiting for the magic bullet to finish off the coronavirus disease before reopening his state, other governors and indeed other countries have begun to move on with their lives and economies, believing that the virus would coexist with humanity for the foreseeable future.
The virus, exotically named COVID-19 by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to differentiate it from other precedent coronavirus diseases, has caused quite a stir and alarm absolutely incommensurate with its strength. It reminds the world to intensify efforts to rein in underlying ailments like hypertension, diabetes, kidney problems and other comorbidities catalysing the virus into becoming the frightening ogre that has sent humanity scurrying behind closed cities. But those efforts won’t come quickly enough, nor prove irresistibly deterrent.
In the first few weeks of the berthing of the virus in Nigeria, and flowing from its ravages in China, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom, and the United States, a previously complacent Nigeria whipped itself into a frenzy, began mindlessly aping the methods and measures of industrialised societies, spoke foreign scientific languages, and waited patiently for a cure or a vaccine that would either sound the death knell for the virus or knock it insensate. But despite all the aping and frenzying, the virus has continued its relentless march, with many Nigerians and their hospitals discovering their funny bones as they satirise the virus and pretend that against African immunity and the merciless rays of the sun, the virus was no match.
Thus in Gombe State isolation centre, patients who tested positive to the virus found the strength to engage in protests, not once but twice, with the admiring and indulgent public defiantly joining them cheek by jowl. Other isolation centres have witnessed patients sending selfies of themselves savouring their culinary delights, or patients killing boredom by dancing the humdrum of the ward away, even mildly twerking their ample derriere.
Given enough time, and sure as day comes after night, these Nigerians will even develop coronavirus isolation ward fashion, complete with provocative display of décolletage. After all, their face masks already manifest their irreverent fashion. Nigerians are irrepressible, a fact quite lost on Gov Abiodun. His counterpart in Lagos, the quick learner, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, has banished the idea of lockdowns and has jauntily leaped on the hilarious bandwagon raucously driven by his wonderful Lagos compatriots. He is not just thinking of opening worship centres, he is asking for flight resumption between Lagos and Abuja.
Only Mr Abiodun can explain the coronavirus arithmetic of locking down Ogun for four days and magically hoping the virus would not spread on the free days of Monday, Wednesday and Friday as indigenes circulate among themselves in markets and elsewhere. Left to Governor Abdullahi Ganduje of Kano State, lockdown is an impertinent little rascal. Lagos, Ogun and FCT endured more than five weeks of lockdown without losing their sense of humour and perseverance. After just three weeks of lockdown, Kano had had more than its fill of lockdown and had begun to look for all kinds of artifices to escape its strangulating hold. States which swallowed the quinine of lockdown way after Ogun have since left that addictive pill to the gentle and undiscriminating palates of Mr Abiodun’s subjects. For the Ogun governor, the virus will disappear after the rate of infection has flattened or vaccines have been found.
Some 10 or 11 weeks after the virus made landfall in Nigeria, the country has finally grown weary of the upstart. The Nigerian Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) is of course not tired, and so too is the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19, and both continue to give dire warnings of the disease’s resilience and resurgence, but few people are listening to their shrill cry. Mosques and churches are reopening — with the NCDC and PTF struggling to retain some form of control over the easing process — and the economy has all but reopened, especially in light of terrible anxieties about the poor shape of the world economy and the downward spiral of the mainstay of the Nigerian economy, crude oil. Not even death by the dozens every hour can force the economy to close again. Would an uproar follow another lockdown? Worse, there would be an uprising.
After the Nigerian presidency had had its fill of lockdown, but was still loth to let go completely, it instituted a curfew, apparently a linguistic pyrotechnic that seduced the Nigeria Police Force into making an ass of themselves before the whole world. They couldn’t tell the difference between lockdown and curfew, nor who an essential services worker was. Before the federal government exited the state-specific lockdown measure, it also imposed a lockdown on movement between states, which it called interstate lockdown.
But right from the first day, commuters and travellers defied the interstate measure, strolled to their motor parks as if the president didn’t understand English, boarded interstate transport vehicles, and both drivers and transporters proceeded blithely to bribe their way across five, 10, 15 states to get to their destinations. Some governors like Nyesom Wike of Rivers State shoute themselves hoarse against the flurry of covert movements, but it was no use. Nigerians were on the move, and it was an Mfecane that was precarious, adventurous and irresistible. If they could cross the mighty and turbulent Mediterranean Sea in dinghies and life rafts not stronger or better than Huckleberry Finn’s wigwam, crossing land borders manned by Nigerian policemen, yes, the same policemen, was cakewalk.
As the lockdown progressed, with everybody deceiving everybody, and NCDC and PTF speaking grammar and scientific jargons, especially with the Chinese lurking in the background, Nigeria’s ubiquitous travellers were on the move, crisscrossing states. No law mattered, and no governor or president made sense. If regular commercial vehicles were not immediately available, trucks and other articulated vehicles would do. If the cousins and nephews of the shrunken middle class travelled in buses and cars, some of them driven by, oh well, soldiers and policemen, the lumpen travelled as passengers with yams, vegetables and cows. This last group of travellers evoked the ghoulish phenomenon of almajirai invasion that has reverberated in the conspiracy theories of the South. While some elites were pondering the difference between almajirai and regular northern youths in search of golden fleece, southern governors roused their people into a panic, insisting that they could not be made to pay for the indiscriminate procreation of the North when the South, no slouch themselves when it comes to such amenities, zipped up.
And well, well, well. The 15 Chinese medical experts are still in Nigeria. Some said they were briefly lost, and others said they were only stranded. It is remarkable, however, that the 15 wise men from the East have kept spectrally quiet, afraid perhaps to commit themselves in their barely passable English. Now and again, some embassy staff or Chinese contractor building roads and rail lines, have spoken up laconically in defence of their experts. But even they have been careful not to commit themselves too enthusiastically, for they also do not trust their English enough.
So, who is speaking for them? Who are their spokesmen? Why, Nigerians of course. And not just ordinary Nigerians, but ministers and well-heeled citizens. They sometimes contradicted themselves, with the Health minister saying one thing, and the Information minister saying another thing, but who really cares? We can’t find the 15 experts, say one. They are not lost, they are only stranded after completing their assignments, say another minister. Babel fell millennials ago, but it is only because archaeologists have not come to Nigeria where remnants of that illustrious race still survive today in their pristine form at the cabinet level.
In one or two weeks, religious houses will reopen, and the economy will be revving full steam ahead in the hope that it can beat or mollify the looming global recession. The lockdown will either peter out or be left in the embrace of Governors Abiodun, Wike and possibly Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna State. Everybody is moving on. Even the NCDC and PTF are growing weary, not of fighting the virus, but of defeating the ingenuity of Nigerians who badmouth isolation centres and ridicule the treatment regimen adopted by Nigeria. More and more, it is becoming clear that COVID-19 is fast becoming like HIV/AIDS, an inconvenience Nigerians and the rest of the world must learn to live with. Highly placed Nigerians wonder why if all the virus requires are good old antimalarials, why then embark on the hullaballoo of isolating, quarantining, decontaminating, masking, gloving, sanitising, and metred distancing panaceas? Haven’t they heard, that the virus is new, and that it requires novel forms of absolution? Yes, some states have elevated it into some sort of religion, and have attached new liturgies to it, states like Rivers, Kaduna, Cross River, Ogun, etc.
But who can forget Kogi. Boxing could deal a mortal blow to the virus, whooped its youthful and irreverent governor, the bombastic Yahaya Bello. The virus has been promoted beyond its capability, he joked. In any case, he added, if it exists anywhere, certainly not in Kogi. Testing for it is a waste of resources, he growled. Wicked virus, what frightened it about Kogi and Cross River States? It is present in the two states in one way or the other, said the pessimistic NCDC and PTF. No sirs, chorused Cross River and Kogi. Or do the federal agencies want to plant it by force in the two states, both governors asked derisively? Perhaps; just as it was planted by oil workers and airline pilots in Rivers according to the croaky-voiced and boisterous warrior, Mr Wike? In future, scientists will ponder what was with the soils of Kogi and Cross River to make them unamenable to the structure and dynamics of the coronavirus. Surely it can’t be the politics of the two states. When they find out the secret, they must recommend their formula to the world when COVID-21 or COVID-22 strikes, as surely they must.
A final word about the virus. There will never be an agreement about the rate of infection or the deaths that have accompanied the virus. There is no agreement that the test kits and reagents are reliable, and there is even no certainty that the virus had not berthed in Nigeria before it announced its extravagant arrival in Wuhan, China last year. There is no agreement that ventilators have not been a significant factor in the deaths of patients afflicted by the disease, regardless of the underlying conditions of the sick. And there is, as a matter of fact, no proof that all the thousands that died from the virus did not perish because of the mistaken treatment administered on them: poor and needless intubation, administration of drugs that caused blood clots or exacerbated the prior illnesses they were battling with, etc. As the table below in fact shows — illustrating that the disease is being handled better in some places — some countries have dismantled the virus more efficiently than the other, with some countries witnessing fewer deaths per capita of infected population.
There is, however, proof that in the weeks or months ahead, the virus will be so demystified that a man would ask his friend why he looked so groggy, and the friend would reply that he had a bout of coronavirus. Nothing more than catarrh or flu or sore throat, nothing to worry about, he would snort. Nothing to raise eyebrows or to provoke stigmatisation, let alone attract the garish and endless lockdowns so beloved of the federal government and some state governments. At least nothing requiring the ridiculous infectious diseases law being sponsored by Speaker of the House of Representatives, Femi Gbajabiamila. A worker could also ask his colleague why he was delirious, and the sick would blame the same coronavirus, which he caught when he slept out. The inquisitive and persistent colleague would ask whether it was COVID-19 or COVID-21. And the response might even be that the doctor probably misdiagnosed it anyway, for it seemed in fact like COVID-16, way before the advent of contemporary malevolent test kits.
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