Even if millions die, should that stop the President’s campaign train? Go on, TAN
Just as we were celebrating our containment of Ebola, and as if to make nonsense of that celebration, a fresh Ebola case was detected in Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital, on Thursday. I had wanted to caution that we should not dance ourselves lame on Ebola yet when our health minister, Prof Onyebuchi Chukwu, said last week that we had contained the disease. But then, one could have been branded as unpatriotic. With the Port Harcourt discovery, it simply means we still have a lot to do to keep Ebola at bay.
Indeed, Nigeria has not been at ease since Mr. Patrick Sawyer, the American-Liberian imported the disease into the country on July 20. In fairness to the Federal Government, its response and collaboration with the Lagos State government since July 20 have been impressive. This has, as it were, almost obliterated the fact that its agencies at the airport had been lax in their duties, hence Mr. Sawyer’s ability to beat the security checks there.
Well, as some would argue, such collaboration is the most sensible thing to do where Ebola is concerned. This is a different ballgame from the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Yes, Ebola, like AIDS does not respect party affiliation. It is no respecter of whether you are progressive or conservative. It does not recognise boundary, be it religious, social, economic or geographical. Like AIDS, Ebola has no known cure. With AIDS, one can take all the precautionary measures: buy your barbing kits to avoid using general clippers, avoid using the same injection or syringe with someone carrying the AIDS virus; don’t take blood transfusion indiscriminately, above all, avoid the ‘danger down below’, zip up.
Even where all these fail, AIDS could still be somewhat managed. But not so with Ebola. So far, there is no known cure for it. Anyone struck by it could jolly well start singing the Nunc Dimittis, or its other version, ‘Oh Lord, I am coming home’. That is how bad things are. So, even when one is crying, he should still be clear-headed as to keep his eyes wide open. Even where political party or ideology differs, that should not preclude collaboration to ward off the Ebola.
It seems to me that with Ebola, God does not need to take any trouble of using either fire or flood to bring the world to an end again if He so desires today. Some 5,000 Ebola patients would do the job. Imagine what would have been our fate in Nigeria had Sawyer been allowed to escape into thin air as he had wanted to, even after having been taken to First Consultants Hospital in the Obalende area of Lagos? Not even Donatus could have been as generous as he would have generously distributed the virus in the country, such that even the Boko Haram terrorists would have seen how little their bombs and other armaments that they had hitherto relied on as weapons of mass destruction could be.
Nigeria had been dealing with a seemingly intractable blood-letting unleashed by the Boko Haram insurgents before Ebola came. Indeed, since 2009 when Boko Haram began its onslaught on the country, there has been no respite. The insurgents have attacked virtually everywhere one could imagine and even never have imagined, including police and military formations. It has sacked entire townships and presently has its flag hoisted in Gwoza, Borno State, where it has also proclaimed a caliphate. More than 12, 000 lives had been lost to the senseless attacks by the terrorists and they do not appear to be done yet. The way they slaughter their victims that they did not bomb suggests they are being propelled by some blood-sucking demons.
As things stand, the terrorists are still holding captive more than 100 secondary school girls that they abducted in their hostel in Chibok in April. At least twice they have rubbished the ultimatums given by top military chiefs even as they seem on a systematic mission of demystifying the Nigerian military, given the ease with which they stroll into parts of the country, abducting people at will.
In all of these, one person I do not envy is President Goodluck Jonathan. Indeed, if any man is sitting on a hot seat, President Jonathan is it. So hot is the seat that one would think he should be in a hurry to get out of it. But the most surprising thing is that he is not in a hurry to complete his term and leave. He has been to churches to pray for peace and apparently to seek God’s nod for more years in the rock. And, just in case that fails, he also invited some Senegalese clerics to Aso Rock, in what many have interpreted as a spiritual angle to the current war against Boko Haram. The 10 clerics were led to the State House, Abuja, by Khalifah Sheikh Ahmad Tijani Inyass, the grandson of Late Shehu Tijani Ibrahim Inyass, the founder of the Tijjaniya sect. They met for about an hour with the President at the First Lady’s Conference Room and offered prayers for an end to the security challenges facing Nigeria, as well as for peace and stability in the country.
Jonathan is not alone in this. As the spokesman of the group, Ahmed Tijani Sanni Alwalu said, “It is a historic visit because it has been done by his father with the then President, Gen. Yakubu Gowon and Gen. Aguiyi-Ironsi. So, history is repeating itself and we come for the Moulude of Ibrahim Inyass Gombe and on his way going home, the President requested for a courtesy visit and Shehu granted that.”
But President Jonathan is yet to complete the ‘tripod’ as he has not called in the African Traditional Religion people for similar prayer. In this wise, one would have thought he would cultivate Governor Rauf Aregbesola of Osun State whose government has embraced the ‘three-in-one’. But he appears to have made Aregbesola a sworn enemy because it was only in Aregbesola’s Osun State that the president did not do well at all in the south west in the 2011 presidential election. With Aregbe’s election for a second term, that history is set to repeat itself in the state in next year’s general elections, a thing President Jonathan had wished he could nip in the bud, by militarising the state to scare voters in the August 9 governorship election.
Interestingly, to date, President Jonathan has not indicated his intention to stand for reelection, but his campaign train is already on the track. The most visible one is the Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN) that has been holding rallies on his behalf, I suspect very much against his will, reminding one of the late General Sani Abacha who never said he wanted to transmute from military to civilian president but everything, including his body language and all, pointed in that direction. With TAN having flagged off the president’s reelection campaign, Nigeria has moved on. What this implies is that that is the end of the search for the Chibok girls; that is if Nigeria ever searched for them. Apparently those who came to help us had to abandon us to our fate when they saw how unserious and unprepared we are in looking for the poor girls. Not many serious countries would want to have anything to do with a country whose soldiers, in the course of ‘tactical manoeuvre’, would stray 80 kilometres into another country in battle! But, wouldn’t it have been better for our military authorities to tell us that in this season of defections, our soldiers merely took a cue from our politicians and defected to Cameroon, instead of saying they were on ‘tactical manoeuvre’?
But whatever the degree of blood-letting or blood-shedding, the president’s campaign train must start. If he wins reelection, President Jonathan would still have a large part of the country under his control. And if he loses, his successor may have to negotiate with the rebels for a return of the Gwoza caliphate to Nigeria.
