Jide Osuntokun
When the news of the arrival of what originally was an unknown ailment akin to flu broke out in Wuhan China, nobody outside China had a clue about what was coming to their own part of the planet. It was not only Donald Trump who was calling it the “Chinese or China virus” many people did not think it will later become a pandemic plague affecting the whole world. This pestilence has radically changed the world and the world will never be the same. Any one or any country that would continue as before will live to regret it. The Spanish influenza of 1918-1919 killed about 15million people worldwide. No one knows how many people this one will kill. The best scenario is that it will kill any figure from 300,000 to 3.3 million in Africa alone in its first wave. If this is true, the figure for Nigeria will range between 75,000 to 825,000. May this scenario not come true.
When our government took so long studying the situation, I was one of the impatient commentators who felt we were dealing slowly with what was an emergency. Eventually our governments both at state and federal levels came up with different approaches to the problem of saving the people from death especially in the face of an unrelenting pandemic. We have, by the divine grace of the Almighty God, been given time to prepare, unlike countries in Europe and America which were hit with immediate morbidity and mortality of the pandemic within a short time. Countries in Europe were so hard hit that severe measures of total lockdown were taken in countries like Spain, Italy, France and Germany before Britain muddled through, leading to high mortality that may well beat the experience in Italy and Spain. The United States with its population of 332 million spread over a vast continental land mass could not order a lockdown of the whole country and had to leave each state to deal with the issue as it affected them. It is understandable while America could not lockdown the whole country like China did for months. The US is a democratic country operating a federal constitution. The result of its inability to take strong measures and force them down the throats of its citizens is the ballooning mortality centring on the coronavirus epicentre in New York. Even the limited lockdown has led to resistance in many states in the United States.
The resistance is being encouraged and organized by conservative political groups enjoying the support of President Donald Trump who in several tweets is calling on Americans particularly in states run by Democratic Party governors to “liberate their states”. We now have several rowdy people coming to the streets asking their governments to open up the country to business and commerce as if the pandemic does not exist. This is a strange reaction to a pandemic that has no cure and can only be controlled by social distancing and testing to identify who is infected in order to prevent the wide spread of a deadly plague. Demonstrators who have in the past month lost their jobs are saying more or less that they would rather die of the virus than of hunger. If this is happening in the US and in some parts of Europe and Asia, one can only imagine the situation in Africa. Before the coming of the coronavirus, Africa’s economic situation was very precarious.
When our president locked down Lagos, Ogun and the FCT, many of the states particularly in the south followed suit with one form of restriction or the other. Many applauded their decisions for many reasons one of which was that people were overwhelmed by the various scenarios of what damage to their health the coronavirus could cause. Nigeria is absolutely unprepared to meet the challenge of this pandemic. All we can do is to emulate the action of other governments in other countries. It has now dawned on us that the different situation here in Africa perhaps calls for a different approach. What that approach should be is not clear to me. We do not have malls where groceries can be bought in clean and controlled environment. We also do not have electricity for refrigerators. But most important, our people have no jobs and some hustle every day to put food on the tables for their families. In the context of the extended family setting, social distancing would probably not work. The important thing is to recognize our reality and try and work around it. Distributing food, I believe, is too cumbersome to work. Sharing cash is problematic in an underbanked society like ours and sharing money publicly is rather an unwieldy way of applying palliative measures of tackling the condition of the abjectly poor members of the society.
Corruption is so deeply embedded in our society that one cannot trust our people with equitable sharing of money or food to the needy. In fact, many will see this tragedy that has befallen us as an opportunity to make fast buck! Perhaps the network of mosques and churches could have been used to share money to the needy. The clerical people have always been involved in one form of poor relief or the other. The upshot of what I am trying to say is that lockdown does not seem to work and the present system of poverty palliative has not worked either. This is therefore the time for wholesale examination of what kind of welfare state we must build now and in the future in order to avoid total collapse of society. The coronavirus has exposed the fragility of our society. This fragility became more noticeable following the inability of our economy to provide jobs for our ballooning population of young people. This unemployed youth is a growing time bomb that may explode anytime soon – coronavirus or no coronavirus. The horde of unemployed youth in Lagos and Ogun states who trooped out of their hovels where they live to take to the streets and to form gangs robbing people in their homes where they were obeying the government-imposed lockdown is very frightening indeed. On accosting their petrified quarries in their homes before robbing them, the gangs of these unemployed youths sometimes lectured them about how many years they had been roaming the streets after graduation without jobs while their victims and their children live lives of luxury in their leafy secluded neighborhoods. All that these young ones need to embark on a revolution is leadership. Fortunately for the government and those of us in leadership positions in our country is that this crowd is at a pre-revolutionary stage. From studies carried out in the past, these hordes of down and outs called the “sans-culottes” and “bras nus” during the French Revolution may be useful in storming the Bastille, but they soon burn out if not properly led. The British Marxist historian George Rude who specialized in the importance of crowds in history and wrote a seminal book on the “The crowd in the French Revolution” identifies how this crowd of disenchanted rabble can become a weapon in the hands of smart and evil and determined demagogues to bring down the entire superstructure of society. Just as the crowd can be very useful weapon in the hands of revolutionaries, it can also create its own grave diggers because of its excesses which will spark a reactionary response and the call for law and order which only a man on horseback, that is, the military can provide. It is therefore in the interest of democrats to ensure that their policies do not breed the crowd of the lumpen proletariat bringing down the pillars of society which will therefore lead to the emergence of reactionary terror in which the crowd and the democrats would lose out. We can all see the rising Jacobinism in our cities every time there is a demonstration or an industrial action or strike. Anybody who seems to have done better than the average Joe on the street is inevitably a target. There is emerging a fracturing of society along age lines with the youth blaming the old who are alleged to have mismanaged the country with the consequence of the underdevelopment of our country today. Nobody is defending the defenseless property-owning class in our society and who in most cases are isolated and are too fragile to physically confront their traducers especially when they are robbed either in their homes or on the highways. In the recent case in Lagos and Ogun states, the police force was nowhere to be found when it really mattered. Should one be surprised? Not really because there is a class solidarity between the crowd and the police. The target of the crowd tries to help themselves by surrounding their homes with killer pedigree dogs and foreign mai-guard who may not be reliable or may constitute a threat to them at the end of the day or join invaders when they are offered a share of their loot. The urban revolt is a manifestation of deeper malaise of the unequal society which the post-colonial society in Nigeria has fostered. This is why the coronavirus pandemic must signal a radical change in the way we manage our affairs and run our governments in Nigeria. It cannot and must not be business as usual. If we do not tackle the problems of unemployment, population explosion and underdevelopment, our future as a country will be dicey. We better find leaders who understand the dynamics of the change we are seeing with our own naked eyes rather than leaders who are still buried in the politics of ethnic cobbling and permutation.
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