By Jide Osuntokun
This is the worst of times in the world with the tragedy of coronavirus bringing out the best and the worst in many people. Doctors are risking their lives to save many even when they have no protective gadgets to protect themselves.
It is not that they have conquered the fear of death but because of the Hippocratic oath they have taken and their individual consciences, they will rather risk their lives to save others than selfishly keep their own lives when they know they can make a difference.
It is this commitment that made my late brother, Professor Kayode Osuntokun to say in the 1970s that going on strike by doctors is a betrayal of their oath to save lives. He was very unpopular for saying this but he could not be bothered.
While doctors are saving lives, there are others involved in price gouging by buying available stuffs including medicines, toiletries, ventilators, clinical masks and so on and charging huge prices in order to make unearned profits at the cost of human lives.
Recently when President Donald J. Trump of the United States said chloroquine may help in the management of coronavirus, the drug commonly used against malaria disappeared from the various pharmacies in Nigeria. I would not be surprised if our intrepid Nigerian traders have exported this drug to earn the much sought-after foreign exchange.
Thank God, we Nigerians do not generally eat foreign food. If we did, by now all the shelves in our supermarkets would be empty because those with money would have cleared them from the shelves whether they need them or not.
What really worries me is not the human propensity for looking after himself or seeking comfort for oneself but the hatred that has become noticeable since the outbreak of the coronavirus against people in authority and people of certain age.
It is common in the social media to read or hear vituperations against certain categories of people for alleged non-performance of duty while in government the consequence of which has brought us to this pass where nothing works in our country.
I agree that people have the right to be angry against the generations before them. But to wish them dead is ungodly. I have seen and heard of people celebrating the news of people in Aso Rock the seat of the federal government of Nigeria, being hit by the coronavirus. People do not only rejoice at this bad news but go further to wish that those afflicted should die!
There is never a time to hate. Those who hate others for whatever reasons are destroying themselves. Their reason is that those in power are responsible for the suffering of the masses. How will the death of a few people in positions of power solve our problems of underdevelopment?
Our Holy books say God does not want the death of sinners but rather that they should repent and live. Anybody wishing another person dead has committed a mortal sin because no one has the right to seek the death of another person except as a punishment for murder.
I heard and I read online, angry young Nigerians saying since the coronavirus is deadly for people over 70, Nigerians should welcome it because in Nigeria this is the category of people who have ruled and ruined the country. They assume that after that generation are wiped out Nigeria will suddenly become a great country run on perfect moral principles and the country will in fact become a utopia on earth.
This of course will not happen.
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I am one of those who believe Nigeria can do better taking into consideration our human and material resources. There were signs of this at independence. I was in secondary school in 1960 in the year of our independence. We had high aspirations and the sky was the limit of our aspirations.
We were also inspired by the kind of leaders we had. This was not only in politics but in the society as a whole among the teachers, bureaucrats, the clergy, the farmers and peasants, the traders, the military, police, paramilitary forces and businessmen.
There was little or no crime and most people did honest jobs to earn honest income. Crime was small and containable. It was not utopia and no country was perfect. We also had five-year development plans in which we matched planned development with resources.
We had good boarding schools and good hospitals and the University College Hospital, Ibadan was one of the best hospitals in the Commonwealth. The hospital was so famous that some members of the Saudi royal family used to come for treatment there.
We lost all this with the advent of easy oil money and with the military incursion into politics and the introduction of federal character, ethnic balancing, bringing everything into the same pedestrian level and abandoning institutions of excellence in the name of if there is great university hospital in Ibadan, Kano, Maiduguri and Zaria must have one not minding if there was money for this.
If there was no money for federal character hospitals, then no city would have one. This is how we brought everything down to the level in which the elite go abroad to treat headaches!
We can make a case against all the governments we have had since 1966. What I object to is to blame the present government for the accumulated faults and neglect of all the former governments. This is not to say the present government has not been shooting itself in the foot by its lopsided appointment based on preferred ethnic and religious considerations.
It is really sad that the Nigerian academic community which in 2015 said anybody but Goodluck Jonathan and passed the word round that Buhari was the man on the high horse to deliver our country now feels let down. We feel the pain as the ordinary man.
How come most of our governments including this one has not been able to change our country and our lives for the better? The answer lies in two things. The first is corruption which permeates everything in the country particularly in politics to the detriment of everything.
The late Right Honorable Nnamdi Azikiwe said in 1959 that Nigerians play the politics of poverty. He said politicians came from poor beginnings and that when they get into power and see the opportunity to make money, they determine to make as much of it that no one in their families up to the fourth generation will ever be poor again.
Side by side with this is the politics of “stomach infrastructure” where greedy plebes prefer eating and voting for those who stuff their stomachs with food than those who can lift them out of the underclass they find themselves. So, all our corrupt ways can be sociologically explained.
Politics has become a means of resource allocation even on a personal level. The second reason why nothing works is because we have replaced our previous competitive and cooperative federalism with unitary government in which the individuals who capture the centre can do whatever they want with our resources while those at the peripheries look sadly at them.
To change the situation, we have to tackle the two highlighted issues above. There is no need dancing around the issue of development when we know the key to unlocking our problems.
Yes, mistakes have been made. My generation and that before me are responsible for the problem. As individuals, only some few of our generation can be held responsible but whether we like it or not, all of my generation are vicariously responsible for our general underdevelopment.
We owe it to the up and coming generation to plead with the Buhari government to put in motion a way forward out of this morass in which we find ourselves. He can look for young people to draw up an actionable plan possibly extracted from the Vision 2020 gathering dust in Aso Rock archive.
This time around, it should be young people who should see vision while old people dream dreams. We cannot continue to do things as before and expect to see changes. That will be pure insanity.
But having said this, my generation should not be prayed away and handed over to coronavirus to deal with us for errors of commission or omission in not planning properly for the present. As Mo Ibrahim, the Sudanese billionaire said recently, the old guard of African leaders in their 70s, 80s and 90s should yield their positions to the youth.
He asserted that a 90-year old president leading a nation can only lead that nation to the grave! But let us pray for the young people who are destined to rule our country that they would not repeat the mistakes of the past. It will be a tragedy if they do that.
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