Merchants of disease

Olatunji Ololade

 

THE coronavirus is real. News of a second wave of the pandemic sweeps through nations as you read, spooling a global contagion of fear. Despair is what is left when humanity mutates to viral nature and nations submit to disease.

We are lucky to have survived the first scourge of the coronavirus aka COVID-19 but who would be left after the plague is done with Nigeria?

Who would be left after the country’s ravage by her innate plague, the raptorial ruling class? Between the pandemic and the plague of corrupt leadership, whose voices and whose breath would rattle as the dry bones they picked over?

As the “second wave” seizes the nation, you can’t but wonder what is true and what isn’t true. It becomes more difficult to separate the truth from the lies, reality from empurpled fact.

Of course, COVID-19 is real but if the government claims to have spent over N30 billion in fighting the pandemic in four months, it’s their word against our fears.

The Federal Government disclosed that it “spent N30,540,563,571.09, representing 84% of the N36.3 billion public funds and donations received to respond to COVID-19 between April 1, 2020, and July 31, 2020.”

To avoid severe and persistent migraines, you learn to ignore the details of the spending. There is no gainsaying public officers and civil servants made a killing from the first wave of COVID-19 palliative funding.

In the wake of a “second wave,” their excitement is palpable and visibly etched in their faces and embellished ‘truths’ about the magnitude and consequences of the pandemic.

Very soon, they will institute another lockdown – deservedly perhaps given the citizenry’s disregard of hygiene and preventive measures.

President Muhammadu Buhari has reiterated the need for discipline and containment thus setting the tone for another confinement.

The lockdown symphony sounds another dirge of intricate threat and appeal: government will warn hungry citizenry to stay at home, claiming the imperative of fighting COVID-19 trumps every other consideration. The intent could hardly be faulted.

But the masses will protest; the lockdown will be flouted across state lines and status circuits. The consequences will be worse in public offices, where governors contract the real virus or pseudo-COVID-19, and attain specious recovery in a record three days, two days, and a day perhaps.

At the likelihood of another lockdown, Nigerians cringe in dread of forced restraint, job losses, heartbreaks, emotional trauma, and government looting of public coffers.

Still, nothing in Mr. President and the 36 state governors’ babble hint at a solution or purposive steps at finding a cure or collaboration with a more visionary partner to create one. That’s flawed leadership and worthy of rebuke.

The government depends on its affiliation with the Global Vaccine Alliance Initiative (Gavi) for access to vaccines. Health Minister, Osagie Ehanire, said the government has also registered for COVID-19 vaccines with the Global Access Program (COVAX) co-led by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Of course, this government like previous administrations has neither the vision nor initiative required to exit Nigeria from the league of global parasites cum spectators to the extraordinary league of global superpowers and doers.

Before the pandemic, Nigeria’s ministries of health, science, and technology had no strategic plans to add value to the country’s development. The status quo will persist till 2023. They can’t give what they do not have.

Health Minister Ehanire enthused about a committee set up to select the vaccine most suitable for the country against the virus. He is excited about getting 20 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine “at some cost” no doubt. His counterpart Ogbonnaya Onu, who presides over the ministry of science and technology must be psyched up too.

Ehanire and Onu must be ashamed that they both preside over dead ministries incapable of fostering the brilliance and enterprise required to produce a vaccine at the homefront, for the benefit of Nigerians and the rest of the world.

Perhaps the government should hand over both ministries to Chinese, American, or European scientists rather than afflict Nigerians with dormant health and science-tech ministries.

As the pandemic persists, the fabric of life is spun and torn by the talons of Nigeria’s vulturine leadership. Somewhere between their pretensions at curtailing the pandemic, a tragic lyre amplifies the horror of our rising funeral pyre. Their pleas and threats are crafty and fickle thus re-establishing their roles as misery merchants, malefic dealers, and undertakers.

To alleviate hardships imposed on impoverished and most vulnerable segments of the citizenry, federal and state governments will make another comic show of distributing food and money. In determining the vulnerable, they will resort to ill-informed and arbitrary categorizations thus rendering large segments of the citizenry disgruntled and hopeless.

The over-hyped palliatives will resound the parable of the sower in the sewer. In performing the roles for which they were elected and for which they claim outrageous compensations, public officers will demand a ceremony of appreciation and re-investiture, come 2023. It’s a classic tale of leaders as dealers: steamrollers masquerading as hope-runners.

The greatest virus is Nigeria’s leadership, many of whom have learned to feign compassion that they do not feel. It is an open secret that the reigning oligarchs are committed to the anti-COVID-19 campaign because the storms stirred by the virus tears at their gated paradise.

In the race for solutions to the pandemic, Senegal developed a test kit at $1 each. Even more amazing is the fact that these test kits could have results ready within 10 minutes, in an easily readable format; probably something like the line that appears in a pregnancy test kit.

At the backdrop of Senegal’s initiative, Madagascar flaunted a herbal cure named COVID-Organics. Despite condemnations and disclaimers of the country’s traditional cure, the government showed sterling initiative and resolve, unlike the Nigerian leadership, who waited for a vaccine from “colonial overlords” while obsessing about rising figures of the infected, the deceased, and cured.

The country’s leadership has, so far, re-established its perverse fetish for control and refinements of domination amid fears that public officers may be exploiting the pandemic to steal public funds.

At this juncture, it is pertinent to ask: To what end are the millions of naira committed to health funding and scientific research? How valuable is the role and establishment of the Nigerian Institute of Medical Research (NIMR)? How proactive is the institute in networking with sister institutes on the African continent, to conduct ground-breaking studies and find a cure to Africa’s most pressing health challenges?

A corrupt political class, a dysfunctional health system, and a disillusioned citizenry aggravate Nigeria’s anti-COVID-19 campaign.

The crisis demanded a swift, lucid, response but the government reacted with institutionalised lethargy and pitilessness; cruelly leaving the borders open like a leadership deadened to the finer aspects of tact, vision and reason.

As we go into 2021, the unfolding dystopia demands urgent intervention by well-meaning Nigerians and civil societies in the interest of the collective. The presiding oligarchs lack the brilliance, native intelligence, and wisdom to curtail the spread of COVID-19.

They lack the foresight required to drive Nigeria up the path of progress and rebirth. The search for their replacement, come 2023, must begin in earnest.

 

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