Test Tube Governance, Guinea Pigs And Virus Hunters By Gbenro Olajuyigbe

We love staring at present we stabbed in the past and blinking into future we have no plan for.  We sow wind but do not want to reap whirlwind. We are a people that engages effect by putting the law of causality in abeyance. To the average Nigerian rulers and their lackeys on dinner table, they cannot understand why trust don’t just grow like mushroom. Clinging on thousand reasons why citizens should adore, respect, believe and trust them; forgetting that tree first provided shade for anthills before it got eaten up by the same termites it sought to protect. Nigerian rulers are termites. Trust is earned! It can only be freely given by those that are appointed to regret. The character of Trust is even made worse by rulers who paint book red and turn gold to ashes – magicians, who, in our chequered history as a nation, have turned wine of hope into water of misery! A gang of rulers that produced a Secretary to  Government who was taught by COVID-19  on how deplorable our health sector has been, minister that insist on distributing food for school children on forced holiday as well as legislators distributing prudentlessly acquired exotic cars at height of pandemic does not deserve trophy of trust! A country with Minister of Health who did not know about peanut hazard allowance to doctors and other health workers on the war front of life threatening COVID-19 is a test tube doctor in incubation of intensive ignorance. Hierarchies of elites in power and in government who  grouped themselves into committees on health, on education, on economic and even on COVID-19 with little or no ideas of how things could run with results as evidence of their powerfulness. 

COVID-19 has stripped off clothes of corruption and exposed the nakedness of officials who are premature in acts of governance. It has exposed deliberate ignorance and outlandish self interests and gross incompetence that direct affairs of our country. A class of reckless elites that delayed the closure of international air borders for self interest thereby increasing the risk value of Nigeria to COVID-19 now has the extension of lockdown of largely poor persons to deal with. Victims of the virus are multiplying, health workers are bare-footedly hunting for virulent virus while the locked down homes of the poor have become laboratories of hunger; places where they themselves have now become reluctant guinea pigs! The  journey of the poor and the vulnerable is going to be rough in the days, weeks, months and years ahead. They are in between the devil and the deep blue sea. Unmitigated hunger will lead to anger. Anger will drive the wheels of frustration. Frustration will ignite aggression and aggression will trigger violence with dire consequences for society at large. 

In my reaction titled “The President, His Speech and the Pestilence!” to President Buhari’s first speech that pronounced the lockdown in the Federal Capital Territory, Lagos and Ogun states, I posited that “Isolating three areas in fluid epidemic outbreak even though other 34 areas are not now considered high risk areas amount to shortsightedness”. I initially assumed that to be an error of the hand. The second broadcast on extension of the lockdown regrettably repeated the same response mistake, hence, signifying another missed opportunity in leading a formidable effective national response. A fast spreading virus of pandemic proportion is a disease without borders or boundaries. Assuming that we are able to get it off the three locked down areas, what happens if the epicenter moves to other part of the country? Do we think that these three areas would have been free from re-infection?

The second speech of the President portrayed poor understanding of the nature and character of the virus we are dealing with as well as reflecting poor national response strategy in place. The lines of relief or social intervention from the speech are too vague and nebulous to offer any hope for the now twice locked down poor people at the mercy of hunger and emerging crimes and insecurity the situation has triggered. It is unthinkable that the President will set up a committee that will address issues of palliative on the third week of a lockdown that ab initio had clear definition of its victims – the poor, the elderly, women and the conventionally sick people.

The President should re-address the country within the next two days after virtually meeting with all the governors. The President should lock down everywhere in the country so as to fight this virus together at once. He should set up Presidential Situation Room where all governors brief him on strategic issues and state responses while the Presidential Task Force continue with their operational interventions. This will mobilise all Nigerians against the virus, unite against disaster and promote national integration. These are some opportunities disaster presents as bad as it seems.

He should rejig relief support for Nigerians who are locked down. Shout of lack of transparency and accountability trailed the so-called palliatives initially doled out. Even in emergency, the voice of corruption is still loud.

The dire strait we find ourselves now is reward the non-challance of government at all levels to development and dare devil corruption that rules our land. From Kaduna to Kogi, Lafia to Lagos, Yobe to Rivers, Maiduguri to Calabar, Sokoto to wherever, our money grows like grass! Plantations of currencies abound anywhere you turn. In banks, in soak away, in the ingenious ‘grave banks’ that abound anywhere you turn. Like weeds under the storm, millions of dollar, naira and pound are berthing in unusual harbours. The whistleblowers are blowing the whistles, the anti-graft agencies are hardly harvesting the maverick weeds and the courts are blowing the cases away. Different whistles for different folks! In a country where lawmakers are taller than law and executives fatter than justice, accountability is the first casualty. COVID-19 has now detected our hypocrisy. The perchance of choosing the worst of us to lead the best of us has stabbed us at front. 

Now, we have the COVID-19 advantage that has made rulers to appreciate the richness of our poverty and the poverty of our plans for health care, education and even emergencies. They are now, as the rest of us, victims of their own grafts. We are all dared by the consequences of our tolerance for corruption. In the midst of all these, I salute the virus hunters – our doctors, laboratory scientists, epidemiologists, virologists, health workers and those on the first line of action. They are our heroes and heroines! The best way we can reward them is to move governance away from test tube mentality, save our people the misery of becoming Guinea pigs in laboratory of power technicians who are fixated on grafts. There must be a revolutionary change in our approach to governance and the way we do things. From COVID-19, Nigeria must no longer come out as that fishing or hunting or herding community that could be pedestrianly governed by migratory looters who see demand for accountability as mutiny and treat advocacy for good governance as treason!

Gbenro Olajuyigbe is the Executive Director of Emergency and Risk Alert Initiative

 

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