COVID-19: Test tube governance, guinea pigs and virus hunters

We love staring at the present, stabbing  the past and blinking into the future, which we have no plan for.  We sow wind but do not want to reap whirlwind. We are a people that engage effect by putting the law of causality in abeyance. Average Nigerian rulers and their lackeys on dinner table cannot […]

We love staring at the present, stabbing  the past and blinking into the future, which we have no plan for.  We sow wind but do not want to reap whirlwind. We are a people that engage effect by putting the law of causality in abeyance.

Average Nigerian rulers and their lackeys on dinner table cannot understand why trust don’t  just grow like mushrooms. They cling on thousands of reasons citizens should adore, respect, believe and trust them, forgetting that the tree first provided shade for anthills before it got eaten up by the same termites it sought to protect.

In Nigeria, we have a secretary to the Government of the Federation who was taught by COVID-19 how deplorable our health sector has been, a minster that insists on distributing food to school children on forced holidays, as well as legislators distributing exotic cars at the height of a pandemic.

This is a country with a health minister who did not know whether hazard allowances should be paid to doctors and other health workers on the warfront of the life-threatening COVID-19. It is quite sad.

We have   elites in power who  grouped themselves into committees on health, education, economy and even on COVID-19, with little or no ideas of how things could run.

COVID-19 has stripped the cloths 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 the affairs of our country.

We have 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. We now have a large number of poor people to deal with due to lockdown.

Victims of the virus are multiplying,  health workers are hunting for the virus without adequate protection, while homes of the poor have become laboratories for hunger. The  journey of the poor and the vulnerable is going to be rough in the days, weeks, months and years ahead.

They are between the devil and the deep blue sea. Unmitigated hunger will lead to anger, which will drive the wheels of frustration. Frustration will ignite  aggression and aggression could trigger violence, with dire consequences for the society.

In my reaction  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 an epidemic amounted 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  mistake; hence signifying another missed opportunity to lead a formidable and effective national response.

A fast-spreading virus is a disease without borders or boundaries. Assuming that we are able to get it off the three lockeddown areas, what happens if it moves to other parts 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 the 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 who are at the mercy of hunger and emerging crimes and insecurity.

It is unthinkable that the president would set up a committee that would address issues of palliatives on the third week of a lockdown that ab initio had a clear definition of its victims – the poor, the elderly, women and the conventionally sick people.

The president should readdress the country within the next two days after 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 a presidential situation room, where all governors would brief  him on strategic issues and state responses while the presidential task force continues with their operational interventions.

This will mobilise all Nigerians against the virus, unite against disaster and promote national integration. These are some of the opportunities the disaster presents, as bad as it seems.

He should re-gig relief support for Nigerians who are locked down.

Unfortunately, shouts of lack of transparency and accountability have trailed the so-called palliatives initially doled out. Even in an emergency, the voice of corruption is still loud.

We have seen the reward of the nonchalant attitude of our government at all levels. COVID-19 has now detected our hypocrisy. The perchance of choosing the worst of us to lead the best of us has stabbed us in 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 suffering the consequences of our tolerance for corruption. In the midst of all these, I salute the virus hunters – our doctors, laboratory scientists, epidemiologists, virologists,  other 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 and save our people the misery of becoming guinea pigs in the laboratory of power technicians who are fixated on graft.

There must be a revolutionary change in our approach to governance and the way we do things. From COVID, Nigeria must no longer come out as a fishing, 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