Our small, scared, sickly world
One Chinese citizen sneezed some weeks ago in his country. Many of his fellow citizens and thousands more across the world caught a strange illness that looked like a cold. It was not. Chinese authorities scrambled to respond using a combination of desperate containment measures and self-denial, as the world watched and thought it was […]
One Chinese citizen sneezed some weeks ago in his country. Many of his fellow citizens and thousands more across the world caught a strange illness that looked like a cold. It was not. Chinese authorities scrambled to respond using a combination of desperate containment measures and self-denial, as the world watched and thought it was safe. Today, billions of people all over the world who had never heard of, or needed surgical masks cannot afford a single one. Those who can, are rushing to hoard hand sanitizers, soap, food, fuel, medications and everything else that will run out when they are locked away from each other. Billions more are going about their businesses of scraping a living, entirely resigned to the possibility that they could be victims of a pandemic because there is nothing they can do about it. One or two billions more are confident that they will survive it whatever happens, because they pray and they are tough.
The Coronavirus pandemic brings to mind the truism that our world is a indeed a global village. But this is not your ordinary village. It is one that has clear demarcations between wealthy and poor parts. These demarcations, however, are only useful in times of relative peace or when there is enough to keep all the villagers in their places. The village receives the same rain, same air, shares the same access and exits and substantially the same friends and enemies. There are separate markets for the rich and the poor, resources that are owned only by the rich while the poor lives off the crumbs of the rich. Without the poor, the rich villager is in trouble. Without the rich, the poor is lost, and has to re-create life in a village that had been designed and run only by the rich.
The rich part of our global village has finally succumbed to variable levels of fear that it is dealing with a disease which could take a lot more than the lives of large numbers of citizens. From an uncharacteristic lethargy, it is now effectively in a panic mode. It could lose hundreds of thousands of lives of citizens. That will be tragic, but it will move on. The prospect of major, prolonged damage to the economy will be a bigger disaster. This is the prospect facing the wealthy part of our global village. Its industries are grinding to a halt. Markets are collapsing, shrinking and evaporating. Barriers to movement of persons and goods are going up, effectively fracturing an elaborate and intimately-structured global economy powered by economic interdependence, human movement, communication and transportation.
Stocks and bonds are crashing faster that face masks disappear from shelves. Decades of global and regional plans on cooperation are going up in the heat of unilateral panic, with countries adopting do-it-yourself measures that best suit their exposure or understanding of the situation. Large populations are being quarantined, and no one is sure whether this is a solution or the path to more problems. A worst case scenario is facing this section of the global village: a crisis without known or predictable dimensions or a timeline for resolution. Long after this virus is eliminated as a global threat, the world will be engaged in rebuilding an economy that it was never prepared to deal with. The cost will be higher for the poor like us.
The poorer section of the global village is bracing itself to suffer more than the rich which has stronger systems and resources to handle a pandemic. Every requirement for dealing with this pandemic costs resources, and needs strong organizations and institutions. Three-quarters of the world lacks these. The global poor will have to rely on the rich to find palliatives and cure. In the meantime, it is likely to lose lives and more of the little resources it has as its citizens are exposed to a strange disease that demands cleanliness when the majority of people live in dirty environments and squalor. Unlike folks in the rich sections of our world, people here will not will stay indoors, avoid markets, stop congregating or literally live isolated existence. This will not be because they choose to ignore requirements for survival, but largely because no one will force regulations that give poor people two choices: risk death from a disease or from lack of life-saving requirements.
Even in a world which has fought wars that took lives of millions, tolerated smaller wars that went on for years, lived with dangerous gaps between rich and poor, weak and strong, secure and vulnerable, the daily, worsening developments over this virus is enough to create unprecedented panic. Leaders are unsure whether raising alarm is better than attempting to calm nerves and creating false senses of security in the process. Citizens contemplate entirely new phenomena: virtual isolation and the freezing of social relations as we know them. There have been events and setbacks that jolted the developed world and dragged the poorer part around it, but this pandemic looks set to bridge the gap between the world in control, and the world with little control over its affairs. Research into vaccines could take months or years to develop, but by that time the damage would have been monumental.
The worst part of it all is that no one knows how long we have to wait to know how much danger we face, all of us. We are raising barriers out of fear, and locking down whole populations in the hope that it will contain this virus. Not everyone, however is doing this, either because they cannot, or they would not, or both. One part of the world could conceivably enjoy relative safety and distance from the disease if its containment eradication strategies work, but it cannot resume relations with another part of the world that is victim. Yet our deeply interdependent world cannot break into healthy and diseased parts. We are in this together all the way, but many will pay a higher price.
Nigerians who are aware of this threat pray that its presence among us is limited until a cure is found. We are already waking up to the alarming crash of crude prices. If you put together the threat of Coronavirus, the prospects of drastically reduced income from crude exports, a nation showing all the consequences of poor governance and a citizenry that is strong on fatalism and weak on mobilizing resources and heeding to advise on self-help, you get a picture of a major impending disaster. So, let us pray. And stay clean. And listen to advise. No one is entirely safe.