Too early for locust to gloat

Some Nigerians were gloating at the weekend at the rush of our VIPs who tested positive for COVID-19. Many more VIPs who recently met with those ones had to go into isolation and undergo tests. The social media warriors were openly hoping that these tests will turn out to be positive. Not surprisingly, rumours soon […]

Some Nigerians were gloating at the weekend at the rush of our VIPs who tested positive for COVID-19. Many more VIPs who recently met with those ones had to go into isolation and undergo tests. The social media warriors were openly hoping that these tests will turn out to be positive. Not surprisingly, rumours soon swept Nigerian social media sites alleging that the Most Important VVIP [MIVVIP] also tested positive for COVID. Some said he was already on ventilator; others said he was spirited out of the country on a plane that took off late at night.

What is the gloating all about? COVID-19 has afflicted many VVIPS around the world, including Prince Charles; British Prime Minister Boris Johnson; British Health Secretary Matt Hancock; Canadian Prime Minister’s wife Sophie Trudeau; as well as Hollywood film mogul and convicted sexual offender Harvey Weinstein. It reminded me of a story, when the then BBC reporter Mannir Dan-Ali went to interview the Chairman of National Drug Law Enforcement Agency [NDLEA] Major General Musa Bamaiyi in the 1990s. He began by congratulating Bamaiyi for surviving a Cali drug cartel assassination attempt. The Army General from hilly and forested Zuru in Kebbi State tugged at his bushy moustache and gruffly said, “It is premature to congratulate the grasshopper when the bush is still on fire.”

There is no reason to gloat because Koro is an equal opportunity virus that strikes anyone within range, whether rich or poor, young or old, male or female, native or settler, national or foreigner, elite or mass, beautiful or ugly, powerful or powerless, resident or visitor. The guys who were gloating, did anyone assure them that Koro will never strike their own mouths, noses or eyes?

The only possible benefit that I see of VIP affliction with Koro is that it will help to concentrate the minds of the powerful to take stern action and, hopefully in future, to wake up to their responsibility of improving local health care. Koro has proved the utter failure of the system where every VIP rushed abroad at the slightest sign of illness. But before that, leaders should now strictly enforce the lockdown order and stop playing the ostrich for fear of some powerful clerics. As a result of one Northern state government’s ambiguous statement on the lockdown last week, thousands of people proceeded and held congregational Friday prayers. When an official was asked why, he said the state had not recorded any case of Koro and that as soon as it did, lockdown will be enforced. What happens to the old Hausa saying that when you see your neighbour’s beard on fire, you should quickly drench your own beard with water?

The state government that was waiting for Koro to arrive in the state before it took action, did it have the ambulances, testing centres, doctors, nurses, isolation wards, ventilators, medicines, face masks, sanitisers, gloves and protection gear to fight off the pandemic? Even the US does not have enough of these; I saw a statement where it asked doctors around the world to apply for its visa.

President Donald Trump reportedly ordered car makers Ford and GM to begin making ventilators. Which company is there in Northern Nigeria that can be ordered to produce ventilators? Is it Peugeot, Steyr, Jos Steel, Ashaka Cement or National Truck Manufacturing Company, many of whom have been assembling foreign-made parts for decades? Bauchi’s Steyr has not done even that for decades. When some state governments eventually woke up from their slumber, they overreacted, closed their borders and said no could come in or go out of the state. That might set a dangerous precedent. One day some Nigerian states could close their borders for reasons other than pandemic.

Gloating, playing the ostrich and overreacting all paled last week beside the spectacular conspiracy theory about COVID-19 that Jos-based Izala factional leader, Sheikh Sani Yahaya Jingir conjured. He denied the reality of Koro, saying it was a Jewish conspiracy to stop Muslims from praying in mosques. Insofar as thousands of observant Jews are no longer going to synagogues in New York City due to COVID-19, it looks like Jingir’s alleged Jewish conspirators, unusually of them, did not think this one through.

In New York, which has been hit harder than Wuhan, Koro does not seem to know a Jewish face from a Gentile one, a black face from a white one, a Yankee face from a Native American one, a Catholic face from a Protestant one, a Mason’s face from an Elk’s, or a Republican’s face from a Democrat’s. If indeed Jews invented Koro with a view to annihilate Muslims, why did they choose to release it in China, where Muslims are few and far between outside Xinjiang province?

I am not giving Jews an idea, and I do not have to since many Nigerian Muslims believe that Jews are preoccupied with scheming against Muslims and that the Israeli secret service, Mossad, is nearly invincible. The idea is this: the best way to annihilate Muslims would have been to release Koro at Mina, Saudi Arabia during the peak of the Hajj season. Pilgrims will then carry it back to all Muslim countries and regions.

The trouble with this strategy, as Mossad strategists will easily figure out, is that no one in the world is safe if you deliberately plant a virus among Muslim pilgrims. We know, for example, that Malcolm X went to hajj from New York City in 1964 and adopted the name Malik al-Shabbaz. Before then and since then, lots of American Muslim folks go to hajj every year from New York. If they bring back Koro, Jews are in real danger because the city has the world’s second highest concentration of Jews, after Tel Aviv-Haifa. There are twice as many Jews in New York City as there are in Jerusalem.

Even worse from Mossad’s point of view, thousands of New York Jews go to Israel every day, so in no time the virus that Mossad planted at the hajj will overwhelm Israel too. Unless if a brilliant Jewish genetic engineer can program Koro virus to discriminate between Jew and Gentile. I have yet another fear for Jewish conspirators. If they secretly invented COVID-19 and surreptitiously planted it in Wuhan, some of the world’s secret services such as CIA, MI-6, Russian SVR and China’s MSS could find that out. Donald Trump has been the most overtly pro-Israel US president ever. Koro is hurting the US economy and threatening his reelection chances, which is what he really cares about. If  he ever discovers that Mossad planted COVID-19, the impulsive Trump could relocate the American embassy from Jerusalem back to Tel Aviv and withdraw his “Middle East peace plan” with one early morning tweet.

So much for Jingir’s conspiracy theory. His followers in Jos who are gloating because they successfully defied the lockdown order and said Friday prayers in congregation, how are they sure that they really got away with it? Plateau State Government’s belated warning to Sheikh Sani Jingir to obey its orders is not the real threat. Koro has up to 27 days’ gestation period. It will be a month before we know exactly whether the men who obeyed the Sheikh and exchanged handshakes all around really got away with it.

While majority of Nigerians appear to accept the lockdown as necessary, many others are saying it is cruel because people are told to stay at home when they have no food to eat. Some people are saying that hunger [HUNVID-20] will kill us before Koro does. It reminds me of what the Swedish forestry expert Prof Tore Anborg once told Sokoto farmers who protested that planting tree shelterbelts in their farms would deny them 10% of their lands. Anborg said, “You either lose 10% to shelterbelts or you lose 100 percent to the desert.”