BY UGOCHUKWU EJINKEONYE
Even though by 2015, the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) had
performed below the high expectations of many Nigerians and had rightly
earned their rejection, I highly dreaded the disastrous possibility of
Nigerians falling for the massive, overwhelming but vacuous propaganda
of the All Progressives Congress (APC), backed by a formidable coalition
of tragically naïve activists, intellectuals and opinion leaders, to
seriously consider that the APC could by the widest stretch of the
imagination, qualify as even a manageable alternative.
There was massive corruption in the PDP, but it was just impossible for
me to buy the tasteless myth that the APC which was mostly made up of
the very characters that gave the PDP its unwholesome image could, no
matter the relentless efforts of their tireless spin doctors, qualify to
be classed as something that has the slightest resemblance with a party
of saints and an assemblage change agents, and that once a person moved
from the PDP to the APC, the person would receive instant beatification
from a band of holy angels waiting to perform that sacred assignment.
This should make no sense even to a two-year old!
Also, despite how strongly they tried with their humongous propaganda,
the APC’s leading lights failed miserably to inspire any confidence in
their capacity to effectively manage a modest government department or
mere small public corporation, let alone a country as large and complex
as Nigeria. Looking at the monstrous antecedents of several of them,
their brazen insistence that they were on a mission to cleanse Nigeria
of corruption and change her for the better sounded so terribly
ridiculous, even exasperating. Their hypocrisy and chicanery stank to
high heavens.
The evidences were too glaring for everyone to easily see. That was why
I kept wondering how my otherwise brilliant and perceptive friends who
had remonstrated with me for holding a different view about the
self-anointed “deliverers” from Mars could not see that they were
being led by the nose to eagerly embrace a well-packaged and overly
scented fraud. The APC completed its distasteful image by the egregious
confidence it exuded about its ability to continue mesmerizing Nigerians
with outrageous claims and the tantalizing promises it recklessly
dropped which even Kindergarten kids could see were clearly
unrealizable. Although, many chose to blindly flow with the herd, it
took only a few months of the APC being in power for scales to fall off
many eyes and my friends to be astounded by the insufferable deception,
howling inadequacy and irredeemable incompetence they had willingly
agreed to temporarily live in denial of, which they probably thought
would go with the aggressive campaigns, but which had now become the
distinctive feature of the “Change” regime. Sadly, it was now too
late. The eagle already had the chick securely in its claws. By the time
2019 arrived, the party was already too powerful to be voted out despite
the widespread disgustful feelings of many Nigerians towards it.
Sadly, nothing seems to have changed even after five years of being in
office. The same propaganda has remained about the only thing the APC
regime has continued to deploy to consolidate its hold on power. It is
often safe to make all sorts of claims about your accomplishments when
you know that people are too sick and tired and too busy trying to exist
in an impossible economy to bother about their falsity, until a real
challenge that threatens something as sacred as lives emerges. Then even
the best of propaganda will readily betray its limits. That is what
Coronavirus has achieved in Nigeria.
When news of the approaching Covid-19 was everywhere, the federal
government confidently and repeatedly told Nigerians that it had put in
place formidable measures to halt its spread if it eventually strays
into the country. I doubt if Nigerians took the assurances serious but,
then, what would they have done than sit in their various corners
nursing their benumbing doubts and fears quietly. Even when calls began
to be made by well-meaning Nigerians on the presidency to halt
international flights to Nigeria and close all entry points into the
country, they all fell on deaf ears. By the time President Buhari was
able to come around to agree to close the airports, seaports and land
borders, the number of infected persons had already exploded, and the
acclaimed efforts by the Lagos State Governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, to
contain the spread had been badly sabotaged by the sad delay.
Gov Sanwo-Olu lamented this tragic failure in his interview with the CNN
a few days ago. He stressed that if the borders had been closed early
enough, and people who had recently come into the country were isolated
and their contacts carefully traced and equally isolated, the pandemic
would have been easily contained. What was mostly done at that time was
to simply advise returning Nigerians and visiting foreigners to
self-isolate which many of them simply ignored. Some were given papers
to state their recent travel history and several of them filled the
forms with fictitious details. Which serious country does that? Should
not the people have been compulsorily isolated if there were enough
isolation centres ready to receive them? That’s the problem.
The truth was that the presidency had enough time to prepare for
Covid-19, but it was merely savouring its familiar game of making empty
claims and probably hoping that the virus would never enter the country
to explode their imaginary claims.
Despite being widely regarded as the richest country in Africa, the
Nigerian government seems to derive immense pleasure from flaunting the
country as poor, helpless and beggarly. If her resources are not
continuously mismanaged and looted by her leaders, shouldn’t several
African countries by now be looking up to Nigeria for help, especially,
in desperate and trying times such as the one the world is in now? But
the sad situation is that even the most leanly-endowed African countries
have since left Nigeria very far behind in the area of provision of
basic amenities for their people. For instance, whereas other African
country have since achieved reasonable stability in power supply,
Nigeria is still very far behind, struggling with debilitating darkness
and has remained the proud, pathetic dumping ground for mostly
substandard power generating sets from China. The same goes for
provision of potable water, another sector in which government has
failed so woefully. If the Nigerian government is allowed, it would beg
for alms from places like Togo or Swaziland!
And so, always shamelessly wearing its beggar mentality, when the
American billionaire, Elon Musk, announced on twitter that his
organization had some ventilators to give out in support of the
treatment of Covid-19 patients, Nigeria was the only country in Africa,
to the best of my knowledge, which through the twitter handle of the
Federal Ministry of Finance publicly begged the US billionaire to donate
the ventilators to her! It was such a disastrous and self-diminishing
move that instantly attracted angry reactions from embarrassed Nigerians
across the world, forcing her to quickly withdraw the request. Yet, as
the pandemic gained strength in the country, and Nigeria still proudly
wore the same badge of shame as that “very poor country” that could
not afford ventilators, enough testing kits and centres and Personal
Protective Equipment (PPE) for her toiling and sacrificial health
workers (thereby, exposing them to serious dangers of being infected),
the dishonourable characters that converge at the House of
Representatives as lawmakers were before the world, busy, celebratorily
sharing very expensive, imported luxury cars to themselves, and the
whopping sum of N37 billion had already been put aside to renovate the
National Assembly. That is the face of the “Change” on whose back
they rode to power, although, they rarely mention that badly abused word
these days.
Prodded by Nigerians to do something more meaningful to lead the
anti-Covid-19 war from the front like his colleagues across the world,
President Muhammadu Buhari emerged from his hideout, locked down Lagos
and Ogun states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) and vanished
again. Nigerians who depended on their daily earnings to feed their
families were the worst hit by the hunger that immediately followed.
Although palliatives were promised to cushion the harsh effects of the
lockdown, what most Nigerians only heard were the outrageous figures
which government claimed had already been spent as disbursements to
“poor and vulnerable” citizens. They were not even privileged to
perceive even the smell of the disbursements!
It became clear then that the government would badly mismanage the
no-movement restrictions and stay-at-home order. And Nigerians wasted no
time in voicing their anger at being asked to stay at home and be killed
by hunger. Unable to respond to this all important need to feed its
people rendered incapable of earning a living by the lockdown, a problem
that even countries Nigeria is supposed to be richer than had managed so
amazingly, the Buhari regime has now decided to ease the restrictions at
a time the number of infected persons was rising alarmingly!
Why is this government too eager to show that it is too impoverished to
give palliatives to needy Nigerians? Only a few days ago, the Central
Bank of Nigeria (CBN) announced that the private sector relief fund it
is organizing to raise money to fight Covid-19 has now hit N27.160
billion. Recently, the European Union (EU) donated EUR 50 million (N21
billion) to help Nigeria fight Covid-19. There have been reports of
sundry monetary and material assistances that have come in from within
and outside country, so, why is Nigeria about to further compound the
Covid-19 pandemic by its strange claim that there are no funds to
sustain the lockdown?
Recent reports suggest that very soon, Nigeria might consider the option
of home treatment for positive cases because of lack of bed spaces to
keep them. It is dreadful to imagine such a possibility and how far it
can go to complicate the pandemic. Please, can somebody who has the ears
of President Muhammadu Buhari walk across to Aso Villa and ask him to
bring in knowledgeable, altruistic, honest and competent people to help
him manage Nigeria at this very critical period before the country is
plunged into a boundless and unmanageable health disaster? It should
never be imagined that anything slightly similar to the experience of
Italy or Spain, UK or the United States with Covid-19 (countries with
world-standard healthcare systems) be repeated here. Indeed, I have
never seen where such level of unseriousness is being brazenly applied
to the running of a country, more so, at a time of a dreaded health
emergency and in a large, complex country of more than 200 million like
Nigeria, with one of the worst health facilities in the world!
EBOLA WAS MORE VIRULENT WHEN IT HIT NIGERIA IN 2014, BUT THE
“CLUELESS” GOODLUCK JONATHAN REGIME WAS ABLE TO SWIFTLY CONTAIN IT
TO THE ADMIRATION OF THE WHOLE WORLD. IN FACT, AN AMERICAN MAGAZINE_,__
FOREIGN POLICY_, SCREAMED IN A HEADLINE, _“IN FIGHT TO STOP EBOLA,
NIGERIA GOT RIGHT EVERYTHING AMERICA WRONG [1].”_
Nigerians are, therefore, right to demand the full accounts of how the
suspicious disbursements of billions of naira purportedly made by the
federal government were undertaken. With the pandemic already badly
mismanaged, the future is indeed heavily pregnant. Only God will save
Nigeria.
_*UGOCUKWU EJINKEONYE IS A COLUMNIST AND MEMBER, EDITORIAL BOARD,
__Daily Independent NEWSPAPERS. (SCRUPLES2006@YAHOO.COM; @UGOWRITE.) _
Links:
——
[1]
https://foreignpolicy.com/2014