2020: What a year!

I have read the joke on social media wherein many people say they would not add 2020 to their year. They argue that the year ought to be discounted from their age because extraneous   circumstances did not let them put the year to any use. The year actually tasted like ashes in the mouth. First was the global lockdown which kept the world behind doors, courtesy of a virus that has refused to go away. The Corona Virus, which is now on the rebound, had stopped all activities in the wake of its entry, and impoverished the people in an economy that was already comatose. The impact became such as has shown no light at the end of the tunnel. Teachers in private schools had nothing to take home given, that students were not in school, and thus paid no fees. The proprietors, in turn, paid no salaries. Many business outfits were shut down. Nothing seemed to be working. The firms that managed to be in business found little patronage because cash flow was so low that even basic needs were hardly met. The inevitable tendency for the rich to come to the aid of the under privileged became a bit of saving grace. But it took the ENDSARS riots, with its attendant horror and destruction, for the people to know that the palliatives resided in warehouses in place of their stomachs where they were meant to assuage hunger that was ravaging   them. The ENDSARS protest, in itself, fall into the happenings that stood the year out. It looked as though the Corona Virus lockdown gave the organisers the opportunity to fix it. The rest is history. The protests brought an end to the notorious   Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) of the Nigerian police, and caused a change to the brute force with which the police and other armed forces handle Nigerians especially young people.

The protests sent SARS to the dust bin of history but also exposed the angst of the masses against the elite. Politicians became the target of rioters who attacked some of their homes, and looted them. Government property became targets. Police stations and even policemen met their end with the protests. Scores of police stations were torched in the process just as some individuals lost property. One of the saddest victims, in my estimation, was Senator Ndoma Egba, whose house in Calabar was looted, and as though that was not enough his wife also lost her life in a car crash, though unrelated to the protests. I know that his cousin, Takon Ndoma Takon (TNT), a close friend of mine, who was his Personal Assistant, at some point, had also passed away shortly after the lockdown. The Senator had quit a lot to chew in the realm of shocks. Some other politicians had their houses looted. A Senator in Oyo State had a short end of the stick when the second and looting phase of the ENDSARS protest found a base in his house.  Motor bikes and other items disappeared with the looters who visited his house. The state government moved to arrest and prosecute the looters. I do not know how effective that move proved to be. It may have let to the recovery of the items, but the looting further gave politicians an inkling of how the people ‘love’ them.

Students in public universities had another long strike by their teachers, an occurrence that has become a regular calendar in Nigeria’s public universities. Many of them may have lost a full academic year given that the strike ate into their calendar such that it has become impossible to recover what was lost in time. The situation was compounded by the Corona virus. Private Universities managed to augment their lost time with online lectures and examinations. They managed to see their students through graduation. Many of the graduates are stuck at the point of being called for National Youth Service. Everyone have had their time short changed by a year which had been odd in many ways. The Nigerian economy was not spared by the odd happenings given that it slid into recession, the second in three years. Those who manage the economy say it was nothing unusual because other economies succumbed to the lockdown consequent upon lockdowns. They have also predicted that the economy would exit recession by the first quarter of 2021. Little wonder President Buhari had made it point blank, in the rebound of the Corona Virus, that Nigeria could not afford another lockdown. The economy could collapse under the yoke of another lockdown. The people have to find other ways of keeping sake, rather than another lockdown. To contemplate another lockdown is to embark on a journey of no return. The year has seen enough misfortune than to impose another lockdown on an economy already in recession. The harsh economy has also diminished our communal life, such that people hardly have enough to meet their basic needs and thus tend to look away from issues that require communal help.

People also exited this clime, people just passed away, not even on account of the Corona Virus. Here at the Sun, one of the most cerebral columnists, Jimanze Ego-Alowess, bowed to death just as the year was running to the end. Scores of people also joined their ancestors in unexplainable   circumstances.  My mother also joined her ancestors on October 3rd without reporting ill or any such thing. She went to ease herself in the  toilet and slumped there, and passed away on the way to the hospital. It all happened within an hour. What a Year!  It was during her burial on December 4th that it dawned on me that she had truly passed to the great beyond.  It was one hell of a year, but we must all thank God for life. Tomorrow will be better than today.