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My team and I run an every weekday 4pm to 6pm magazine on radio and television, for our state government. It’s called Akwa Ibom Calling. The edition of last Wednesday, on Comfort 95.1 FM, Uyo, was quite special. Smart thinking turned a disappointment instantly into a didactic blessing.
We had planned a Covid-19 session in the dialect. But, with the edition well underway, the two medical resource persons who had agreed to come sent word they were neither on their way nor would be. Left with no other choice, I asked the listener to call in and share own perspective on Coronavirus. What an eye-opener it was!
I laughed my heart out. Really, I should have been crying, no, I should have been weeping. Well, perhaps the laughter-induced stream of tears that coursed down my cheeks showed I was crying inside. Perhaps.
You know, Nigerians are a wonderful people. How can a people joke with even life-threatening emergencies? How can a people be this supercynical, this fabulously suspicious, this hyper-unbelieving of own government, a government elected of, by and for them? Which way out?
I should field that battery, presently. Meanwhile, here’s what most of the callers said. One talked about having had ‘a very, very, very high fever’ long before the bad news from Wuhan, China, but vowed that no power on earth could force him anywhere near a hospital now knowing they would declare him a Coronavirus case. That was so Nigerian; how we bask in denial!
I laughed and fell down from the studio seat. That happened with about 10 other callers. Please, hear it for the man who called from outside the state: his people had been eating snake and other varieties of bushmeat for centuries without any problem whatsoever. That made sense to me, but his argument became comic the moment he concluded that Covid-19 was only found in Chinese snakes, insisting there was no way snakes would ‘fly’ from China to his part of Nigeria!
All attempts to enlighten the man that the zoonotic disease was now spread by man only incensed him further. He retorted that if it’s now from man to man, why ask people not to eat snake and sundry bushmeat? I fainted. No pun intended, but even as I write I can’t fathom our Nigerianness.
The other memorable caller recalled how embarrassed he was the day people scampered off when he cough-sneezed. His narration was so funny: imagine a Covid-19 suspect running after people fleeing from him, desperate to reassure them he’s clean. This narrator had such incredible sense of humour. But, why do Nigerians play with everything?
There was yet another caller who ought to be a stand-up comedian. He opened by querying why I was laughing so hard. As I measured how to respond, he himself burst into such explosive laughter that everyone in the studio, who like him had been suppressing it, joined in. Me too.
It took minutes for all of us in the laugh orgy to ‘come to.’ The caller then went on to say that it was no laughing matter; that I should as a matter of urgent national importance inform the powers-that-be that the same way our people died in their numbers bathing with or drinking salted water purportedly to ward off Ebola, which hadn’t even arrived the country, so many citizens were currently harming their health and that of family members with Stone Age so-called anti-Coronavirus self-medication. He mentioned the wanton abuse of chloroquine and alcohol going on, in the name of Coronavirus prevention. Specifically, he said (I hope it is not true) that adults and youngsters have taken to alcohol overdose just as parents distribute chloroquine among their children and themselves.
Surely, that cannot be true. Surely, our illiteracy level cannot be this Neanderthally low. Surely, we cannot be this criminally gullible. Surely, we cannot continue ‘to carry last’ as we say in Nigeria.
However, Nigerians are not alone in this shameful new normal. The entire world (yes, plus including the West) has been imprisoned by a stupefying potpourri of brilliant ignorance and illiterate civilisation. Online and offline, one reads Covid-19 stuff that should never have been conceived by a human mind. The deliberate bogus preventive and curative outright lies, wicked misinformation and annoying conspiracy theories speak to an animalised humanity.
How can anyone think, let alone say, that Covid-19 doesn’t exist? So, what’s responsible for the alarming fatalities that began in Wuhan, then other parts of China and now all over the globe (even in the United States and Europe)? Unfortunately, back home here, Nigerians have not only caught the conspiracy bug but I read and hear how some of us also say that the Italian said to have ‘imported’ the disease into Nigeria does not exist. Father Lord!
If Abuja needed to fabricate something for whatever reason, which would have had more believability: faking with an Italian or a Chinese? Forget the case of the Nigerian footballer abroad, nobody should reveal the identity of any patient. Furthermore, governments may not always meet popular expectations but people must learn restraint and support. We must not antagonise those we elected to run our system and we must stop making supporting government seem as if we were doing them a favour.
Today, with the deadly viral scourge ravaging Italy to the extent of government contemplating complete shutdown, nobody should doubt the existence of this public health crisis, which has had a debilitating effect on life, economy, sport, education, governance, transportation, name it. Rather, as Rome and other national governments as well as international health organisations who should know have maintained, everybody should ensure habit change, personal hygiene, keep away from crowded places and handshake, wash hands with soap and running water, use hand santiser every time after ‘hand impacts,’ etc. On their part, governments the world over must work to win back people’s confidence and in the process bury public cynicism, which I consider a major governmental drawback.
God bless Nigeria!
