Pantami’s Hobbesian order

Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami is Nigeria’s minister of communications and digital economy. Recently he caused his own variant of epidemic within a pandemic. At the twilight of last year, Pantami gave a rather curious directive to phone subscribers to link their National Identification Number, NIN, to their SIM cards or risk being blocked by service providers.

Ordinarily, this is the best thing to do. There should be a link between a particular NIN and phone numbers of its owner. For national security, it’s imperative to achieve SIM-NIN symmetry. But these are not normal times. The times have changed. A global pandemic with the name COVID-19 has reconfigured life and ways of life. Governments, corporates and individuals are daily devising means to cope and contain the pandemic. Global public health is at grave risk. Millions have died. The World Health Organisation, WHO, is overwhelmed. The world health management body is at sixes and sevens. To make matters worse, the coronavirus infection is mutating into variants that have little or no respect for drugs and vaccines.

At such a time, what is needed is a deepening and enforcement of safety protocols like wearing of face masks, observing social distance, avoiding crowds and crowding, washing of hands and using sanitisers as disinfectant. Even the Federal Government, wanting to curtail spread, has had to bar certain categories of workers from reporting at offices. Ditto for the private sector and state governments. Working from home has become an acceptable and preferable modus.

The Presidential Task Force, PTF, on COVID-19 led by Mr. Boss Mustapha, the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, has been inventing and re-inventing strategies to contain the pandemic. The PTF has gone through much stress, exposing its members to great risks. Some medical workers and others on the frontline, including journalists, have contracted the virus. Some, like many other Nigerians, could not survive it. They died in throbbing pangs of pain. Those who graciously survived the trauma have torrid tales to tell. You don’t wish it upon your worst enemies, they say.

It’s understandable. Nobody goes to hell and back and not have horrible tales to recount. Surviving COVID-19 is akin to going to hell without dying. That’s how terrible the disease is. Each time I have conversation with a friend who is a medical worker in the United Kingdom and an active participant in the National Health Service (NHS) rescue team, he always had blood-cuddling stories. It’s like being at the epicentre of war; a war fought without bayonets and bazookas. Yet, you see corpses lying in helpless mortuary. You see men crying for help yet you cannot help them. Even the deployment of science and technology – drugs and ventilators – could not do much. You look at a human being shaking in spasms of pain, gasping for air, muttering incomprehensibly, and there’s little you could do. You are even afraid for your own life. That’s the nature of COVID-19. It is a picture of death painted in petals of pain. It’s a picture of hell created among the living. He tells me, with COVID-19, death is not instant. It’s a painful, harrowing process. Especially when the lungs are imperilled and breathing becomes a horrifying experience. You watch the patient’s body quake, jerk intermittently and asphyxiate spasmodically. Painful death!

That’s the nature of the virus we’re dealing with. Nigeria has reported a mutant of the virus. Experts say it’s not the same with the British mutants. Boss Mustapha himself has been a victim. COVID-19 spares nobody, respects no one and is blind to status, fame and influence. It kills both the rich and poor; the influential and the inconsequential. It’s in the midst of this pandemic, especially, a widely reported second wave, that Pantami activated a dormant order, rendered comatose by the pandemic with its attendant shutdowns and lockdowns and all. It’s at the very least a Hobbesian order, rich in primitivism and suffused in insensitivity. Pantami was and still is insensitive to the tears of the dead, the dying and their grieving families. His order has caused a new wave of infection, predictably. Has he ever visited, unannounced, a NIN registration centre? Bedlam. Total mayhem. Crowd control is poor. COVID-19 protocols are observed in the breach. Social distancing dies naturally. Bodies hug bodies. Sweaty faces confront sweaty faces. Face masks are worn on the chin. In some cases, not won at all. People are yelling into people’s faces. The NIN registration as decreed by Pantami has become a fertile ground for the festering of the virus. Coronavirus surely would be happy with Minister Pantami.

When Nigerians started responding to the order in December, some of us predicted a spike would begin to manifest in a matter of weeks. It turned out, we’re right. In January 2021, the Pantami order of mid-December 2020 has just begun to show why it’s what it is – a Hobbesian and counter-productive order. Just check the statistics from the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, NCDC. Nigeria has hit an all-time high daily threshold in COVID-19 infection, grossing over 1000 infections daily for many days; including harvesting, unfortunately, 11 deaths per day within the same period. And if nobody stops Pantami and his retrogressive order, more Nigerians will be caught in the COVID-19 infection net. And many more will die. The Pantami order has caused a national public health panic. Somebody should play the hero and save Nigerians by halting this sudden drift to the precipice of insensitivity. We need to stay alive to worry about NIN and national identity card. The nation has seen enough protocol abuse in the markets, a minister who ought to know, should not add to this.

At such a time, you want to ask: who is in charge of this government? And if President Muhammadu Buhari is not aware of the danger posed to public health by this ridiculous order, why can’t his Chief of Staff bring it to his notice? If the Chief of Staff is unaware of this, then the PTF leadership whose hitherto brilliant management of the pandemic has grossly been undermined and rubbished  this order should brace up and appeal to Mr. President to invalidate the order. The whole world is preaching social distancing, one man is ordering Nigerians to bunch together in the midst of a pandemic that even the vaccines have remained a subject of global contention. The Pantami order is good but the timing is wrong. A right directive coming at a wrong time. It’s counterproductive and completely at variance with the message from the PTF. It simply rubbishes the efforts of the PTF, CACOVID, state governments, medical workers who put their lives at risk and all those associated with containment of the pandemic. Pantami should have factored the corruption and inefficiency at NIMC including the socio-cultural behaviour of Nigerians before reactivating the order. Not even NIMC’s knee-jerk approach of asking enrolees to download the ‘Form’, fill it and bring to the registration centres, is working.

Pantami should rescind his order. Or the President should do so in the public interest for the sake of public safety. The constitution demands that government should protect the lives and property of the people. This is one such instance to so act. Nigerians deserve better than this.