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.
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| *Buhari |
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.”
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.)
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