Dr Ugoji Egbujo When SERS and MERS came, they didn’t get us. So when I heard of coronavirus in Wuhan in January, I simply called it OPP –...
Dr Ugoji Egbujo
When SERS and MERS came, they didn’t get us. So when I heard of coronavirus in Wuhan in January, I simply called it OPP – other peoples property. Yes, property!
But Coronavirus is here and if our recent daily jumps and the news from Kano are anything to go by, then the virus came with an entourage. We must, therefore, look back and thank Ebola for prepping us. Perhaps had Ebola not come around in 2014, we would have received Coronavirus without a single lab, with our eyes closed, without respect.
It was after Ebola we got an NCDC. Perhaps after Coronavirus, we might become again a West African centre for medical tourism. Because, I see billions flowing freely into medicare in Nigeria. And If you believe, simply say, Amen! I know our big men, you only need to scare them to get them to act. And once frightened, they overdo everything. Big hospitals to serve West Africa are coming.
Other things are coming too. And they will come like they have been stampeded.
The implementation of Oransaye report has been approved by the president. We must praise President Buhari.
President Jonathan commissioned the Oransaye committee in 2012. When the committee submitted a report to him he set up another committee to review the report of the other committee. And when that committee presented what was to be the white paper in early 2014 he put it in a file and left it there. Anyway who would blame him? We had money then. Oil had gone below 100 dollars a barrel but people were still buying it. So he could take his time. Perhaps he thought he would win in 2015, and do it later.
The Oransaye committee recommended the scrapping of NECO. It recommends the scrapping of FRSC. It recommended the merger of EFCC, ICC and CCB. It recommended the upgrading of CCT to a full anti-corruption court. It recommended the scrapping of HAJJ and Christian Pilgrims boards. It recommended the immediate cessation of wasteful sponsorship of pilgrimages.
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The Jonathan government committee rejected all these lofty recommendations.
We will wait to see what Buhari has approved. But we can be hopeful. With the strangulating hold Coronavirus on the nations jugular arteries Buhari will act more comprehensively and will now act in a hurry. Buhari no longer has oil revenues. The NNPC has abolished petrol subsidy and has promised to build six regional hospitals.
Coronavirus is making even things that would have happened, happen feverishly.
Opponents used to say Buhari was slow. But when he addressed the nation and allowed Lagos and Abuja to begin gradual re-opening from May 4, many critics said he was too fast. He wasn’t. We all know it is safer to hide in a bunker till December. I would have recommended that if we were UAE with a sovereign wealth fund of about 1.3 trillion dollars for their one million people. We are 200 million with nothing in our savings. Our only means for foreign exchange is in a coma. We have to restart cautiously.
Our figures appear to be jumping but I think it’s an illusion of a steep rise. We have been locked down for over a month. We tested only about 5000 in 5 weeks. There was no way we could have got a proper picture in that tiny sample size. If we continue testing 0.001 percent of our population per week, we will continue to see apparently rising figures for some months to come. Our level of testing cannot give us a picture we can rely on.
But there are two ways to assess the actual situation.
The first is by testing, otherwise knowing the approximate number of infected people. The second is knowing how many people are dying from the disease.
We didn’t and don’t have the resources to know the first. The second can’t hide once it’s huge. The mortuary spaces in Lagos, for instance, are limited, perhaps about 1000. If we had the sort of thing that happened in Lombardy Italy happening in Lagos Nigeria, we would have seen it. So we can say that since we have been locked down in Lagos and people aren’t conducting funerals as before, after 10 weeks of the arrival of the Italian, Lagos has not seen hell.
That is a safe assumption because in other places- Spain, Italy, Wuhan, England, New York, 10 weeks was more than enough time for the picture to become nightmarish. We don’t have such a picture. So the conclusions are that we have slowed the spread or we aren’t as vulnerable as the other mentioned. Either way, we are not in in the valley of the shadow of death.
So let us reopen cautiously. Any action we take either way carries a risk and has a cost. Hiding the population in a bunker would lead to thousands dying every week because of hunger. We will not throw away the gains we might have made in slowing the actual spread of the disease. We will reopen cautiously and watch out for flare-ups.
I have been wondering. Is there anything Coronavirus can do to stampede the provision of centric power to the people of Nigeria?
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