Matters ‘Coronally’ miscellaneous

We are all living dangerously in a deadly season of Coronavirus. With international and national borders closed, schools shut, businesses shattered, peoples confined and social distancing, wearing of face masks and hand gloves a way of life COVID-19 has somewhat effortlessly beaten humanity to a point of submission — even if temporarily. Suddenly our traditional way of life has received a pandemic hit to the extent that the principles of human relationship has taken a redeemable blow.

We no longer shake hands in deference to socio-cultural affinity, we no longer go out at our convenience (sometimes at wee hours of the night) to have fun; we no longer dance, sing, or celebrate or even bury the dead; we no longer travel or visit friends and relations but all confined at home waiting for better days.

The year 2020 would definitely go down in history for centuries and generations to come less for the scientific and technological exploits of the human race and more for its particularly mortal pandemic challenge, a terrible Coronavirus challenge yet to be surmounted medically globally.

President Muhammadu Buhari addressed Nigerians, yet again, last Monday. This time his performance was uncharacteristically upbeat, better than the previous national address fraught with unpresidential swing and swagger. Two major decisions could be retained of the broadcast. One, he decided that the residents of the FCT, Abuja, Lagos and Ogun states would have to endure two more weeks of confinement. Two, the President added a million more indigent Nigerians to the social register of the country. That meant that a million more poor folks would be receiving the conditional cash transfer of the National Social Investment Programme.

More social palliatives are needed in these trying times. There is no way crimes and criminality would not rise in a city like Lagos when you force artisans eking out a living by hitting the streets daily in search of opportunities to stay back at home day and night in order not to be ‘killed’ by a disease they never understood fully. They may easily understand HIV/AIDS, Ebola, polio, malaria, fever but this one, ‘Coro’, no!

A recent report by the National Human Rights Commission had indicated that security officers in Nigeria enforcing the stay-at-home restrictions had killed 18 Nigerians in recent times! That means that the security forces had extrajudicially killed more Nigerians than the novel pandemic (having itself killed just a dozen people) within the period of the lockdown.

By Ozodinukwe Okenwa…

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