Hardball
WITH the way looters body-crushed and pressed on one another in the scramble for Covid-19 palliatives when government as well as private warehouses were raided across this country, you would think the pandemic itself is a myth. Not a scintilla of the prescribed protocols, namely the use of facemasks and social distancing among others, featured on the radar of the stampeding looters, as if the whole issue of Covid-19 never arose to begin with. That the looters were stampeding for ‘palliatives’ intended to mitigate the effects of a health challenge they showed scant acceptance of its reality was the height of irony.
Warehouses have been looted in Lagos, Osun, Ekiti, Akwa Ibom, Cross River and Ogun states as well as the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) – actually, perhaps in all the states of this federation – with tons of raw edibles and other items stolen by the looters who were reported saying they were appropriating what belonged to them ab initio. In a number of places, the materials seized by looters in opportunistic desperation were not fit for human consumption, such as in Ekiti where government raised the alarm that poisonous items including single super phosphate and NPK fertilisers mistaken for cassava grain (‘garri’), and pre-fermented corns preserved with chemicals for planting had been spirited away.
Although government had earlier declared that the Covid-19 curve is being flattened in Nigeria, the Director-General of Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), Dr. Chike Ihekweazu, early this week warned that the low case count in recent times could soon take a twist for the worse. Speaking on Monday at a media briefing by the Presidential Task Force on Covid-19 in Abuja, he said laboratories in Lagos, as in other places, had not been operating optimally lately amidst the #EndSars crisis. “As we move into the next two weeks, it will not take a rocket scientist to know that we have to watch the numbers very carefully. The reasons are obvious: we have gathered in our masses for whatever reason and for now, we have to keep our eyes open for the potential consequences. Those consequences are not inevitable; we can still do our part to prevent them,” he added.
It requires no arcane insight to understand what Ihekweazu means to be that the Covid-19 pandemic, which seem on the verge of being defeated by Nigeria, could rebound courtesy of the indiscretion of some Nigerians such as looters involved in the reckless stampede for palliatives. As at last Wednesday, the NCDC reported 147 new infections, taking the total count to 62, 371 confirmed cases. When people conduct themselves in aggressive disregard of safety protocols the way looters have been doing, they risk incurring a second wave of the pandemic on this country. We surely don’t want that.
