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VIPs and COVID-19 infection

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By Emeka Omeihe

Those privy to a recent letter by the Chief of Staff (COS) to President Buhari, Alhaji Abba Kyari directing legislators who just returned to the country to report to the nearest office of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) for screening, would be surprised at the news that he (Kyari) tested positive to the lethal virus a few days after.

In the letter to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Olufemi Gbajabiamila reference number SH/COS/TP/03 dated March 21, Kyari had justified the directive against the backdrop of reports to the office of the Minister of Health that federal lawmakers refused to submit themselves for the mandatory coronavirus screening upon arrival at the airports. He deprecated the attitude of those of them who refused screening on arrival as they posed a great threat to the health of others. He said it all.

Ironically, as the nation was still contending with the reality of our legislators’ non-compliance with screening regulations and other safety measures at our entry ports, the sad new filtered that the very man who moved to halt this ruinous attitude has tested positive to the lethal virus. The reality of the situation got further complicated with the disclosure that he also recently returned to the country after an official foreign trip to Germany.

Expectedly, this has raised questions as to whether the Chief of Staff was also guilty of the same malfeasance he accused some legislators of that prompted his letter to Gbajabiamila?  Did Kyari really submit himself for the compulsory screening at the airport on arrival from the foreign trip or is he also guilty of non-compliance just as the legislators he sought to rein in?

The flurry of official engagements he was involved in soon after his return did not indicate either strict compliance with the mandatory screening at the point of arrival or the requirement to self-isolate for a period of 14 days. The impression one gets is that he may have also ignored those health procedures given his office. And that has turned out a grave error. Had he adhered to those health regulations, his health conditions could have been detected and necessary precaution taken to avert further spread of the deadly disease. But this did not happen and we are left with the current embarrassing situation.

From available records, the COS travelled out of the country on Saturday March7, and returned on March 14. But he was in Kogi State on March 17, three days after his return to commiserate with governor, Yahaya Bello over the death of his mother. He also attended both the National Executive Council meeting as well as that of the Federal Executive Council a few days after his return.

It is very clear from these activities that he did not self-isolate for the 14- day mandatory period. He could not have done so having travelled to Kogi State three days after his arrival into the country. Not also since he worked in his office on his return. The fact that three members of his staff have also tested positive to the lethal virus gives further fillip to the fact that he went into full official activities soon after his return. It is not surprising that governors and ministers who attended some of these functions and had close contacts with him have since been isolating and testing themselves for the virus.

As unfortunate as the situation is, it would appear we are really contending with contradictions of sort. Events are opening our eyes to the stark realities of official disposition to the fight against the corona virus pandemic. And that speaks volumes on the kind of leadership we have in this country. Governor Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti State captured this contradiction very succinctly when he urged 35 of his colleagues to self-isolate and get tested, after he self-isolated and with Governor Bala Mohammed testing positive to the virus.

The same feelings of official tardiness in the control of the ravaging pandemic were evoked by the altercations between Bauchi State governor, Bala Mohammed and Mohammed Atiku Abubakar, son of former vice president, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar. Both tested positive to the virus.

But the Bauchi State governor alleged that he contacted the virus from Mohammed Atiku whom he met in an Aero Contractors’ flight from Lagos to Abuja. According to the governor’s media aides, their boss met Mohammed and shook hands with him while on board the aircraft. They see the handshake as the source of the virus the governor contacted.

Atiku’s son has repudiated the allegation claiming nothing of such happened. He said the seat where he and his wife sat in the aircraft was not very close to where the governor sat and therefore he could not have been the source of the virus that afflicted the governor. We are not in a position to offer definite opinion on the issues traded by the duo given their complexity.

But available facts seem to indicate that the altercation was as avoidable as it was superfluous. Why do we say so? Indicators on the ground vividly show that both travelled outside the shores of the country and arrived almost around the same period. The countries they visited were also those at the epicentre of the Coronavirus pandemic. It is thus, difficult to say with degree of precision the source of their infection or which of them infected the other.

The safest assumption is that they contacted the disease from the countries they visited. That is how far we can go on this. Why the Bauchi State governor did not factor his country of visit as the possible source of his ailment despite the contacts he would have been exposed to in the course of his travel is still curious.

Sadly, the altercation between the two has again elevated to the fore the vexatious question as to whether they complied with the safety regulations requiring all returnees to submit themselves for screening test and self-isolate for 14 days. From all indications, they observed those safety rules in their breach. It is little surprising that a very close friend of Governor Mohammed has since tested positive to the virus. Even as one sympathizes with him in his current predicament, it would appear cheap blackmail singling out Atiku’s son as the purveyor of the virus while concealing the fact of his foreign trip.

More fundamentally, the predicaments of Kyari and Mohammed have brought to the fore the lethargic attitude of our leaders to the COVID-19 pandemic – an attitude that is largely responsible for the current spread and possible escalation of the pandemic in the country. The same attitude accounted for the tardiness in rolling out preventive measures in the face of the spread and the challenges faced by countries where the pandemic was most prevalent. We refused to learn from their experiences.

We trudged on and behaved in a manner suggesting that we are immune to its ravaging lethality. Even with the arrival of the indent case in February and the reality that the virus is being imported by returnees, we neither found it expedient to shut down our porous borders nor restrict flights into our international airports. By the time the nation’s leadership acted, it had become rather late. Fears are now that if the staccato of measures rolled out by both the federal and state governments do not quickly achieve desired result, we run the risk of an exponential explosion in the virus spread.

We shudder at such prospects. The consequences would be too grave for a nation grappling with decrepit medical facilities, debilitating poverty and a burgeoning population. It is hoped that Thomas Malthus’ postulation on the inverse relationship between food production and population growth is not about to be set in motion by the coronavirus disease. Malthus had said that food production was growing in an arithmetic progression while population was growing in a geometric progression.

He then postulated that unless nations take deliberate steps to stem the rate of population growth through a variety of measures, wars, pestilence or disease will put a natural stop to population explosion. We hope the coronavirus disease is not about to activate that process through the actions and inactions of our leaders.

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