It is no longer time for humour in Nigeria. Gone is that hour when a blogger turns Coronavirus into a visual laugh. Not like the fellow who placed the word virus beside the car named Corona. What a blighted journey ahead.

It is also no day to inflate the black pride or continental hubris by dismissing it as a white man’s disease. A Nigerian footballer in Italy deflated that swagger.

Even the irony of an Italian patient in Nigeria and a Nigerian patient in Italy cannot satisfy the humorist. Once, comedian Trevor Noah bolstered his home continent in his laugh lines when Africa was the only place wi thout COVID 19. He said if it came here, Ebola’s welcome party would suffocate it with a handshake at the border. Not anymore.

Not now that no Nigerian wants a face mask or sanitizer out of their side. Those who believe in the end times can see it in a disease that confounds the best of scientists. Nations with nuclear arsenals bow to this army of germs. China started it and, with all its power surge of an economy, it has to pray to survive its battalions of infections with their body bags. The United States cannot show power over China here as even Donald Trump stumbles in his speeches about what to do and what might happen. Country after country is aghast, and we can recall Christ’s warning of “distress of nations and perplexity.”

There is also human perplexity. Your hand should avoid your mouth. Remember the Yoruba song that mocks the juju man? “Babalawo mo wa bebe/ oni ma ma t’owo b’enu…” “Juju man, I am here to beg/ He says I should not place my hands in my mouth…”

Some pastors are wincing for fear of being exposed as failed miracle workers. A certain pastor went viral for boasting to take the miracle to the Chinese lair. But that was before the rude Italian, and an outcry upbraided him to begin charity at home. Beijing will log in too much time and space.

Some still manage some revanchist joke. A fellow told me if it were possible, let us package the virus into bombs and lob them at Sambisa and the forests of the thousand herdsmen in the country.

Nor is it now humour among some Arabs who no longer shake hands but legs as greetings. A video now goes viral as the friends greet with both hands in their pockets, while their feet, ensconced in shoes, tap each other. They toss their legs in the air for goodbye, as though about to kick a ball. Remember the popular song, Gbe body e? it means “lift your body.” So Arabs are also adding a new refrain: Gbe ese e! It means, raise your legs.

But first we must admit that the federal authorities failed us by allowing the infected Italian into the country without being detected at the Nigerian gate. Senator Borrofice lamented the lack of mandatory checks at the port of entry. It is a case in which act one portends a tragedy. The senator told me the South African medical corps quarantined him among others who wanted to board a flight back to Nigeria, and tested all of them before allowing them out of their country. But on reaching here, there was no screening. They merely filled forms. Somebody reported forgetting to turn in their form. In this matter, our federal government is many steps behind the world. We need to wake up.

Just as in the case of Ebola a few years back under Governor Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN, Lagos is taking charge again under the BOS of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu. The Italian was promptly quarantined, and we are assured that bed spaces are already secured for any outbreak. We don’t have an outbreak yet, neither do we want it. But we have to be prepared. Everyone in appropriate position has spoken with authority in Lagos. Apart from the Governor, the deputy governor, Obafemi Hamzat, also articulated the state’s preparedness. So has the health commissioner, Prof. Akin Abayomi and information commissioner Gbenga Omotoso.

If the Federal Ministry of Health cannot show the urgency it requires, Lagos State Government has rallied for Lagosians. Lagos is Nigeria’s main gate, especially for airways and water access. The land border will remain closed, so the debate as to whether we should open the borders will be cradled in ice for now.

This is one of the few areas where a crisis does not inspire geographic or religious loyalty. No one is asking where it came from, or whether it can speak the same language as those in power or not. Of course, no one wants it in their church or mosque. I hope it does not veer there.

Just as in the case of Ebola a few years back under Governor Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN, Lagos is taking charge again under the BOS of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu

God forbid that it gets to a point where we have to appoint persons to superintend it and we bicker over whether he or she should be a Muslim or Christian, or an Amadioha or Sango faithful. Or the PDP will say the APC is incompetent, which ironically is what we see at the airport with no screening. The virus is its own tribe and discriminates against others except when it devours.

It makes no sense that the federal government will impose its incompetence on the states, especially Lagos. The state will now scramble to respond. What this calls for is a partner, not pariah. During the Lassa days, the Federal Ministry of Health worked with Lagos, although the main engine room was Lagos.

The most potent power of a pandemic like this is not the disease itself but the fear. It is like the fear of war or invasion. The country already is crippled before it is crippled. It places itself on voluntary lockdown. It’s like Christ’s prophecy about “men’s heart failing them for fear…of those things which are coming on the earth.” Just like U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, who said during the Great Depression, the only thing the people should fear is fear itself.

This is where leadership counts. There are a variety of theories about what caused the disease. Some say it is from rats, others say it is from snakes. Some have conspiracy theories that it came from the West in a bid to choke China’s rise as a superpower, what some historians have called the Thucydides’ trap. Historian Thucydides wrote about Greek anxiety’s over the rise of Rome, which boiled over in the Macedonian Wars.

Others said it was a chemical weapon gone awry. The Chinese, according to the theory, engineered the virus as a weapon but it got into the wrong hands. Senator Borrofice, a geneticist, believes the theory.

Whatever the case, what is important is not to panic, but to keep a country of hygiene. Many of us see hygiene as an abstract, a speculative injunction to keep everyone from random harm. No to coronavirus. Everyone knows any error might be fatal.

This is no sexual stigma like HIV, nor heredity like diabetes. This is more lethal, although we are told that two of every hundred patients die, which means it is not necessarily a death sentence to contract it. We don’t want the sort of experience as delineated in La Peste, or The Plague, the novel by absurdist novelist and Nobel Laureate Albert Camus in which no one in the epidemic-ravaged town knows the cause of the disaease or the cure, but everyone awaits its demise. The good news is that all plagues in history have come to an end, and humans survive, like in Camus’ The Plague. The wait and morgue’s rising population are a torture. But the end, when will it come? That is the question.