The wages of relentless propaganda? Political self-destruction.

If you doubt, watch Seyi Makinde, the Oyo governor dash, with willy-nilly propaganda, to politically self-destruct — his latest fiddle clearly Covid-19.

Did Nero fiddle while Rome burnt? Well, you could say Seyi rallied — Coronavirus be damned! — while global health decreed the extreme opposite.

Why, the governor even essayed partisan wit, which sent his deluded PDP crowd, rolling in partisan mirth!

“I want you,” the governor quipped, “to take two things home. And the first is: they are of the opinion that we should not have staged this rally because of the Coronavirus pandemic but it was,” he joked, to cacophonous applause, “one of their leaders who said Coronavirus had already entered their party” — yet another thunder of applause — ”We all know,” came the sententious clincher, by Seyi the Wise, “that there is no Coronavirus in our own party”! Ringing, rousing applause!

But some 24 hours later, the governor was eating crow. Now, was that God confounding the wise? Or the foolish, passing wiles for being wise, reaping the fair comeuppance of combative folly?

Hear a subdued Makinde cringe, akin to bolting the stable doors, after the stallion had galloped clear: “That rally should never have held. It was a lapse of judgment for which I take full responsibility.”

Just as well — for there is always nobility in apology. So, give the governor some credit.

But he isn’t about getting away with gubernatorial garrulity and equal opportunity recklessness in perilous times, just to corral needless political mileage.

Ibadan’s Covid-19 index case test just returned positive, as announced by the governor himself in a tweet, @seyimakinde Twitter handle: “The Covid-19 confirmation test for the suspected case at Bodija has come back POSITIVE. The result was released at 17:35 pm of March 21, 2020. Oyo State public health officials are collaborating with the University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan’s team on the case.”

Now, Coronavirus appears the beginning of the end for Governor Makinde’s populist charm, which craves good news, good news and more good news! The wages of relentless propaganda!

Yet, that bit of APC having Coronavirus and PDP having none, was meant to start —and end — as a campaign ground joke.

It was a witty, though wily, pun on Asiwaju Bola Tinubu’s quip, that APC elements that wanted to unhorse Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, the APC national chairman, had caught a blind power virus, akin to Coronavirus, en route to 2023.

Yet, it was needless gubernatorial flippancy, that could peak in costly gubernatorial consequences.

Indeed, given all we know about Covid-19, the governor’s frivolity was shocking, especially to a large gathering, that could spur its spread, and claim needless lives.

In a classic case of fiction trumping reality, to hazard clear and present danger, Dean Koontz, in The Eyes of Darkness, had written: “They call the stuff ‘Wuhan-400’ because it was developed at their RDNA labs outside the city of Wuhan, and it was the four-hundredth viable strain of man-made microorganisms created at that research centre.”

Credible conspiracy theory, in a globe swirling with mutual Sino-Western hostile propaganda? Relax! The Eyes of Darkness was published in 1981 — 39 clear years before the current pestilence, though Coronavirus did break out of Wuhan, China!

Even then another excerpt, from that same fiction, simply leaves you numb and dumb! ”… the Chinese could use Wuhan-400 to wipe out a city or a country, and then there wouldn’t be any need for them to conduct a tricky and expensive decontamination before they moved in and took over the conquered territory.” Can that be true?

Again, a credible conspiracy theory, even if fictive? Or the West just being haunted by long shadows, of own past imperialist crimes?

But leave Koontz and flip to Sylvia Browne’s End of Days, a scientific stuff, published in 2010 by Dutton-Penguin Books, USA.

“In around 2020,” Browne predicted, “a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments. Almost more baffling than the illness itself,” he continued, “will be the fact that it will suddenly vanish as quickly as it arrived, attack again ten years later, and then disappear completely.”

Relief? Or fresh alarm that Coronavirus could come ravaging the globe again by 2030?

But even more chilling, and closer to Koontz than to Browne, is an account credited to an unnamed Chinese military intelligence officer, making the rounds on cyberspace.

It claims Coronavirus was a biological warfare experiment gone awry, to hobble Hong Kong, and slow down its democracy hell-raisers.

It claimed the plague broke out in Wuhan because its remote experimental base was near there; and that the Wuhan dead were simply collateral damage, even if the victims were mostly alleged Chinese dissidents and government critics, carefully handpicked.

The unnamed Chinese soldier decided to squeal because his co-Chinese operatives allegedly gave his only child, a boy, polluted mouth/nose masks. The boy caught Coronavirus; and is being nursed on his deathbed.

His final chilling verdict: Coronavirus, he alleged, may as yet have no cure. So, all the talk about heat destroying it are fibs from the sweet-lying Chinese government!

Some conspiracy theory, from inside China itself, suggesting the very Armageddon? You can’t but break out in cold sweat!

This then is the very serious issue, rippling with life-threatening uncertainties, that the Oyo governor chose for his propagandist fiddle. It’s good he duly apologized. But what good would that do, if people from that gathering got infected, and became agents to spread the virus, in other South West states — and even beyond?

Still by the apology, the omi tuntun (fresh and refreshing spring) wonder boy is miles ahead of his unthinking party. The PDP had moved from the Ibadan South West zonal rally, to local government polls campaign in Cross River and Rivers PDP elective congress in Port Harcourt, Covid-19 be damned! Hardly any surprise.

Makinde is so, so reminiscent of Otunba Gbenga Daniel (OGD) in his Ogun gubernatorial years. OGD was the classic Afenifere-PDP, a neophyte more authentic than the Afenifere-AD original! In his glory days, OGD media votaries belted out merry acronyms, in praise of their god: OGROMA, OGADEP, OGRA-GRA, … zealous chirps to spread the good news.

But if OGD earned a second term before he unravelled, Makinde appears unravelling fast even before his second year! The perils of eternal good news and the wages of propaganda!

Tinubu on the other hand, that Makinde tried to ridicule in his unfortunate Coronavirus joke, logged his own due share of bad news. Indeed, early in his Lagos governorship, he was a devil dutifully nailed to the cross, by impatient Lagosians, to echo Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s novel, Devil on the Cross.

Still, at the end of it all, he built enduring legacies for Lagos, so much so that during the Ebola crisis, and now Coronavirus, Lagos is never found wanting. Indeed, it is to Lagos, that other states look for direction!

Governor Makinde had better use his ill-fated Coronavirus joke to turn a new leaf. It’s time to shun cheap showboating and face serious business.