The following day, April 15, the same paper carried again, the Adeleye ‘feat’ saying that he urges the Federal Government to engage him over his claim to cure COVID-19. Again the parasitology expert said about his work:
“this research is not recent. It had been going on for some years but it has now come into manifestation. It is a practical thing; if it fails, the whole world will see it. But if it succeeds, credit goes to Nigeria as a nation. I have done what God has told me to do; the rest is with the Federal Government”.
How daringly plain can a man get? I must point out that, in these times when cost of production is high and readership size is not encouraging, every news item in a paper must be adjudged worthy to be there.
I imagine that The Guardian seems to subtly nudge the Nigerian authorities to take up Professor Adeleye’s offer, subject it to scrutiny by qualified local assessors who are not mentally enslaved by foreign knowledge systems. So, what on earth is the government of Nigeria waiting for? To contain and possibly eradicate Coronavirus is a global task that must be done.
And to this urgent end, every serious country is conducting research with all unique resources it can marshal. A Yoruba proverb says that “iwa ku’wa l’an wa oun to ba so nu”. Meaning: we tend to search with unreasonable desperation that is missing.
The COVID-19 threat to humanity is so huge and so weighty it demands, as is done at brainstorming sessions that everyone brings to the solution table every imaginable solution.
No idea is too crazy to be discussed in a brainstorming session. Before Adeleye, Prof. Maurice Iwu has been reported to isolate ‘a chemical compound’ that may cure SARS and hopefully, Coronavirus too. His finding is undergoing ‘testing’ in the US “to confirm whether this could be a cure for COVID-19 or SARS” said Minister for Science and Technology, Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu. This was early March.
But why send Iwu’s findings to faraway US when a respectable team of Nigerian specialists can be charged to examine it and test it on afflicted persons? And lest we forget, before Iwu was a certain Dr. Abalaka whose research efforts, whatever it was worth, was derided into oblivion by his ‘foreign mentored’ colleagues and his own federal government. But no one else came up with an alternative cure to the HIV disease.