At last this horrible year is ending at midnight tonight . I can’t wait!. The news of Covid-19 did not break in Nigeria until sometime in February 2020. At that time many of us thought it was going to be a flash in the pan, but alas! We do not now know how the tragedy that is afflicting and affecting the whole world is going to end . Close to over one and a half million people have died in the world with most of them coming from Europe, the Americas , India and relatively few have come from Africa. The reason why the morbidity and mortality in Africa are this low is not clear. We have heard that this may be because the demographic situation in Africa where 60%of our population is below 25 years old, meaning we have relatively young and strong population, gives us some kind of advantage because the problem affects older people than younger people whose immune system is certainly stronger than those of the elderly. it can also be that we in Africa are exposed to many viral diseases to the extent that we have developed some kind of herd immunity to most of them including this new coronavirus. Whatever the explanation may be, it is obvious that we have not suffered the kind of morbidity and mortality suffered in Europe, the United States, Brazil and India. One just hopes we won’t push our luck too far and ignore all established preventive measures that are known to work in other parts of the world . Our religious leaders have to be careful in saying God has lifted the death of coronavirus over our heads. This may be true, but we should curtail our assembling in large numbers in cross-over services on the 31st of December so that by so doing, we don’t facilitate the spread of coronavirus. God is omnipresent and he is everywhere, including our private homes . We can pray to Him with our families at home and He who hears our private pleas in the secret of our homes will reward us openly.
The coronavirus pandemic has had severe and deleterious effect, not just on our health but also on our economy which in the best of times was never strong as a mono-cultural economy depending on hydrocarbons export. Things were so bad that Nigeria had to pay to store its unsold crude petroleum abroad because its market in India and China were virtually shut down . This was also at a time when humongous amount of money was being spent on unending and materially and humanly wasteful war in the northeast of Nigeria . To make matters worse, the insurgency has spread to the north-west of the country manifesting in farmers / herders mutual slaughter . The brigandage that has ensued is also prevalent in the north-central part of the country. Added to all this are the incendiary movements, which are decade-old in the oil producing Niger Delta . One kind of turmoil or the other now affects the entire southern part of the country with the cities in total disconnect with the rural countryside. All these problems have made governance extremely difficult. Road infrastructure remains unmaintained if not totally abandoned. These problems and the criminality in the ungoverned spaces of Nigeria has led to the London Financial Times sometimes in December 2020 branding us as a nation on the brink of total collapse as a “failed state.” What worse indictment can we get when perhaps the most respected medium in western capitalism brands us a near-failed state? This has sealed our fate in terms of foreign direct investment, because no foreign company is likely to venture to our shores unless we can miraculously clean our acts and restore sobriety and security to our land. This near-failed state status in which we find ourselves has had damaging effect on our profile in the international community where before now we had a strong presence, but now our influence internationally is zero.
To compound all these problems we have had a political leadership totally cut off from the reality of the problems of Nigeria. Many of the leaders are living large in sumptuous and conspicuous consumption, and some of their children and children of their business associates are getting married and throwing lavish parties and celebrations while the famished many look at them in wonder, hoping to join them by hook or crook no matter what it takes and by all means necessary including banditry and kidnapping. The political structures have proved inadequate and unresponsive in tackling governance issues, particularly such issues as overpopulation, corruption, bribery, and general malaise in the country. Yet all appeal to common sense to practice the federal constitutional grundnorm negotiated at independence has fallen on the deaf ears of those benefitting from the rotten and wretched current structure imposed on us by the military. It seems the country is bound to failure, violence or collapse unless men of good conscience will come forth to force the leaders to change course from the edge of the precipice they are willy-nilly leading the country. What is most disappointing about the political leadership is that rather than be seized with the problems of the moment, they are focused on the question of succession to the leadership of the country in 2023. One would have expected many of them would be worried about the future of the country rather than 2023 when a day is a long time in politics, as it is generally known. In their struggle for 2023, they are not strategizing based on ideas or ideologies but on sterile ethnic balancing permutations. They are not talking on what they are going to do for the country, but apparently thinking of how they are going to use whatever political positions they are hankering after for their own financial self-aggrandizement.
The intelligentsia of the country is not better. How does one explain shutting down the tertiary educational sector of the country for a whole year following unresolved industrial action and wild cat strikes by workers. University workers, apparently unimpressed by plea of national hard times when politicians are living it, up refused to work while negotiations about salaries and better working conditions were going on. The problem really is that there are too many wishy-washy universities hurriedly established as “dividends of democracy,” with no planning about staff and funding. Professors who should have been shouting hoarse against it keep quiet when they are appointed, without merit, as vice-chancellors or promoted professors in the new universities. The end result is a watering down of the quality of education and inadequate funding, which now have to be spread to the hundreds of secondary schools masquerading as universities. The universities are also plagued by the presence of four or five trade unions in the universities, while the governments which should legislate all of them into one looks helplessly on.
Universities should also rise to the occasion of providing governments alternative ideas , knowledge for industries, and innovations that will benefit society and expand national wealth. The universities should be at the frontier of knowledge. It is a shame that none of our scientists is involved in the research and finding solutions to the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic or in the development of the vaccine against it. I know it is not their fault in a nation of misplaced priorities, where budgetary allocation to education and research is grudgingly and miserly given. Research costs money. But if in the past our researchers had demonstrated the link between research and development in a knowledge-based economy, our governments would not be nigardly in treating researchers in budgetary allocation . If the knowledge community do not demonstrate their relevance to economic development, they will continue to be treated as the Cinderella of relations in sectoral budgetary consideration.
It is now evident that all the things I have been discussing are related. Without knowledge, politics will remain at a pedestrian level of primitive accumulation by those in control of the levers of governmental power, who see their positions as primarily for financial self-aggrandizement. The bad governance emanating from this will redound on all other sectors because money in the country is not inexhaustible, and it is whatever is left that will be shared by the other sectors crying for financial support. Education will be neglected, Defence will have its share based on the necessity to secure those in power in their posts. Infrastructural development will be neglected. The appurtenances of modern life like potable water, electricity, hospitals and health facilities, aviation and shipping infrastructure will not be provided. All this neglect will lead to massive job losses, which will in turn fuel internal insecurity and aggravated poverty. This has been the story of Nigeria in 2020 and one hopes we will turn the corner for good in 2021.
The year 2020 witnessed a harvest of deaths in the top hierarchy of our public life, both at federal and state levels. May God rest their souls in peace. On a personal note, 2020 was horrible year. I lost two very close cousins and an uncle. I couldn’t because of the coronavirus pandemic attend their funerals. Quite a few academic brothers and colleagues like Professors Ladipo Akinkugbe, Tunji Oloruntimehin and Olu Longe – distinguished nephrologist, historian and computer scientist respectively – have passed on. Their loss was a great loss to their families, the global Academy and to Nigeria. May God accept their souls and rest them in the bosom of father Abraham .
Happy new year to all my readers .