The entire purpose of government in Nigeria, is the maintenance of the ruling class in imperial style, and as a special breed. Our rulers have no idea of what ails the people, and unlike Catherine that offered the French hordes cakes in place of bread, these ones are completely insulated from our pains. They are untouched by the pains of our afflictions.
I have a lot to say, but I am determined to be as brief as I can be. I need you to reason along with me, and I do not have the luxury of time: my task is urgent. Your very lives, may depend on your capacity to grasp the points that I intend to make.
You are a member of the herd. Don’t worry, so am I. This is not me insulting you. This has nothing to do with any dislike of any of the crooks ruling us that you might even believe yourself obliged to defend. You are part of what must be properly defined as a herd of lambs. Don’t worry, you will understand soon enough.
Our rulers are the wolves. The difference between rulers and leaders, is best illustrated by the parallels between Dubai and Lagos State. Forget about Nigeria and Dubai, those would be false equivalences. Leaders envision a future that rarely correlates with the existing realities, and they paint pictures of this future, in the mind of their people. The people then become ready to make the sacrifices required to actualize the vision that drove the choices dictated by the leader.
Dubai is where it is today by design. Where is Lagos after 21 years of Tinubu’s hegemony? Where is Nigeria after 8 years of Obasanjo, and 5 years of the saint of Daura? I will not even bother with GEJ. Rulers live in the moment, motivated by personal aggrandizements, unfettered by lofty ideas, unrestrained by vision. Look around you. We are a nation of lambs ruled by wolves.
The entire purpose of government in Nigeria, is the maintenance of the ruling class in imperial style, and as a special breed. Our rulers have no idea of what ails the people, and unlike Catherine that offered the French hordes cakes in place of bread, these ones are completely insulated from our pains. They are untouched by the pains of our afflictions. States with less than a thousand bed in combined capacity, employing less than a hundred poorly paid, and badly motivated doctors, are busy buying cars for legislators, because to do otherwise, and to then presume to redirect scarce resources in this season, to healthcare and other areas, would bleed the system of the complicit support of the thieving legislators, and it would collapse.
Herd immunity. The wolves have decided that the herd has to return to work. That the wolves are responsible for the total failure of the lockdown and social distancing measures, matters little. That the wolves have ignored to test up to a hundred thousand lambs, out of a likely 200M, and failed woefully at contact tracing, does not matter. That the abject failure of presidential leadership exacerbated an already bad situation, counts for nothing. It also does not matter, that the choice had been made for us, by the horrible choices that the wolves had made, before COVID-19 came to these shores.
This virus is already here. It is spreading in the community. It is pretty well dispersed. Our rulers have no choice but to open the bolted door. The moment Mr. Pointer began to wear his cap and clothe masks in matching colors, I knew that they had taken a decision to stop pretending that the lockdown is working. But then, they had always known that the lockdown was a mere fig leaf, an exercise in PR, and the evidence that they did try something, even as they were the ones that undermined the lockdown by their need to make unfair exceptions for those to whom the rules must never apply. Kyari is my strongest witness in this regard.
They have done the maths. There are enough things already thinning out the herd, how much more can the virus possibly kill, when weighed against the potential for social dissonance, when you have locked down an already distressed economy, at a time when crude prices have also tanked?
We were never going to be able to test on a scale that would have made the lockdown a sensible proposition, and we certainly lack the hospital capacity to deal with the outbreak. Alimosho Local Government is big enough to overstretch the healthcare facilities of the entire nation, and you can all forget about the photo-op tents being touted by the state. If they are any good, Kyari wouldn’t have forsaken them, and so many of our Lagos private hospitals, wouldn’t be currently locked down. But these lies will aggravate an already bad situation.
Herd immunity is when a herd of animals is deliberately exposed to a pathogen against which no vaccine exists. When a vaccine is available, the same is done by a program of mass vaccination, but in the absence of a vaccine, the expectation is that the entire herd will catch the disease, and by the time they had recovered from the disease, enough members of the herd would have become immune to the disease, and thereby rendered the disease inconsequential in the calculations of the herd keepers. In this case, the wolves that we have as shepherds.
It is not in the character of Nigerian state officials and spokespersons to tell the truth, but Garba Shehu is completely right. At 3.4% mortality rate, COVID-19 is a much more benign killer than malaria, and when compared with our murderous police and soldiers, the virus is a learner. The Nigerian state already kills more than the virus, and nobody has locked down our society for any of the other viruses. The times we have had to shut down our streets for our paranoid wolves do not count.
The herd will return to work next week. Do remember that your clothe masks offers little protection against COVID-19, and that it is designed to mask their lack of care, and your own refusal to see: that the herd is being shepherded by wolves.
DF
Originally written on the 30th day of April 2020
