Dear survivors

This is a message to those of us who may survive this pandemic in our dear country. It is inspired by my concern that any one of us can fall victim to this virus, and I, a simple, terrified but substantially unprotected citizen may be one of those that will fall to its creeping insidiousness. If I survive, I will read this as if it is written by compatriots who fell victim to a  voracious, globalised virus emboldened by failure of the Nigerian state to improve their protection. If I do not survive, this will represent my contributions to dealing with a future no one is in a position to even imagine. This virus may take us in thousands or in hundreds. It may stay with us for weeks, for months or even for years. Nobody knows. What is certain is that it will eventually leave, as all past pandemics did, but no one can tell in what state it will leave us.

If you are a survivor, you may, or you may not have a chance to undertake a thorough and disciplined post-mortem. You may live in a world anxious to move on, or in one that cannot move because its essential requirements for re-invention have been destroyed beyond repair. If you do get an opportunity to analyse  the route of this virus to our land and Africa, and the context which allowed it to wrought the damage it did to us, please start with the leaders who had responsibility to prepare our people for the good life and the bad life, even if not for pandemics. Ask why we failed to invest the  hundreds of trillions we realised from God’s largess to our nation to reduce poverty, give our children and young people good education, build basic social and economic infrastructure like health, quality education, power, roads and opportunities to be gainfully engaged as well as  basic security. Ask  who stole  our wealth, and the systems that allowed them to get away with it. Assess how our nation was left crippled and helpless between a virus and the cumulative ills of failed leaderships that left us virtually at the mercy of this pandemic.

You owe a duty to establish where we went wrong in preparing to confront this pandemic. Were our leaders ignorant, lethargic and indifferent  towards a disaster that had sent many advance notices of its intent and arrival, or were they plainly  and chronically incompetent in managing big crises? Could they have done better in a context which required massive resources to fight the pandemic and a citizenry that  had little faith in, and respect for leaders  who will not help cushion effects of privations? Ask what leaders did when it appeared we were playing with figures and statistics, when they sent us in different directions in those moments when we needed clear-headed and firm national resolve towards policies and regulations about containment and treatments.

If you still have the luxury, ask about major turning points in this crisis. Did we sit on our hands, hoping that this virus will all go away anywhere but to our homes? Did we prepare citizens for lockdowns, for possibilities that they will face difficult choices between starvation and a possible horrible death? Did citizens finally revolt? Was it a sudden, spontaneous uprising, or a creeping insurrection against the state and the wealthy, fuelled by desperation and hunger and anger? If we had hundreds or thousands dead or dying, what did we do with them? What happened to those who were responsible for law and order when people were robbed in broad daylight; shops and homes broken into; people molested and chaos reigned supreme?

You could be deeply engrossed in managing or watching a country in an advanced stage of disintegration from the effects of pandemic-related crises that eats out its fragile heart and its immunity to old and new threats. Pre-COVID-19 Nigeria was facing a decade-old insurgency that had sapped the capacities and credibility of its political and military leadership; multiple types of internal security challenges, deep-seated corruption that had eroded respect for leadership of every type and widening gulf between political elites from narrow constituencies over the nature of changes the nation must go through to please them enough to stay in the country. A huge, young population may have substantially survived a virus with a particular preference for the elderly. This will add a major burden on a state that would have lost the basic foundations of an economy run without transparency on a safe level of stability. The crash of the global economy would have affected Nigeria very badly. Rebuilding its economy in the context of massive political uncertainty and instability will be very challenging, but that will have to be your task if there is a nation to rebuild.

You would have survived into a world that would have been taken to pieces by a virus and  its catastrophic consequences which would include collapsed economies, new global relations that will take a long while to show a new order,  a world that is fragmented and defined by common and peculiar challenges about survival, and one with no sympathy for nations such as ours. You will be involved in fights to salvage a damaged national political framework, or you could be part of the process that will put an end to it and starting new frameworks with fairly new problems and a lot of the old problems. You would have survived in a nation that has to re-invent its economy from the ruins of the remote past and recent damage caused by its exposure to the pandemic and its economic fallouts, principally, the destruction of its main assets and infrastructure and the abdication of responsibilities by leaders.

You will have the fortune or misfortune of living through a moment of great turbulence and uncertainties over priorities in securing life and building a future. Please pay special attention to the issue of leadership of all types and at all levels. Whatever becomes of Nigeria as we know it now, no solution will help its future unless it (or pieces of it that used to live together) can rescue leadership issues from the damaging drawbacks of ethnic and regional influences and the stranglehold of an elite that uses state resources to corner power. Create new values and systems that will allow the best to lead our people towards the best they deserve. Pay attention to the youth, and design governance substantially around addressing their needs. Design a more inclusive social and political process which makes available to the economy and the political process the huge, untapped capacities of females. Look closely at the roots of the nation’s many security challenges. Understand them and take all steps to resolve them and address their roots.

Like every Nigerian, I am praying that I will survive this pandemic too. Those who do, need to understand that surviving it is only a step among many they will have to take to make life more secure, comfortable and meaningful.