Excused from the lockdown

I hate social media, but the devil keeps drawing me back to it. Monday night, the web was awash with stories of several robberies between Lagos and Ogun axis. It spoke of desperate victims trying to get through to the police without success. Tuesday, the police flatly denied the incidences. Wednesday, commands were parading half-clad suspects before the media.

Apparently, victims needed police approval to authenticate their experiences with the robbers. Once they stamped it, suspects were fished out. Except that it was almost too late, gangs in other states caught the operational modus and were testing it out too.

Robbers didn’t get the memo that the curfew meant they should take things easy. Social media swears that pen robbers are not exempted from the curfew. But since they operate with sophistry, it may take a longer time for us to see their faces on crime fighters.

In spite of the lockdown, Boko Haram is very active. In fact so active that it has finally forced Tukur Buratai from Abuja to the frontline. The 59-year-old army chief is not idling on the battlefront. An undated picture showed him parachuting from a fast-moving plane into the evil Sambisa forest. Eyewitnesses believe the base height is higher than Mount Everest. Wicked reporters won’t say so. They hope to rob Buratai of his medal of bravery.

Buratai has promised not to return to Abuja until he has the head of Abubakar Shekau on a platter for presentation to his Commander-in-Chief. The last time he presented a memento at the Villa, it was a captured Shekau’s flag.

Looks like all the evils of diseases are active against Nigeria. I asked a doctor friend of mine whether malaria has slowed down since Covid-19 presented; and he said no. Malaria continues to be the highest killer of pregnant women, young children and old people. In order not to give malaria undue publicity, Nigerians have stopped counting its casualty figures.

Not so with lassa fever. According to Daily Trust, the haemorrhagic fever has claimed more victims than Covid-19. At the last count, 188 citizens have succumbed to the disease in twenty-seven states. Lassa has no vaccine but it could be treated and prevented.

If you want to know the value of oxygen, ask an asthma patient. A friend of mine recounted last week how a woman died when she presented at a hospital gasping for air. Apparently, the health workers have not received due training from NCDC. They left the woman to die, believing she had Covid-19. They had no idea what to do and the poor woman died when an intravenous injection of aminophylline could have saved her life.

While robbers are targeting the poor, fraudsters have the numbers of others. Innocent Nigerians have lost their hard-earned savings to scammers pretending to represent the ministry of palliathieves. The fraudsters ask unsuspecting Nigerians details of their BVN and account numbers claiming to need the information to qualify them for government aid. Once with the details, they clean the accounts.

With three thirds of the world under lockdown, these fraudsters are setting up fake online business profiles selling the products that the world need at these trying times. If you think everyone has a heart, you have never met a fraudster. A report in Daily Trust last Thursday revealed how some European police have foiled attempts to swindle some governments of badly needed cash with the promise of sending them non-existent masks.

It is not fraudsters alone that are excused from the lockdown. According to figures credited to the National Human Rights Commission, the police have killed more Nigerians since the lockdown than Covid-19 has killed so far. While the nation’s big cities are locked down, crime, criminals, war and diseases are excused.

What To Do With Curfew Breakers

Trust unelected Nigerians to know better than their elected rulers how to run thngs. This nation of geniuses tests its expertise after losing crucial football matches. Forget the fact that many have not entered a football pitch since the last time politicians distributed vote-inducing packages, they’ll demand that the losing squad be infected with Covid-19 and left to die as propitiation for their sins.

It’s week three of partial national lockdown and Nigerians already think their government adopted a cut and paste approach to dealing with a pandemic that won’t work in their milieu. They want the choice to die of Covid-19 than hunger; except of course they don’t want to die alone. They want to take the rest of us along.

That being said, government’s logic beats rational imagination. A man who broke curfew to feed his family has been sentenced to six months imprisonment in Abuja. This comes after government released those it called vulnerable prisoners in a bid to decongest the prison and prevent an outbreak of the virus. Mobile courts are convicting curfew breakers and sending them to swell the prison it recently decongested. Is that how the prisons became national correctional centres?

Could we find a way not to punish those who were forced out to eke a living rather than die of hunger in their homes or endure the heckling of their worst halves?