"We seldom get into trouble when we speak softly. It is only when we raise our voices that the sparks fly and tiny molehills become great mountains of contention."
Having
to write twice or thrice monthly for a column, I find the crass rot
in my country quite an inexorable grist to the mill. The good thing
is, I never have to worry about running out of stuff to write about.
As
I sat writing this, I was dazed by a news report that in Ekiti state
Nigeria, a governor-elect led red-eyed thugs into a court, where they
beat up the presiding judge. When lawyers saw the judge picked clean,
they discarded their wigs and scampered out of the courtroom-turned
physical battleground.
A
disgusted eye witness said watching the unaccustomed blistering speed
with which the attorneys sprinted from the slugfest, one would have
thought they were contesting for gold medals at the Olympics games!.
Ordinarily
such craven behavior would have seemed frightening and reprehensible.
However, in a land where such violations are commonly aided and
abetted by state power, no one bats an eye over such extreme chaos.
The
report further noted that after the politician left the court, his
band of thugs was in turn waylaid later in the day and a top member
of his gang felled by a volley of bullets apparently shot by thugs of
an opposing party.
Not
to be outdone, the politician’s sympathizers visited mayhem on
and shut down the capital city of the state.
At
about the same time, a little bit down South in Rivers state, another
judge had to be escorted to court by a fearsome team of police
officers armed to the teeth. To clear the path for the judge to get
to court, the police fired tear gas bombs at riotous thugs hired by
that state governor to prevent the judge from sitting.
The
social instability has been long running. In a 2006 memoir, Nigeria’s
lone Nobel Prize in Literature, Wole Soyinka, chronicles the vicious
cycle of corruption in which Nigeria is trapped and the ill-disguised
contempt leaders in Nigeria have for the masses. He also notes the
anguish and frustration felt by Nigerians at a leadership that had
for long abandoned its obligations to the people.
Soyinka,
who dismisses this leadership with caustic words, writes that rather
than see themselves as “transforming agents” and provide
services, the nation’s leaders from independence “identified
themselves as replacements of the old colonial order.”
Accordingly, they defined leadership as “a master-servant
relationship” and “saw the nation as a prostrate victim
to be ravished.”
This
naked plundering has the dire consequence of routinely plunging the
economy in crises.
While
the state brags of providing free access to education to its
citizens, the absence of provisions to enhance learning thwarts
whatever good was intended. Many students carry writing desks from
home on their heads to and from school. Often faculty and staff are
unpaid, leading to frequent shutdown of schools by the aggrieved
workers. These crises are often the result of reckless spending by
leaders.
Like
the schools, the health system is just as shabbily treated. Take
Ebola, for instance.
The
epidemic, as President Obama remarked in his speech to the United
Nations recently, is “wiping out whole families” in West
Africa. It has, the president revealed, “turned simple acts of
love and comfort — holding a sick friend’s hand or
embracing a dying child — into potentially fatal acts.”
The
fatality caught Nigerian authorities napping. It exposed the
ineptitude of nation’s planners and its politics of inertia.
One would have thought that since the fiercely gruesome virus has
been in existence for 38 years in Africa and wreaked havoc in
neighboring West African countries and in Congo and Uganda
previously, Nigeria would have anticipated and made adequate
preparation long before it claimed its first victims.
Rather,
when it hit the country, Nigeria had to send test samples to Dakar,
Senegal, to confirm locally done preliminary investigations.
One
of the care givers, Dr. Ada Igonoh, who herself fell victim to but
fortunately survived the virus, speaks of the gross sanitary
condition in the ward she and other patients were treated. The
situation, she notes, was dramatic enough to give the Ebola scourge
added incentive to thrive.
“The
whole Ebola thing,” she recounts, “had caught everyone by
surprise. Lagos State Ministry of Health was doing its best to
contain the situation but competent hands were few. The sheets were
not changed for days. The floor was stained with greenish vomitus and
excrement.
“Dr.
David (a foreigner) would come in once or twice a day and help clean
up the ward after chatting with us. He was the only doctor who
attended to us. There was no one else at that time. The matrons would
leave our food outside the door; we had to go get the food ourselves…
Mosquitoes were our roommates until they brought us mosquito nets.”
Recalling
details of the decrepit hospital ward, Dr. Igonoh adds, “I was
shocked by the environment. It looked like an abandoned building”
that “had not been use for quite a while.” Settling into
a corner, Dr. Igonoh was completely nauseated that the whole place
not only “smelled of faeces and vomit” but was “desperate
enough to break anyone psychologically.”
It
was therefore not surprising that patients, who before now were
themselves caregivers in the hospital, became casualties to Ebola as
the dingy ward had become “the house of death,” Dr.
Igonoh says.
Damning
dysfunction, she observes, was everywhere. The toilets did not flush,
so she had to fetch water in a bucket from the bathroom each time she
used the restroom.
The
doctor turned patient writes that for a patient who was “stooling
every two hours,” such “indignity was quite
overwhelming.” To survive, the critically ill doctor
improvised. “To contain the frequent diarrhea, I started
wearing adult diapers, as running to the toilet was no longer
convenient to me.”
Nothing
aggravated the degraded environment of her treatment more than the
poor condition-specific nutrition she received. Although Ebola had
opened up sores in her mouth, she was served with an over-spiced
dinner of rice and stew. “The pepper stung my mouth and tongue.
I dropped the spoon. No dinner that night.”
The
outraged doctor, who mustered the will to live enough to crawl out of
the ward of death, puts her survival to never suspending faith in her
Creator. She also credits inspirational messages, the prayers of
friends and family, personal knowledge gained from researching the
virus and support from brave and committed colleagues.
Dr.
Igonoh’s story illustrates how scary and complicated a health
emergency can become in a situation where the state has scant respect
for the lives of its citizens and their basic needs. Her
trauma shows the disaster that stares at a dopey state when it stalls
on the challenges of poverty, planning, education, and systemic
failures.
Imo Ben Eshiet was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Raised in his village, Uruk Enung, and at
several cities in his country including Nsukka, Enugu, Umuahia, Eket and Calabar, Eshiet is a
detribalized Nigerian. Although he was extensively exposed to Western education right from
childhood in his country where he obtained a PhD in English and Literary Studies from the
University of Calabar, he is well nurtured in African history, politics, culture and traditions.
Imo is currently a teacher in the high priests group in the Summit Ward of the Greensboro North
Carolina Stake.