These are not the best of times for political leaders
all across the world. Certainly not for heads of governments who bear the
burden of blame for the exceptionally high fatalities of their citizens to
COVID 19. They are accused of negligence and lacking the creative intervention
that true leaders must demonstrate in a moment of grave national crises. The
end result is that a bad situation has gotten out of control: hospitals are
overwhelmed, deaths are rising while job
losses are at all-time high.
In some countries like the United States, matters such
as police brutality and race inequality have emerged to compound the problems
for the incumbent, with the elections just a few months away. He is not alone. The
State of Israel, Republic of Lebanon, the United Kingdom, Libya, whichever way
you look - East or West, or South, the approval ratings of many leaders are
falling amid worsening crises.
In Nigeria however, our leaders can sleep tight and never
have to worry about the kind of mass protests we witness daily on foreign
media. That’s simply not in our nature.
It’s not for nothing that our good citizens are ranked the happiest on earth even
if we are still numbered among the world’s poorest!
Granted that being at the helm of affairs of any
country is never easy, even in good times, yet one still wonders why
politicians are good at winning elections only to become clueless when confronted
with same societal problems they had orchestrated against the old
administration.? Here, I can’t help but remember the 2009 song of Heavy D &
the Boyz – “Now that we found love, what are we gonna do with it”?
Despite
the widely reported death tolls in other countries, Nigerians in the majority still
don’t believe that COVID-19 poses any dangers to them. Many people don’t trust
their government and never believed that keeping them off their businesses is for
their own safety. With no history of natural disasters that other nations
suffer - volcanic eruptions, tropical cyclones, heatwaves, tsunamis and
landslides among others, Nigerians can be forgiven for being at ease with a
pandemic, having known no other recurring disasters beside that of leadership! To
them, poor governance has been far more corrosive than coronavirus!
Let’s
be fair. Why would the masses who, for all their lives, have survived the worst
kinds of viruses in their slums and flooded communities begin to fear a
particular virus that originated from Wuham China in just October 2019? Little
wonder they saw the death of a few prominent politicians to the pandemic as
mere nemesis, and had hoped the global travel ban that prevented the rich from
assessing medical intervention abroad would have forced the government to immediately
set at reversing the rot of our health system.
Of course, we read of hundreds of
billions of dollars secured in foreign loans. But rather than on the health or education sectors, we read
only of renovations of National Assembly that will take billions. revival of NTA, of mind-boggling news of
corruption at NDDC, endless rows of exotic SUVs awaiting collection by the Honourable
and distinguished Senators of the Federal Republic, allegations of returned
loots being re-looted, all these at a period of extreme hardship for businesses
and families.
Was
George Owells referring to Africa’s most populous country when he wrote his twentieth
century classic: Animal Farm?
