“He had no big plans for this, he had not prepared for the day when he will be fighting his own work.He had not plotted against his own plots”. – Dean F Wilson
We are at a time when both royalty and the multitude, politicians and statesmen, the affluent and the pauper are all tied to the same destiny. The Nigerian health system. The work of our hands. Our collective disgrace.
The Covid 19 pandemic has exposed our true situation as an unserious nation who make abstracts and vanities as priority and pretend all is well. The rot in our national healthcare system is alarming. We were never prepared for any emergency. Successive governments have not done enough to salvage it because the principal actors and the citizens that matter can simply hop into the next plane out of the country to treat even the basic maladies. The poor were left at the mercy of frustrated and underpaid healthcare workers and an ill equipped facility.
Covid 19 has exposed our leaders at all levels as a bunch of opportunistic imposters instead of crisis managers in a time of war with an unseen enemy. It has given the citizens more reason why they should elect credible leaders and not allow themselves to be swayed by sentiments.
The unfortunate pandemic has taught us to appreciate the things we take for granted. Our freedom of movement and association. It is sad that now and beyond everyone you come across is a suspected carrier of the virus. The world will certainly never going to be the same again. People will become mask adorning agoraphobics and a lot of man hours will be lost in conducting screenings in public places.
I also hope this pandemic has taught us to be proactive in decision making. Just some few weeks ago there was a lot of commentaries on the 37 billion naira budgeted for the renovation of the national assembly at a time when we lack basic primary health care facilities. We should invest more in education and health. Developed nations that spent trillions of dollars on nuclear weapons and space research watch helplessly as their citizens die in hundreds despite having good health care systems that were also overwhelmed by the pandemic. This shows that no investment in the health care system of a nation is too much.
The lockdown that was imposed in a lot of places due to the pandemic is an opportunity for sober reflection. A chance to pause, take a deep breath and evaluate our lives. All over the world , pollution has reduced drastically. We should ask ourselves what are we doing and at what cost. We should recall the past, analyse the present and plan for the future.
After everything, we will remember that the electorate who didn’t vote or collected bribes to vote the wrong leaders, the politician who failed to develop the health care system and the citizen that sat and didn’t do anything are all in this together. They had plotted just as Dean F Wilson said, but they had not plotted against their own plots.
#Stay safe
Sanusi, an Architect, writes from Abuja and can be reached at Sanhab3@gmail.com
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