A noise some pestilence

By Theo Adebowale
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In recent years, with our ears we have heard of outbreaks of diseases. There was bird flu which ravaged the poultry mercilessly with severe financial setback on poultry farmers. The epidemic posed a serious challenge to Animal Science and Ministries of Agriculture at federal and state levels. Its outbreak was sudden while its disappearance was unceremonial. However thousands of birds and hundreds of farms were casualties.

Bank of Agriculture and other organisations that provide facilities for the trade may have details of bad debts and bankruptcies arising from the deadly disease. We have no record of human deaths arising from bird flu. Later came Ebola through Lagos as Patrick Sawyer, a Liberian flew in. The patient was rushed to the hospital causing deaths of health personnel including a female, senior medical consultant Ameyo Stella Adedevoh.

Like a bush fire, Ebola ran amock, causing a lot of casualties. In the course of health education, bat was identified as carrier of Ebola and within a short time bush meat generally was stigmatized spoiling the market for hunters and traders in wild game. While many were too frightened to touch bush meat, a few believing that pepper is no respecter of flu, took advantage of the force of demand and supply to enjoy the delicacy in their meals. Afterwards the Yoruba believe that the person who avoids or minimizes pepper in her menu, endangers her life. Not a few are convinced that Ebola met its Nemesis in pepper!

Epidemics are not a strange phenomenon. Flu, measles, chicken pox, small pox, meningitis, have broken out some times in the past. Inoculation, vaccination, immunization described the process through which antidotes to those deadly infections were applied. Hepatitis has also been curbed in that process. HIV and AIDS have not been eliminated but certainly medical sciences have reasonably slowed down its spread and reduced its capacity for fatality.

When Sogismund Akinbulumo returned from the United Kingdom, he brought me a wise saying: The plague plagues its inventor. Once did he tell me, and always have I remembered that those who invent diseases have no skill to prevent their descendants from contracting it. There have been several speculations about cultures including cannibalism, cockroach consumption, synthetic rice grain, corned beef and cruelty to workers. The heart, generally being more devious than any other thing as is depraved so that no one can pierce its secrets, imagine when it is fed with human flesh, cockroaches and wall gecko. In the rat face for economic and military supremacy what can restrain it in design and manufacture of chemical and biological weapons? While some heart came up with Toyota Corolla, another could have developed Coronavirus as a physical tool to express economic and economic dominion in the global village. Such a weapon could be activated in the territory of a rival. Another possibility is that the plague plagues its inventor. Who are inventors of these plagues: HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis, Coronavirus? For which purpose are they invented? Are they for economic, demographic or military? While a thousand fall in Iran, and ten thousand in China, what assurance have we that it would not come nigh us? With porous borders and rapacious officials in high and sensitive positions who have no home ground in their reasoning or geographical consciousness, how would not evil come our way or how shall we remain unscathed?

Pestilence, no doubt poses so much threat to continued existence of the human race, coronavirus, the more so. Through quarantine and attention of health personnel, ravages have been curtailed and humanity restored, but who would rescue from noisome, pestilence? Epidemiologists are knowledgeable in the nature and character of deadly diseases, hence they have admirably instructed in prevention of further spread. They have so much influence on public administrators and politicians in policy making and implementation to restore health. If only cancer experts have gained as much success in management of their patients.

Cancer patients have reported every so often late, hence they claim, the poor rate of success in the cure of cancer patients. But the noisome pestilence of corruption has been recognized since biblical times. Dishonest methods were employed to make a military contingent distort the evidence of crucifixion and resurrection. If soldiers admitted they slept on duty to enable disciples steal the body of Christ and illegal steps were taken to exonerate them, over two thousand years ago and nothing would happen, we can only imagine the extent of impunity. No wonder traditional rulers betrayed their people to slave raiders for a gift of bottles of gin, gun powder and foreign dresses. Any wonder then that African hustlers, mainly young men sell palace artefacts and idols to European rustlers ever so desperate in intensifying neocolonialism.

Is any still surprised that highly placed officials deliberately facilitate policy summersault to frustrate local investments in favour of foreign goods and services? Or how else shall we explain the collapse in quick succession of Volkswagen, Peugeot and Truck plants in Nigeria? Fake drugs abound in chemists and drug stores all over the place in spite of officials whose duty is to ensure standard. Electronic, mechanical and laboratory gadgets and equipment are in circulation as a result of international collaboration of manufacturers and distributors across continents and cultures. Businessmen from African economies are guests of Asian and European manufacturers they persuade to produce substandard materials for their own people. That way, they make health, education, transport and construction facilities unsafe. Substandard materials deliver building collapse everywhere you go.

 Autocrashes result largely from substandard spare parts and unqualified drivers certified illegally. When indigenes of crude areas have their land exploited and devastated without a share of income of the black gold, they resort to militancy, piracy and treasury looting. Expertise is provided by their partners across the seas who facilitate sales of bunkered crude and dissatisfied local law enforcement agents. To ‘maintain law and order’ there is a breakdown of law and order.

There is already a system of thoughts that summarises that if it is legal for a set of privileged northerners to exploit oil blocs in the Niger Delta and lawfully make billions of US dollars from the producing areas, what is unlawful in indigenes of Niger Delta accessing the national purse, helping themselves into its content? Because concessions were granted to militants to appease them and secure armistice, a crop of political elite has proposed that religious bigots who want to bring the state down unless everybody converts to their variant of Islam must be appeased and sponsored overseas to pursue further studies as they deem fit while their victims are henceforth domiciled in internally displaced persons’ camps.

Political epidemiologists in neighbouring African countries see things differently perhaps in the light of Vladmir Putin’s philosophy that it is within the competence of God to forgive terrorists while he has a duty to dispatch them to Him. Interestingly, Islamic states hang terrorists while secular Nigerian transparently honest leaders want them to proceed abroad for higher education.

The heart of man is desperately wicked, who can know it? It conceives infectious diseases and spread them. The heart of man employs apparatus of the state to concort injustice, promote illegality and exalt nepotism. It has pushed man to feast on cockroaches, human waste and human flesh. Through dishonest means and illegal methods it has plunged nationals into slavery, hunger and avoidable wars. Corruption is the noisome pestilence ravaging human civilisation as human body is ravaged by cancer. Whereas epidemics are put in check by epidemiologists and health specialists, privileged officials as a result of religious, ethnic and cultural perversions intensify efforts to multiply injustice and promote impossible policies. They are noiseless in the process of multiplying noise some pestilence.