On Monday, the Governor of Osun State, Adegboyega Oyetola, rued the recent death of his Deputy Chief of Staff, Mikhail Jare Adebisi. In eulogising the deceased, the governor said, “We would have flown out Adebisi for treatment, but for the COVID-19 pandemic.” The startling lack of irony with which the tone-deaf governor declared what they would have done if circumstances permitted implies our politicians have not learned much from this COVID-19 pandemic.
With travel restrictions imposed by countries, our politicians’ junketing privileges have been clamped, forcing them to remain home with their hapless citizens. The blasé manner Oyetola stated what might have obtained suggests that these people will resume life as usual when the COVID-19 pandemic is over. Oyetola and other members of the political elite seem not to have learned the necessity of committing the resources they take abroad to the upgrade of healthcare and making good quality healthcare available to all. They still have their eyes trained on foreign medical trips.
The issue of medical tourism has always been a riling one, and for good reasons too. One of the many high expectations people had of the Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.) regime when it began in 2015 was that he would lead the change among the Nigerian political class whose sense of entitlement was draining the country. Buhari not only disappointed those that believed he would be a vanguard of social change when he spent extended time in hospitals in the UK, his aides even had the gumption to moan about how much damage medical tourism was doing to the nation’s resources. Their peculiar moral blind spot as they preached to us means they consider themselves super-citizens, a class of people above the accountability a society’s leadership owes the people.
Annually, foreign medical trips cost Nigeria N400bn, far more money than what is budgeted for healthcare funding. One would have expected that this period of lockdown would have forced a revision of priorities. Oyetola’s gaffe shows that even a crippling pandemic has not been enough to shake our leaders.
Just last year, the House of Representatives threw out a bill seeking to restrict public officials from taking foreign medical trips at public expense. What was even more interesting about their decision, from the news report of that session, was the argument advanced by each of the lawmakers that spoke on the bill. Their opinion on the bill had less to do with the collective; it was all about how it could affect them as individuals. Their usual self-centredness moved to another level. They argued the bill would discriminate against their human rights, and punish them for the government’s failings.
One of those that contended the bill, Deputy Majority Leader, Mohammed Wase, from Plateau State, asked the House to “throw away” the bill. He related how he had been misdiagnosed in Nigeria, only for him to travel abroad and spend three months receiving medical care there. Wase did not say he spent personal funds on that extended medical tour, neither did he spare a thought for millions of other Nigerians whose flesh and blood will pay for the invoices he racked up while abroad. Like the rest of his clique, he suffers moral blindness and cannot see how the capital flight that results from their conduct impoverishes medical facilities available at home. Who knows how many of them are currently waiting for the travel restrictions to be lifted so that they can haul themselves on another state-sponsored foreign medical trip? At what point will Nigerian leaders begin to do things differently?
In March, when countries started going into lockdown, one of the popular topics various experts commented on was how the way we had always known social life was about to change. They said the pandemic had begun a “world historical moment,” and it was bound to shift the way we conducted our social and political affairs. They divined that we were at the beginning of a new social order because some of the changes we would be making to our social and political lives would become a permanent feature. They said there would be a new world order, but here we are. Countries like Nigeria are barely budging on their existing habits of underdevelopment. Why?
Historians of pandemics particularly prepared our minds for the social changes the pandemic would bring to structures of life. From the various perspectives of these historians, we learned about social development in the wake of a pandemic. We learned that disease outbreaks presented serious-minded societies with the opportunity to bolster their knowledge of medicine and improve on medical research. The structures they built to understand the disease became a permanent part of society even after the worst was over. We also learned that the breach in norms during a pandemic also turns into an opportunity for planners to develop the structures that will facilitate orderliness. People not only reshaped their lifestyles, but they also improved their urban architecture and hygiene practices to optimise quality living.
While they remain an undesirable event of history, pandemics also expose political and economic truths, especially when they coincide with other social anxieties. The USA is confronting that reality after protests and riots pervaded its cities in the past weeks. What started as a protest against police brutality soon metamorphosed into a demonstration of bigger truths: the country was not doing as well, and too many people were being left behind by economic agenda. President Donald Trump had spent the good part of the year touting rising figures of employment, whereas, too many people’s centres were not holding. The pandemic exacerbated the growing frustration, latent tensions, and underlying resentments. People whose miseries have been papered over by a government unduly invested in show-off at the expense of substance stormed the cities. They unleashed their frustration by setting the symbols of their impotence on fire.
Nigerian leaders need to shed their indifference and take a lesson from these happenings in the “saner climes.” When people have no qualms in watching the institutions that form the bedrock of their society burn, it means they have no stake in them. No society can afford to have too many people who have nothing to lose if the country fails. Nigeria, unfortunately, keeps growing an army of citizens who are mentally disconnecting from the country. They are subsisting in a country that promises too little in terms of opportunities and delivers even far less. They do not feel they have anything to lose, and our political class too does not seem to care they are losing them.
Despite the expectations in early March that our leaders would be forced to rethink the terms of our existence, it seems they have only been strengthened in their resolve to do ill by us. Our broken systems will require more than the clarity that a pandemic brings for these leaders to understand that we are long overdue for a change. They do not seem to be thinking about these issues in wider contexts. It has always been about them; it is still about them.
The least Nigerian leaders can start doing is to demonstrate that they know the value of this moment and are prepared to institute a different set of ethics that will roll back our habits of underdevelopment. They have to learn to cut down on their consumption habits, particularly the ease with which they allocate joint resources to what benefits only them. They have to understand how much they deprive the majority of a good life to guarantee the survival of a political minority.
When the governor of Osun State said he could have flown his aide abroad, he showed that there had been no change in his clique’s selfish mindset despite the cataclysmic changes the COVID-19 pandemic has engendered in our social lives. They still think their lives matter more than ours, and they are merely biding their time before they fully resume their destructive profligate behaviour. With the way they are wasting the valuable lessons of history, we might as well come to terms with their incorrigibility already.
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