Alhaji Francis Danjuma Al-Oronsaye wrote: For some days now,the social media has been awash with the news of Mr Patrick Sawyer,an American-Liberian,who we are now heaping the blame of ebola upon(even our president was said to have insulted him). It reminds me of the bini saying,nuse se miehe na tiebo.(The poverty-striken man has found someone to blame for his woes. Some months back,the news went viral that the virus was ravaging the West African countries of Sierra Leone and Liberia. We have a lot of our citizens in the countries and by virtue of the ECOWAS protocols,citizens of these nations are free to enter Nigeria. A country that thought with its head would have set up adequate preventive measure. No,what did we do? Our media-attention-seeking minister of (mis)information,Liebaran Maku,quickly rushed to a media briefing and said the transformer government of Ebelemi Azikiwe had provided adequate measure and had even procured enough vaccines to take care of the epidemic(a simple check on google should have shown him that a cure for ebola had not been found yet). Good. Mr Patrick Sawyer probably watched/read that news and probably decided to seek help. I guess it is not a crime for a man who is terminally ill to seek help,no matter how stupid it may seem.(Afterall,a lot of healthy people wey no get ebola drank and bathed with salt water). Our borders are porous without adequate screening measures. Now wey the disease don nack us gidigba nko? Our minister of health and his information counterpart are fighting over each other for media attention. We immediately launched an ebola fund of N1.9b and the next thing we see is oga at the top being shown on TV modelling hand sanitizers,while over 300m has been given as baiko to some other nations. I saw a picture of the ebola centre that so much noise is being made about and I almost wept. I no go allow my enemy pig even stay there. I learnt there is no water and all the patients under observation(some of whom may not have the virus) are being made to share common toilet facilities. Yet,we blame the nurse for escaping from the centre and running home. In our desperation to blame someone for our woes, we simply forgot that there are a lot of our citizens living in those countries and without Patrick Sawyer,sooner or later,some of those citizens would have come to Nigeria. It would have been more disastrous if one of our citizens had come in by road when the symptoms had not fully manifested.Imagine if a cittizen had brought it to Nigeria and taken it to one remote village. Perhaps,by now,we would be talking of hundreds of cases. Right now,our officials are busy announcing with glee about how some infected patients have been healed. Other countries would place her under further surveillance for a few more months to be very sure,but our Minister of health seems to enjoy the cameras these days. I watched on TV that Kenya has banned flgihts coming from Sierra Leone and Liberia(ravaged countries) except rtheir own citizens,who will be properly screened. They have set up centres,which I saw on TV and are training volunteers to take care of the situation(when they do not have it yet). This is proaction. We are the cause of our problems and should stop blaming others.
Posted on: Mon, 18 Aug 2014 11:59:52 +0000