By Vincent Akanmode.
My extended family was thrown into mourning last week with the death of a beloved member after she was denied admission at the National Hospital, Gwagwalada, Abuja. She had left her base in one of the states in the Northeast to attend the burial of her younger sister in Kogi State only to start complaining of tiredness after the obsequies were completed. She was promptly taken to a mission hospital in the community where she was attended to and discharged the following day.
However, the sickness relapsed before she left the community for her base in the north, prompting her being taken to Lokoja, Kogi State capital, where her daughter ( a pharmacist) and the daughter’s husband (a medical doctor) are based, in the belief that she was in safe hands with the two professionals. The couple wasted no time taking her to the Federal Medical Centre in Lokoja, but as fate would have it, her health deteriorated and she fell into coma less than 24 hours after she was admitted.
Seeing that her condition did not improve after almost one week at the intensive care unit (ICU) of the hospital, her husband decided that she should be taken to the National Hospital in Gwagwalada. But on getting to Gwagwalada, hospital officials said they would not touch her even with a six-inch pole because her COVID-19 status was not known, having been brought in from a state that was not testing for the pandemic because the governor, Yahaya Bello, insists that there is no such thing as Coronavirus in the state. She was then taken to a hospital run by the Catholic Church where she gave up the ghost even before doctors could attend to her.
The foregoing is an example of the burden the state bears on account of Governor Bello’s insistence that reports of massive deaths from COVID-19 in Nigeria and other parts of the world are nothing but tales by moonlight. In Nigeria, the ravaging virus is believed to have infected no fewer than 116,000 people and claimed more than 1,485 lives across the states of the federation, but Governor Bello insists that if by any chance the virus exists, it is incapable of penetrating Kogi, the state with the highest number of boundaries.
Carved from Kwara and Benue states by the Babangida administration in 1991, the North-Central state, whose capital, Lokoja, is at the confluence of Rivers Niger and Benue, shares boundaries with Nassarawa, Benue, Enugu, Anambra, Delta, Ondo, Ekiti, Kwara and Niger. Each of the aforementioned states have had their fair share of Coronavirus infection, but Governor Bello says the virus is yet to gain access to his state in spite of daily interactions between the residents of the state and those of the nine others surrounding it.
While the federal government and states like Lagos and Ogun are running from pillar to post in search of ways to stem the spread of the virus, Governor Bello has been at best derisive in his response to the pandemic, deceived probably by the sound of the name of his state to think that the residents are immune to any disease. ”NCDC (National Centre for Disease Contro) is marketing Coronavirus and destroying our lives,” he was quoted as saying on one occasion. At other times, he only stopped short of calling the campaign against the spread of the virus a fraud. “Enough of this Covid-19 nonsense. 386 new cases? We have played the fool enough. And you have discharged 679… What did you give to these ones you discharged?” he queried on another occasion.
The governor even took upon himself the duties of a consultant at some point, telling the NCDC that instead of spreading fear and causing panic among the populace, they should simply tell the people the drugs that were used by Nigerians who survived the infection. “Tell people how to boost their immune system and stop creating merchants out of Corona. People are dying every day for more serious ailments because they can’t access hospitals. People have diabetes, kidney issues, liver issues, heart diseases, cancer, BP, labour complications, HIV, brain issues, lung diseases, etc. Some need to go to other states to access hospital services… They are dying in numbers and no one is counting them because you are counting Corona.”
The question on everyone’s lip is what the governor hopes to achieve by feigning the absence in his state of a ubiquitous pandemic that is a real as daylight and with records of the high number of eminent and not-so-eminent people who have died from it. More worrisome is the fact that some other minds in the state appear to be buying into the governor’s derisive thoughts of Coronavirus. It probably explains why the kinsmen of a former General Officer Commanding (GOC) 6 Division of the Nigerian Army, Maj-Gen. Olu Irefin in his Ayetoro-Gbede native community in Kogi State vehemently rejected the claim by the Nigerian Army that their son died of COVID-19 complications while attending the annual Chief of Army Staff conference in Abuja.
A statement signed by A.A. Aminu, a spokesman of the Ayetoro-Gbede Development Association, called on the authorities to investigate the general’s death because COVID-19 could not have killed their son at such speed. ‘“Except there is COVID 20, which we doubt, COVID-19 does not kill its victims within three days,” the statement said.
The earlier Governor Bello admits the reality of the ravaging virus and encourages the people to go for tests, the better for the state. There is no medal to be won from living in denial of a ubiquitous virus that is killing with the ruthlessness of a hydrokinetic force.
