By Sunny Awhefeada
The title of this piece will tickle the memory of those familiar with the corpus of English Literature who must of necessity remember the title of Charles Dickens’ 1859 novel, A Tale of Two Cities. Dickensian imagination was inspired or better put provoked by the kind of inveterate socio-economic malaise that is afflicting Nigeria at the moment. Dickens lived and wrote in an epoch of unimaginable social rot and grinding poverty. The social, economic and cultural milieu of the Victorian Age during which English fiction bloomed was bleak in an unenviable and almost irredeemable manner. Ironically, that period represents the heyday of English fiction. The travails and ordeals of that era provided a narrative tapestry of social experience that birthed what has come to be known as the Victorian novel. Besides Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Charlotte Bronte, Anne Bronte, Emily Bronte, Jane Austen, George Eliot, among others who recounted the sordid reality of the English landscape of that benighted age produced works of fiction that remain unparalleled to this day. Adversity was thus for the English writer an elixir that spun uncommon yarns. Later writers from different times and climes had to look back at Victorian fiction in their search for narrative models. Many countries of the Third World also passed, and some are still passing, through the rough patch that gave that fictional world the memorable characters that were the victims of the malignant order that the aforementioned writers limned in their works. Nigeria probably leads the pack of Third World countries that are presently manifesting the unenviable lot that defined Victorian England.
The two videos reflected in the title of this intervention have been in circulation for some three or four days now and they speak directly and indirectly to our personal and collective predicament. The first video is that of a riotous scene recorded at the University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan. The video showed patients protesting against seventeen days of lightlessness and lack of water in the hospital. A few staff came to the scene to offer some explanations, but to no avail. The patients lamented their ordeal and felt that they have been abandoned to die. The second video recreates a hospital scene where a medical doctor has just taken delivery of a new baby. The doctor was seen taking the baby that looked lifeless to a small room where he put his medical expertise to work. With worried looks, the doctor put the baby on a bed, brought out some tools and went to work on the seemingly lifeless body. His worried looks persisted as he worked to revive the baby. He tickled it again and again until the baby’s clenched left fist moved, it cried and stopped. Still looking worried, but determined, the doctor continued the act until another round of piercing cry burst forth from the baby. That was the usually anticipated first earthly cry that tells of a baby’s survival at birth. The baby survived. The creases of worries on the doctor’s face melted and in their place was a warm smile of satisfaction. The doctor wasn’t a Nigerian and the hospital scene was foreign. Therein is the tale of two videos. Had the scene in the second video happened in UCH would the baby have survived? Certainly not! The baby would have joined the infamous statistics of stillbirths that made Nigeria to be adjudged as one of the most unsafe places for child delivery some seven years ago alongside Niger, Chad, Sudan and Somalia!
The first video points to the decrepit depth into which Nigeria has sunk. Growing up, UCH was to us the best hospital we could ever imagine. It was not only among the best teaching hospitals in the Commonwealth and by extension the world in the 1970s, it was also reported that the Saudi royal family patronized the hospital. That was nearly fifty years ago and once upon a time! When we ought to have made progress, we receded into the murky waters of state failure as a result of acute failure of leadership and criminal complicity of the led. Many countries in Asia that envied Nigeria in the 1960s and 1970s in view of our phenomenal development despite fighting a civil war have all gone ahead in the race of development while Nigeria remains marooned as a poor, helpless, hopeless and failed entity. Had that baby been born in Nigeria, the doctor, good and committed as he is, would have been helpless. He would have had no equipment to work with. There would have been no electricity to illuminate the hospital theatre and he would have declared the baby dead and moved on to the next victim of our conscienceless system. I watched the video with mounting anxiety praying and hoping that the baby would not die. Those who discussed it with me also shared similar feelings.
The UCH video is reflective of the present state of affairs in Nigeria. Nothing is working here. Our health and educational institutions have collapsed. When the then Brigadier Sani Abacha announced the 1983 military coup he described Nigerian hospitals as “mere consulting clinics”. That was forty-one years ago. Nothing has changed. Rather things went from bad to worse and worst! While admitting that every sphere of national development is in shambles, the two that are worst hit are human capital development and citizens’ welfare as reflected in the near utter damage done to our education and health sectors. Our educational and health institutions are among the least funded in the world. This sad reality has resulted in low workers’ morale, perennial strike actions and brain drain. The number of trained and skilled Nigerians who flee the country every month continues to increase. They are fleeing and escaping to saner climes where there is order and the government’s responsibility of ensuring the welfare and security of the people is not taken for granted.
At the core of our predicament is the hydra-headed monster called corruption. The dreaded monster has injected the nation’s body politic with a cancerous virus that has become malignant and can only be cured by some desperate and deliberate lifesaving action. Nigeria is right now in an intensive care unit in UCH where there is hardly hope of survival unlike the incident in the second video. But must we surrender and succumb to such a fatal order? No we mustn’t. To surrender or succumb is to die. And I know Nigerians do not want to die for nothing. That is why we must think of a redemptive route out of the present quagmire. The people must seize the initiative and reorder society and the workings of government. We must all be involved. I have in earlier interventions called for the vivification of the civic essence of the citizens and privilege the people over politicians. In doing this, the citizens must come up with a charter that will holistically enunciate the rubrics of good governance. Such a charter must prohibit those in government from patronizing private and foreign schools and hospitals. After ruling Lagos for eight years, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, now president of our republic, have had cause to fly abroad for medical attention again and again. After endowing Akwa-Ibom with “uncommon transformation” and boasting that he built “a world class hospital” in the state, Senator Godswill Akpabio, less than six months after leaving the office of governor didn’t find the same hospital “world class” enough to treat a leg injury. He flew out for medical attention. Those who rule us do not attend the hospitals they “built” for us. Their children do not attend the schools they “built” for us. They are like chefs who find the food they cook uneatable yet want others to eat it. Would UCH be in that decrepit state if the president, the governors, the senators and other titans of state patronize the place? Certainly not!
