In this 21st century world of globalisation, what goes round truly comes round. From region to region, country to country, industry to industry and person to person, the spiral of coronavirus is doing the morbid ‘ward round’ and taking people to heaven or hell.
To date, there have been 220,877 confirmed cases of coronavirus in 176 countries, with 8,988 of the patients confirmed dead. The world is in what the Yoruba would call, “gau,” or a dangerous cul de sac.
A conspiracy theory doing the rounds is that coronavirus is a chemical weapon unleashed by China to fight a phantom World War III and to even scores with the West. You would agree that if this is true, coronavirus could be a veritable weapon of mass destruction.
The theory gains more ground when international media reports indicate that China, where coronavirus first broke, has successfully tackled the disease, folded up the last hospital dedicated to handling coronavirus cases and sent the medical personnel back to their homes.
If the world is a global village, with everyone in everyone else’s backyard, those instigating the war will perish with their victims. Although medical experts aren’t quite saying that coronavirus is airborne, you could metaphorically say its capacity to spread, free-to-air fashion, will result in Mutually Assured Destruction, to borrow a phrase from Cold War Theorists.
Like the genie in the magic lamp, coronavirus escaped in Wuhan, China, traversed the seven seas to all the continents of the world and claimed many lives in its wake as a handmaiden of death the ‘Grim Reaper’. So far, 42 Nigerians have fallen sick through coronavirus and one high profile Nigerian was confirmed dead.
The outbreak of coronavirus has assumed an epistemological dimension through the phrase, ‘social distancing,’ which is a shorthand word for avoiding crowds as much as possible. Some group activities that people are expected to avoid are concerts, movies, retail outlets, gyms, sporting events, even mass transits and sleepovers.
The other trending phrase is, “lock down,” which means that human activities in an entire city, or part thereof, has been prohibited by government’s restrictive laws or voluntary avoidance by members of the public, who fear for their lives.
Nigeria had its index coronavirus patient, whose case was expertly handled by Lagos State, Ogun State, the National Centre for Disease Control and the Federal Ministry of Health, in that order. The index patient, who was in isolation for some time, has been cured and he has been discharged.
But true to its nature as a virus, coronavirus has gone viral, berthing in the following Nigerian states, so far: Èkìtì, Edo, Enugu, Plateau, Kaduna, Kano, Lagos, Ogun, Ondo, Oyo, and Yobe. Media reports indicate that three Nigerians have died from causes traceable to the virus.
What some doomsday alarmists are saying is that the world system, or what rastafarians call ‘Babylon System,’ is about to collapse. Some Pentecostals, however, think it’s worse than that. They insist the world is coming to an end and Armageddon is right here. Well, almost here.
Travel bans against citizens of countries that record relatively high incidences of coronavirus have adversely affected the aviation industry globally. Many airlines are reducing their fares, cancelling flights and temporarily laying off many of their workers, as they face dwindling revenue from reduced flights.
International Aviation Transport Association forecasts that if the coronavirus pandemic does not abate soon, Nigeria’s aviation industry may lose $434 million and 22,200 jobs, as more than 2.2 million passengers will not be able to fly.
As Nigeria’s National Sports Festival, scheduled to hold in Edo State, is postponed indefinitely and football matches, such as the Juventus-Inter Milan match of the other day, are played to only TV cameras in an empty stadium, the hosting of July 2020 Olympics Games in Japan is becoming iffy. The Olympics Games, the sporting event of elite sport men, holds every leap year.
Interestingly, Japan’s gaffe-prone Deputy Prime Minister, Taro Aso, is suggesting that Japan probably has a 40-year cycle of jinx regarding the Olympics Games, which it could not host in 1940, because of the Second World War.
In 1980, 40 years after, Japan joined the United States and China to boycott Moscow Olympic Games because the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. After yet another 40-year cycle, coronavirus is threatening to abort Tokyo 2020.
Yoshio Mori, chairman of the local organising committee, who is also a former Japanese Prime Minister, however insists that the games will hold. In any case, the Olympics Games torch has arrived Tokyo amidst the negative speculations.
In Nigeria, state governments are advising schools to shut down and asking worship centres to restrict the number of worshippers within their auditorium to 20 or 50 at a time. Some Moslems are not too sure if both the Lesser Hajj and the Greater Hajj will hold this year.
Meanwhile, all kinds of novel ideas of worship, like online services, television or radio broadcasts and conversion of house fellowships that typically have less than 50 members into temporary worship centres, have been introduced.
Price Waterhouse Coopers, a global management consulting firm, has identified the common issues that will be confronting organisations while the coronavirus scare lasts as: protection of the workforce, disruption of supply chain, decline in orders and sales, reduced operations, restricted travels and new compliance regulations.
Restaurants, in some European countries, have been advised to close shop temporarily, just as the aisles in several food stores and shopping malls are virtually empty. Some cynics however, crow that the Jeb Bezoses of this world, and their online shopping portals, just entered into their El Dorado.
To deliberately break a redundancy rule of grammar, (sorry, journalism teacher, Dr. Delu Ogunade), the truth is truly true that the value of the stocks of Amazon.com, eBay, Jumia, Konga, and other online sales portals should be truly charging like bulls. It shouldn’t be too hard to figure that out.
The 2019 average closing price of crude oil, which stood at $57. 05 per barrel, has plummeted to less than $30. Consequently, Nigeria that planned a N10.59 trillion budget for 2020, has had to review its benchmark projections for crude oil downwards and shaved off N1.5 trillion from the budget.
The managers of the Federal Government’s fiscal policy, who fixed the crude oil benchmark price for the 2020 budget at $57, are yet unrealistic. They lack the grit of hard-nosed numbers men.
The five cents difference between the 2019 closing price of $57.05 and the $57 benchmark for the 2020 budget is wafer-thin. With crude oil prices tanking to $24, even the revised benchmark for the 2020 budget is unrealistic at $30.
The $22.79 billion foreign loan that the Senate already approved for the Federal Government to borrow was quietly dropped by the House of Representatives, maybe after the Executive Branch whispered some discouraging words.
On March 10, 2020, the Nigerian stock market value dropped to N12.7 trillion, after losing N656. 04 billion. Panic sell-offs were triggered after the coronavirus scare caused the crude oil prices to drop drastically.
Now that the Central Bank of Nigeria claimed it has, by way of semantics, only depreciated the naira, the prices of imported goods are spiking, as coronavirus threatens to stand in the way of further importation of goods.
The world, including Nigeria, is staring at an economic lockdown.
