It seems clear to me that there is some kind of mystery associated with COVID 19. Do location (where you are) and exposure (to constant media news about this pandemic) have anything to do with a people’s susceptibility or otherwise to catching this notorious disease?
I have come to this inevitable conclusion following a social (and not a scientific) experiment I have embarked upon in my own small way in dealing with, or avoid, getting infected by this disease. Following the often periodic updating by the NCDC of how the disease is spreading and the spiking in the death rate, I decided to quietly relocate to my village in Gakem, Bekwarra LGA of CRS to pursue my farm work and to stay safe from both the hysteria and the disease itself. I left May 23 and returned only on Saturday, August 15.
While there, I deliberately decided that I will not develop what I chose to call “the COVID 19 consciousness’’. Like the people living there, I will just live my life freely and not develop the mindset or consciousness of unwittingly inviting the disease upon myself as many do when they have been sufficiently panicked by experts and the media.
I followed my community in living a quiet, non-COVID 19 consciousness or never followed the protocols of wearing face mask and living a frightened, fearful and suspicious life- suspecting the next person of being a victim and deciding to avoid him or her. My community and others in the Ogoja area behave and believe that the disease does not exist and that if it does, they are somehow immune against it. I followed them in that belief and behaviour pattern.
We move freely in burials and other community gatherings. There is no social distancing. As it is a part of our culture, two close friends still drink wine from the same bowl or animal horn as a mark of their friendship and brotherhood!
There is no agency there to daily harass people with near and distant stories of those who have caught the disease, those who are dying from/of it and those who have been impoverished with measures aimed at containing the disease. We live a smug, contented and care-free life. Yet, there was no mysterious diseases killing people in great numbers while I was with them.
What is killing people in my village and the villages around it is the usual, old witches and wizard. Even concerning this, when I got home I told myself I will not live “a witches and wizard consciousness’’ life, a life of always thinking and believing that witches and wizards have nothing else to do but are always after the life of non- witches and wizards.
In my village and many villages in Africa and the Black World, even when a 90 -year old man or woman dies the family will cast their suspicion on the usual predators-witches and wizards. No one just dies like that. There must be a cause and a predator.
I think the COVID people are also like that in their thinking. These days, no one just dies like that. It must be COVID 19 or COVID 19-related!
The conclusion I have reached following my unscientific experiment with myself and others as living test cases is that where you are and what you hear determine whether or not you catch the disease and the number of deaths that rise following disclosures by the agency handling the pandemic.
If you live in Abuja, Lagos and other big cities where it is strongly held and believed that COVID 19 exists and is killing people in alarming numbers, then the likelihood of one catching it and mass numbers getting killed as a result, become a living reality.
If, on the other hand, you live in a village like Gakem in a state like CR where the government has said this disease does not exist or that if it does, it does not kill people in great numbers as said by experts and you or the people believe that the disease does not exist in their midst the chances of your not catching the disease will also become a reality.
There is no use for the big experts in Abuja, Lagos and elsewhere to say that states and people like Crossreverians are living in denial and hasten to pronounce one or two persons to have died of it and that the state and its people should own up. What matters is that the people are living and not dying of COVID 19 in high numbers
I think what is operating here is the Biblical, spiritual law of believing and having your belief confirmed. ‘’As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he’’. So says the Bible. What I have personally learnt from this COVID19 pseudo experiment is that the mind is the most powerful instrument ever invented by God and put in man. If you tell your mind something, it will respond to what you have told it accordingly. If a nation tells itself that a new disease has come that will wipe the people away if they are not careful and you constantly inject that fear in them, that disease will define their lives. That is what is happening to much of the world today.
My spiritual father, David Oyedepo has been teaching us on the power of the mind for years. It is only now that I have caught it. COVID 19 and the work on my farm have brought home the message. My farm is about 20 hectares which I bought little by little until it got to that size. When I came home and beheld its massiveness and the volume of work that needed to be done to open up for cultivation, I felt a bit intimidated until I realized that I was a spiritual son of Oyedepo and needed to tell my mind that I can do it. And do it, I did with the help of many helpers whom God readily made available to accomplish my goals.
To His glory, last Friday, August 14 every inch of that 20 hectares of land was put under cultivation with oil palm, bambara nuts, cassava and rice.
I am also of the deep conviction that like in other cases before COVID 19, the world is being manipulated by the big, rich and influential medico-pharmaceutical industry in alliance with rogue, unethical owners and runners of big, rich and influential media. My suspicion has been deepened by recent awful revelations that pharmaceutical companies, bribe influential media to accept research conclusions that will favour/promote their business. Some editors of some media houses have resigned in anger and are spilling the beans.
After COVID goes, the sane world must regain its balance and begin to interrogate the role of the mass media in how we live in this world. The media propagandizes the rest of the world to think in a particular way, to believe in a particular way and to act in a particular way.
If tomorrow the medical/pharmaceutical industry decide that Malaria is the public health enemy number one, that is how the media will be trumpeting that and telling us how a particular strain of the malaria parasite is becoming resistant to certain drugs and how it is only responding to a particular one developed by a particular company and how deaths from Malaria are spiking in Africa, Latin America and Asia as a result of this rapidly mutating strain and how that is a threat to life in the world.
They will proceed to stampede some undiscerning world leaders to organize their economy and politics to align with that fight against a real and present or non-existent danger.
I returned to Abuja with a sense of righteous anger to share these my findings with you. What do you in the scientific and non-scientific community have to say on this? Is it useless, worse than useless? Is it idiotic and have no foundation in science or observational reality whatsoever?
Whatever is your opinion, I plead for one thing and one thing only: praise me for my courage- the audacity to share this type of finding in a world that has been thoroughly propagandized to see COVID 19 as the scare-crow which rice farmers put in their farms to scare away birds.
Even if you are not disposed to acknowledging my small courage, please appreciate the fact that I have alerted the world to a new pandemic that is more devastating in its effect than COVID 19 and I am talking here about the unholy alliance between the medico-pharmaceutical industry and the media.
Unless people of ethics rise up against this insidious virus that predated COVID 19, the world will not live a fear-free life but a fearful, tentative and half life afraid even of our own shadows. I have said my own. Let the abuse begin.
Please you may wish to call me, among others, a covidiot but this is what I found when I lived in my village among my own people, far, far away from the madding crowd of Abuja, Lagos and Kano. Please note that I do not say that COVID 19 does not exist.
My consternation is our attitude towards it. I think that our attitude should just be that COVID 19 has a ministry and we the people also have our own ministry. Each one should carry on the work of its ministry and not allow one party to hold another to ransom. Now we have allowed COVID 19 to hijack our own ministry.
Idang Alibi is an Abuja- based journalist, publicist and farmer and can be reached on [email protected]
