An Easter like no other; Where are the people?...Nigerian Police & the dynamics of ‘covidflation’ - Ik Muo, PhD

When I was in Enugu (1982-1987), there was story that ‘went viral’ even though there was no social media then (we only had mouth-media).  One man was madly in love, indeed, addicted, to ‘holy-waters’. His daily routine involved coming back from work, having a shower and then straight to US(Udi-Siding) where he would soak himself in the whitish liquid while seated in the usual bench in the thatched-roof bar.  He and his gang would sing all sorts of suggestive songs, exchange no holds barred banters, and tell stories of their various acts of bravery; how they ‘finished’ a battalion during the war, disbanded a group of armed robbers or killed a lion with bare hands.  His running-mate  initially thought that he was having an affair with mama-Nkiru ( there were no sidekicks then).  She trailed him on three occasions and on each occasion, he ended up at US.  She preached, persuaded and threatened to no avail and then she came up with an ingenuous plot. She ordered a first-class palm wine from the Eze-Nkwu 1( king of tappers) from Ngwo,  and chilled it in the fridge( those days when NEPA supplied light). Around 4pm, the husband came in and was about to leave for the usual bar and bench fellowship when she   told him they had to have a very important discussion. He agreed to hold the discussion later in the day but the wife insisted and he agreed to give her a few minutes, because he was late for his  usual encounter. The wife then served him the dead-cold, first class palm wine. The man tested it and sure, it was the real thing. He took a second glass and then turning to the wife, he asked: ‘but where are the people’? In the absence of his drinking pals, the drink did not taste so well and so,  he went off again to US! 

Where are the people? From the look on his face, that was the question ‘running around the head’ of our Archbishop, His Grace, Adewale Martins, as he came in for mass on  Good Friday, Holy Saturday and especially on Easter Sunday and came face to face with the EMPTY church. The Holy Cross Cathedral had just members of his ‘household’, 5 choristers and 4 other congregants, three of whom were Reverend Sisters.   Pope Francis would also wondering, where are the people, when he delivered his homily to an empty St Peters Basilica that usually hosted hundreds of thousands during the Easter seasons.  That was the challenge, which Fr Corbari of St Quirico & Giuletta Parish, Milan, solve in an ingenuous way by placing the pictures of his parishioners on the church pews!

A lot has been written about sheep without shepherd( Mark,6:34); but this Easter, it was the other way round; the Shepherds were, appropriately attired with their staffs of office but the sheep were missing in action, not because they rebelled but because they could not make it! And both  at St Peters Basilica and Holy Cross Cathedral, there was no Alleluia Chorus because  the choristers could not assemble. An Easter Vigil and Easter Mass without Alleluia Chorus?  Unthinkable; but it did happen! We are used to Silent Night during the Christmas seasons  but this time it was a silent Easter. It was bleak; It was uncommon; it was unusual; it was an Easter like no other. Not even during the Biafran War of independence did we have  this kind of experience. The worst that would happen was that the churches were relocated to emergency buildings inside the thick forests and masses held between 5am and 6am. But I was confirmed during the War by Archbishop (now Cardinal) Francis Arinze.  And in the Amichi Parish of 8 towns served by one Priest, we had our normal Masses at St Anthony’s Osumenyi, whenever it was our turn, which was once every 2 months.

The 2020 Easter process started normally with Ash Wednesday, which was celebrated as it ought to be. By the second Sunday of Lent, Coro had become so pervasive that it scattered everything: no school, no church, no market, lock up, lock down, lock in, and since then, life has not been the same.   On Easter Sunday, 13/4/20, Nigeria had 323 infections and 10 fatalities. There were 1.7m cases across the globe with US  moving from 12000 cases on 12/3/20 to 530,000 on 13/4/20 and 10,000 fatalities. Good Friday was the deadliest in the US with 2000 deaths.  There was gloom all over the world; ever country had been subdued by the rampaging  and vicious coro!

That morning, I ‘attended mass’ as I had been doing in the recent pass. We all dressed, arranged our chairs facing the new alter (our TV) and followed the mass from beginning to the end, stood up knelt  and sat down as required, and received  the Holy Communion spiritually.

I have not been to my Parish in the past three weeks; I have not seen my priests and fellow parishioners since then and I could not follow up with our facebook-mass because of streaming challenges. Thus because of the coro challenge, we have been forced to  operationalize the teaching that the family is the domestic church; that we cannot go to where God is because God is where we are; after all wherever two or three are, God is there( Mt, 18.20). after all, the Most High does not dwell in houses made by human hands( Acts,7:48) but dwells in us because we are the temple of the living God( 2 Cor,6.16)them  Even before then, Mrs Itsueli had  designed a programme of how to turn every Sunday into a Family Assembly! So, in the past three weeks,  my household has migrated from Our Lady Seat of Wisdom Okota to Holy Cross Cathedral, Lagos where we now have a new Parish , Priests and parishioners and gradually, I have known them very well. Our Archbishop, Fr Teko( Cathedral Administrator) Fr Ezeigwe( Bishops Secretary) Fr Emedo (Associate Priest),  Seyi Martins(  of Metro FM, the baritone lector)  Sr Fidelia Chukwuma with her sonorous voice and impeccable phonetics, Sr Dorothy Ezike( one of the ‘elders’ of Our Lady of Apostle Congregation) and the dexterous organist. Yeah; I now have another catholic family, courtesy of DSTV 198 and Lumen Christ TV.  After the war ( Yes; this is WAR!) I hope to enjoy a live fellowship with them

 For the first time in my life, I did not see, not to talk of  entering a church throughout the  Holy Week and on Easter Sunday. Not only that I did not go to church; I did not even step out of my parlour for the whole day.   It was like the experience of  one Chike Ezeokoli who was excited that he woke up with his family and they prayed together, cooked together, ate together and played

together. This is the first Easter that I did not travel to Igbo-Ukwu to  enjoy communal fellowship with ‘my people’  and attend to 1001 socio-cultural activities.  This Easter, I was billed to attend, participate or officiate in 3 meetings, 5 Ozo-title ceremonies, 4 traditional marriage ceremonies  among others. I did not travel home and did not attend any of them ( 99% of them were cancelled). It is the first Easter without our Umunna meeting and surprisingly, the world did not collapse. And the messages that poured in were most appropriate for the season; we had message of hope out of the mess as we met the risen Christ in  coro-induced crises( next week)

 Other Matters: Nigerian Police and the dynamics of Covidflation

Economits like  Bismarck Rewane, Ayo Teriba, Prof Nwokoma and Prof Tella have another term to contend with and that is covidflation! We already know what inflation is, whether it is YOY or QOQ; we know its various components and we know the very mean variant called stagflation. Inflation in Nigeria is already at 13% and is projected to get to 19% and this trend is due to, among other things, covidflation.

 Covidflation is inflationary pressure linked to Covid19. When we had our index case on 26/2/20, prices of   certain goods rose astronomically. A micro-bottle of sanitizer moved from the N300 range to N2000+;  and  facemasks moved from less than N500 a pack to N5000 and that was if you saw them to buy. These ones were due to the forces of demand and supply, panic buying, supply chain dislocations and avariciousness/profiteering. Profiting is good but Profiteering is evil. Profiteering  is making obscene and sinful profits at the expense of your fellow human beings.

Food items were the next group that experienced price hikes and that is where our ever-active policemen came in. On 6/4/20, we went to the neighbourhood market to buy some fruits and condiments  and the prices of the items had become irregular. The fruit seller said a police man carried her in a police vehicle to the market and charged N500 for a distance she usually paid N50k. It was with a police van. A  vegetable seller said  that everybody in their own vehicle wase taxed N1200. The fish seller said they policemen charged their driver 15,000 and they all had to share the police imposed covid tax! By the time I went to the same neighbourhood market on 13/4/20, the tithes to the police had gone so high that even my regular fruit customer could not give me ‘jara’!

She said it was no longer doable after  she had shared her money with police men.  And now, all the military and police drivers have turned into human-haulage business...with our tax-funded vehicles. The other day, a friend of mine went to work at Mowe. He is into  haulage and as such, he ought to have free movement  since they  are the ones who transport the food items. However, he had to speak to the policemen in their preferred language  before he  could move. Somebody had reported in the public square that even though NigerBridge is locked up or down, his cousin at Asaba goes to Anambra state anytime he wanted; he only needed to ‘drop something’. There is the report that on the checkpoints along the Shagamu-Benin highway, the fee is N3000  and N5000 for police and military  tollgates respectively. And then, on 13/4/20, a policeman from Okota Police division was caught red-handed; he had extorted N40,000 from a driver. And he took time to recount the money to ensure it was complete! What a confident and sure-footed fellow! Anyway, God don catcham!

I have explained the concept of covidflation and itemized the ‘dependent and independent’ variables. The economists should take it from there but while they are building their models, let them remember that we are talking about human-beings and their  unpredictable behaviours, not some abstract things.

- Ik Muo, PhD, Department of Business Administration, Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago-Iwoye 

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