Yari and his God of meningitis

In the midst of the pains we suffer as a nation over the avoidable and yet ravaging scourge of meningitis currently in Nigeria and the accursed silence and inaction of our elected representatives, we apparently needed some comic reliefs and a natural window into the hearts of those who rule us. In no long a time, providence sent the Chairman of the Nigerian Governors Forum and the governor of Zamfara State, Abdulaziz Yari to us and we are afforded these dual opportunities.

Yari’s Zamfara is the worst hit by this scourge. After meeting President Muhammadu Buhari in the Aso Villa and while speaking with State House Correspondents, he had attributed the scourge to the wrath of God. Said the governor: “What we used to know as far as meningitis is concerned is the Type A virus. The World Health Organization, WHO, has carried out vaccinations against this Type A virus, not just in Zamfara, but many other states. However, because people refused to stop their nefarious activities, God now decided to send Type C virus, which has no vaccination. People have turned away from God and he has promised that ‘if you do anyhow, you see anyhow’ that is just the cause of this outbreak as far as I am concerned. There is no way fornication will be so rampant and God will not send a disease that cannot be cured.”

Immediately this illicit rationale went burst, Yari’s Special Adviser on Media and Public Enlightenment, Mr. Ibrahim Magaji Dosara, attempted to repair the damage. Yari merely asked Nigerians to move closer to God and plead for his mercy to avert further infectious diseases and other health crises in the state and Nigeria, he had said perfunctorily. The most alarming – pardon the word – was Dosara’s further proffer. The governor, he said, thereafter enjoined all Nigerians to embrace prayers, “as God who is aware of the outbreak of the ailment surely has antidote for it.” The Governor, he continued, specially appealed to Nigerians to make deliberate effort to be closer to God by shunning sins of fornication and other forms of disobedience so as to receive his divine health.

This is absolute bunkum. If the thinkers in the WHO were bugged down by the lazy attribution of every human act and misacts to God as Dosara’s boss, would they have apprehended the Type A meningitis strain? If they were as mentally deficit as Nigerian leaders, would they have developed the vaccines for Type C which government now banks on to curtail the scourge? Methinks Dosara even complicated the whole comics by offering an explanation. He should have alerted that his boss was too preoccupied with governance and bored, merely wanted to lighten the burden of death and pains on the brows of the people by cracking a joke, even though it turned out to be a coarse or irreverent humour. The reverse is laughable and seems to explain the simplistic approach that our leaders take to serious national issues.

Emir Lamido Sanusi and other northern elders and including the Federal Government, have thankfully told Yari that his thinking was far more obtuse than the Middle Ages Church Father thinkers who explained all earthly phenomena using God. In that age, but excusable really, their proffer was tailored and limited to their limited understanding of their environment.  To attribute meningitis, a scourge of the 21st century, to the wrath of God is, in my view, one of those scams that are prevalent in Nigeria today among low-minded scammers whose nefarious activities are the reason we are in this national mess.

Of a truth, Nigeria is replete with all forms of religious scavengers and those who momentarily fleece the people through borrowing religious scavengers’ robes to exploit the fact that the people cannot penetrate the spiritual. It is either that Governor Yari needed to use the shield of the spiritual to hide a looming and noticeable deficiency or he has an illusion of knowledge of what is needed to bail his people out of the meningitis knowledge. We must all know that the illusion of knowledge is far lethal than lack of it.

In churches, mosques and sundry other religious places, these religious charlatans have used the lack of the people’s ability to penetrate religious shields to defraud them. This can only be the explanation for people paying billions of naira into the purses of pastors/Imams, basing this on an injunction of millions of years ago to take care of Levites.

The truth is that, man has been given the power to act like God by God Himself and that power is that which has liberated him. Because all of us cannot be busy at the same time trying to solve the problems of the collective, that was why we gathered to invest our elected representatives with the power to act on our behalf. That indeed is the rationale behind Jean Jacque Rousseau’s social contract theory. For the contractee to now throw the power to make the contract work away from the midst of himself and the contractor, unto the laps of some unseen powers is, to my mind, abdication of responsibility and in fact irresponsibility.

Yari mirrors what our fellows in the social contract do to us and why we are in this bind as a people. It is a tragedy of bad faith from our rulers who scarcely think but go on a binge of mindless acquisition and seldom thinking or reflection. From the Federal to states and local governments, the Yaris and their thinking predominate. If not, why would the Type C meningitis scourge catch the states and the federal government napping? Granted that it is a strange strain, methinks that once a people are susceptible to Type A, a proactive government would make projective accommodation of Type C since same conditions cause them. Our Church Fathers government runners would rather drop their irresponsibility and inability on the laps of God. This is criminality of the mind.