Our Chicken Has Come Home To Roost.

By Joel Nwokeoma

For twenty years running, our health sector funding has declined. In many other cases, budgets are padded and looted by lawmakers and public officials with impunity. Some states just looked away in funding health and education sectors preferring instead in erecting white elephants. Our political elite lived in a binge unmindful of the Day of Reckoning. They all feared nothing. Now, coronavirus has brought fear upon the high and low places. The health sector they refused to fund is what they are now looking unto to save and salvage them. In particular, the Gwagwalada Hospital in the FCT they derided with no funding preferring to vire money meant for its expansion to building a 10-lane airport road is where they are now sequestered.
In many towns and villages, there are no clinics and hospitals. Not that there’s no money for them. Some high-heeled felons cornered the funds to build massive mansions for themselves and lead luxury lives. And send their kids overseas to study and lead life in full crush.

In Imo State, successive governments said they were building 27 General Hospitals in each LGA. Today, they are mainly abode for rodents; that’s where they exist.

Now, no escaping the apocalypse. Coronavirus has exposed our self-deceit. It has exposed our folly. It’s exposed our collective idiocy. They can run but they can’t fly. Like Peter Tosh’s Downpressor Man, where will they run to now that the air and land borders have been closed? We are in it together. But God will not fail to reward the wicked in perilous times like this.

• Mr. Nwokeoma wrote from Lagos