Lockdown Blues-2

It is only 9 o'clock in the morning and the sun has begun its daily run from the east. Amusa walks into the gathering where five comrades are already seated around a kainkain bottle. It is crammed with plant roots that displace the strong liquid right to the neck of the bottle. That is Mama Tega's definition of a full bottle of gin, and it will cost the lockdown revelers N500. The roots are believed to cure any type of ailment, including the coronavirus infection, and provide sexual staying power, a much needed palliative in these idle lockdown times.

By the time this innocuous community gathering grows to its full quorum, three of these bottles would go down, with all the dire consequences on human livers.

The daily gatherings have foisted on these neighbours the affinity of comrades. They have a common cause in being virulent critics of the government once they gather, and have solutions to all societal problems to which government officials appear stupidly blinded.

Mama Tega's nondescript provision store is the host of these meetings. It has assumed an unprecedented importance in the neighborhood in the wake of the lockdown. With no electricity in their homes, the invading heat bearing down on them, the daily visitors to her joint need no prodding to escape their homes. In the advent of the lockdown, she planted a huge Coca-Cola umbrella in front of the store to provide a shade, no, to draw the customers out of their houses, making hers one of the few businesses that should come out of the lockdown stronger, if she survives the virus. Daily sales have more than tripled, and the investment in the umbrella has paid itself.

"Mama Tega, remove the kainkain from that table," Amusa orders with some bravado and pulls a chair to the table. "No be everyday man go dey suffer. Give everybody a bottle of Star and two bongafish!"

"Yes, sir! Coro abeg no go o!" Mama Tega croons happily.

"Musa himself!" Djesan hails excitedly. "E be like say you don hammer jackpot!"

"Abi na government stimulus you don hammer?" Paul asks and licks his lips in readiness.

"Which government? Can anything good come out of this government?" Amusa rails. "Na my senior brother for Abuja declare awoof for all of us o. He wired some money to our eldest sister in Jeddo for us to share. 10k each as lockdown subsidy. My brother, levels don change o!"

The house rises to give him a loud ovation, even as Mama Tega sets the drinks and the bongafish on the table. The raucous ovation draws some late risers to Mama Tega's.

"But there's no movement. How were you able to go to Jeddo and come back?" Djesan asked.

"My friend, if you want to see the best speed and craftiness of a little boy, send him on an errand to a place he wants to go. You nko? When dem say make you come collect local government rice for Orerokpe, lockdown fit stop you? Abeg make una drink jare."

Secret phone calls about Amusa's largesse or 'declaration' soon draw more neighbours to the gathering. When I questioned how drinkers manage their ceaseless drinking spells in these hard times, a brother said to me, "You don't need money to drink beer. Simply show up at a drinking joint and sit down. You'll have your fill of beer. There's always someone declaring at every joint."

By the time the morning session is over, Amusa is indebted to Mama Tega by as much as N5800.

"No shaking," he declares rather foolishly as the bill hits his hand. For a man whose daily source of livelihood is on lockdown, it is the most disdainful use of a bailout. How the unenlightened spend their money is perhaps the 8th wonder of the world!

In the more than two hour session of their morning ritual, all social distancing rules, the main reason for the lockdown, are broken by 22 people. It calls to question the level of awareness of the populace of the criticality and danger of the times we live in. The understanding of our people is abysmally unenlightened. Whereas my wife bought a bottle of groundnuts and would not let us eat it before she had passed it through a microwave ("I don't know the fingers that peeled the nuts." This corona ehn!), elsewhere, naming ceremonies (I was even invited to one), child dedications, birthday parties, and sundry social meetings continue in homes unabated. The thinking of the uninformed and the ignorant that the coronavirus plague is a big man's affliction is very frightening, and quite unfortunate.

You may cage them out of major township streets, markets, mosques, and churches, but not out of the small bars, shops, and meeting points embedded in community neighborhoods. What we need is a lock-in, not a lockdown. But that is an ideal only proper education and enlightenment can achieve. No coercive power of government can enforce it. Unfortunately, education and enlightenment is one virtue the masses of our people lack. No thanks to prevalent poverty and a culture of greed. Ask the average trekker on the street or reveler at a bar why we are locked down and their answer is the government said so.

My one consolation though is that, unless this is happening and we are not reporting it, in our villages, rural communities, and congested urban shanties we have not seen the mass deaths on the streets predicted by Mrs Melinda Gates. And may we not see them. Let no one tell me this is because somebody has been enforcing the lockdown and social distancing rules in those places. It might just be that God continues to be benevolent to us. Indeed, in this part of the world, abdication of responsibility and total reliance on God appears to be our one and only recourse in every eventuality. We know and do nothing else.

Sometimes I wonder if God will not ask Africans to give a special account of the brains He put in our heads, brains that are as new and unused as ever by the time we die.

(For my books and other articles, take this link to my website and blog: https://www.chrisekpekurede.com)