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COVID-19: Mass Deaths In The North As The New Reality

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By Suleiman Uba Gaya
It all started in Kano about a month ago, and a week later, specifically on April 21, 2020, a prominent national newspaper reported that, in the space of three days, 150 people have died in Kano. Undertakers in three graveyards in the commercial city, who also doubled as gravediggers, said the frequency at which they were receiving corpses around the time was very unusual when compared with the number of people they were burying before the advent of the coronavirus ravaging the whole world.
Even those losing their loved ones around that period confirmed to various journalists that those that were dying were exhibiting symptoms of coronavirus. The figure excluded tens of other graveyards spread over the eight local government areas that make up metropolitan Kano. At that time also, Kano had only recorded 59 confirmed cases of COVID-19, according to figures released by the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC).
The Guardian of London reported the case of a certain 75-year-old Musa Abubakar, who has been digging graves at a graveyard near the Kano Abbatoir for 60 years.  He told the paper that, throughout these years, he had never dug more than three graves in a day, but, since the outbreak of coronavirus, he, in concert with his colleagues, are now digging at least 40 graves per day. He categorically said that, from the beginning of Ramadan three weeks ago to now, they have buried at least 300 persons. And that is in just one cemetery in a city that has tens of other burial grounds. Musa Abubakar also told the same newspaper that four of his colleagues exposed directly to the corpses have died, and that the state government has not yet fulfilled a simple promise to provide them with protective gear.
Very strangely, however, the government of Kano State denied the story, with the governor insisting that the number of those who died was being exaggerated. When the government was confronted with superior facts, more so when 20 days ago Kano lost 22 very prominent persons in a single day, including a newspaper editor, it now said the reason for the deaths had nothing to do with coronavirus, that those who died were already managing such terminal ailments as diabetes, hypertension, asthma, etc. Very shockingly, the government made this categorical statement without conducting autopsy on even one corpse.
I travelled all the way from Abuja to Kano to ascertain the true position of things and, after going round at least 10 graveyards in the city, one can confirm that citizens of Kano State have continued to die in hundreds. In terms of the figures of positive cases released daily by the NCDC, I can also confirm that it has jumped from 59 to around 700 as at the time of this publication. But even this figure is only for those who had the privilege of getting tested, meaning only God knows the huge number of persons suffering from the ailment.
I wonder whether it requires rocket science to decipher that, bitter as it may sound, what was at play in Kano was simply a case of community transmission of COVID-19. Indeed, a committee set up by the Federal Government to ascertain the truth came up with the same conclusion, though it was made to eat its words a few days later when the minister of a health appeared before the House of Representatives to say no conclusion was reached yet.
But look at it this way. Diabetes, hypertension and asthma, some of the ailments being cited by government officials as responsible for the spike in the number of deaths, are not in any way strange ailments. They have always been with us. Why is it that it is only now, with the advent of coronavirus, that these ailments are killing people in an unprecedented manner? The simple answer is that there is more to it than these ailments.
Now, we need to ask ourselves: why is it that governments at various levels are denying the truth and have been busy trying to divert our attention from reality? The simple answer is politics and irresponsibility. For many days, the only testing centre for COVID-19 in Kano had packed up, and the mysterious deaths started getting noticed at that time. The NCDC, an agency of the Federal Government, clearly doesn’t want to be blamed for that failure.
The NCDC had done something that a lot of people found very strange and shocking. It was busy setting up testing centers even in places that only got their first index case weeks after Kano, but was foot-dragging in doing same in a state that is officially the most populous in Nigeria. It only did so when it was rather late. So, it is not in its interest to admit that people were dying in Kano owing to community transmission of the ailment. Of course, after that false start, the NCDC had stepped up its game, and has since made Kano a top priority.
And what of the state government? The Governor Umar Ganduje administration probably thought Kano people were immune to COVID-19.  For many days, the ailment had refused to register its presence in Kano, and all that was being heard was cases upon cases in Lagos and other states in the southern parts of the country. A serious government would have used the grace period to get fully prepared. But what did the governor do? He set up a task force and made his daughter, yes, his own biological daughter, a key member of the task force. Though the Deputy Governor, Nasiru Gawuna, was chairing the task force, reports in the public domain indicated the governor’s daughter, a rookie doctor, was in charge of almost everything in the task force, so much so that meetings were delayed or even outrightly cancelled or postponed if she was not available.
With the spike in the number of the so-called mysterious deaths, and with heavy criticisms and condemnation of his actions (and inactions) left, right and centre, Governor Ganduje probably is realizing his mistakes, and very little is now being heard of his influential daughter whose membership of the state task force was allegedly slowing down affairs.
In any case, his request for N15 billion to attack the coronavirus has since been turned down by President Muhammadu Buhari, to the delight of the people who alleged the governor was going to divert it to some other negative use. The Federal Government has instead been paying a lot of attention to Kano and providing as much tools and medication as it could in the bid to scale down the number of deaths. To his credit, Governor Ganduje has now been cooperating with the NCDC, and was lucky to get serious support from Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, who donated a well-equipped isolation centre and has partnered with his colleagues in the private sector to provide another one, converting a urology centre to a well-equipped treatment centre.
Now, I used the example of Kano because it was there that the first case of mass deaths was recorded in Nigeria since the advent of COVID-19. But what happened after that? Hadejia, in Jigawa State, and Azare in Bauchi State also started recording mysterious deaths. But like Ganduje, the governors of these states also resorted to living in denial of what is clear and obvious. They all don’t want to be blamed for failure to save the people.
But the frightening reality is that problems are only solved when those affected believe there is a problem. You cannot be having headache and take medication for ulcer and expect to get cured. So, if our governments at various levels are truly committed to curtailing this pandemic and saving the people, it is best they admit the truth and stop worsening the situation by their needless denial. When you keep telling the people that their loved ones were not being killed by coronavirus, chances are they will not use any protection in preparing the dead bodies for burial and, in the process, they, too, will get infected.
The three cities cited as an example, Kano, Hadejia and Azare, are renowned commercial centres in the North with huge population density. Now, Sokoto, too, has become another state witnessing strange deaths on a mass scale. We do not pray to get more states, but then that is only wishful thinking. One sad reality is that  the people themselves are doing very little to protect themselves.
My fear is that, with some people in the North still arguing that coronavirus does not exist, curtailing the pandemic in those areas is going to remain a Herculean task. What, therefore, government at all levels needs to pay more attention to is massive sensitization of the entire populace. There is no way COVID-19 or any other ailment could be curtailed without the buy-in of the people. We simply must forget about denial, set aside our political differences and collectively embrace this new reality, like other sane societies have done. Only by so doing could we defeat and extinguish COVID-19 and other ailments

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Muslim-Muslim Ticket: idea fixation pathetic, religion be excluded in politics and governance, says El-Rufai

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The Governor of Kaduna State, Mallam Nasir El-Rufai, has described the possibility that the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, would run a Muslim-Muslim ticket in the 2023 presidential election as mere speculation.

Making a remark on Channels TV’s political show, Politics Today, he said, Nigerians’ obsession with religion – when it comes to voting – rather than competence is sad. “This fixation of Nigerians on religion instead of competence, capacity, and capability is quite sad and pathetic.”

El-Rufai said that anyone asking him questions about the controversial Muslim-Muslim presidential ticket is asking the wrong person, because, in the 2019 general election he settled for a qualified Muslim woman as a running mate and won the election in Kaduna State.

He said, “I don’t look at people from Muslim-Muslim or Christian-Christian angle. Most of my closest friends are Christians. It was Pastor Tunde Bakare, a Pentecostal pastor, that took me to the CPC, not President Buhari. I’m very close to Bakare. I’m very close to many Christians. I don’t think the business of governance has anything to do with religion. I think we should look for the best person for the job. A person that will get the job done and let him do that.”

He advised Nigerian journalists to keep religion out of politics and government. He said, “I don’t think we should be looking at religion. We want to develop this country. When I get into a plane, I don’t ask about the religion of the pilot. When I go to the hospital, I don’t ask for the doctor’s religion of the doctor, I just want to get well. I just want to get to my destination when in an aircraft.

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Nigerian Universities, the interference of Professional bodies, and the time bomb

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Having worked with multidisciplinary teams during my PhD at the Department of Engineering of the University of Leicester and postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Electric Power Engineering at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), I decided to experiment the acceptability of a multidisciplinary team in Engineering departments in Nigerian universities in 21st century on my return in 2015. Then, I was already due to be a Senior Lecturer in ABU since 2014. So I sent my CV and an application letter for the position of Associate Professor to the VC through the Head of Electrical Engineering Department of one of our public universities in November 2015. And I received the following not very surprising reply.
“Having perused your application documents, I found them interesting and relevant to the need of the department. However, I cannot pass your application for further processing because of the post applied for. For your information, the Council for Regulation of Engineering in Nig. (COREN) has fixed the bar of an Engineering lecturer who is not registered with COREN at Lecturer I regardless of the number of his/her publications.”
The question that came to my mind was that is the regulation of engineering lecturers in universities part of the mandates of COREN? I read the reply again and he was very emphatic on my PhD and postdoctoral research experience and the relevance to his department. I was made to understand that the University has no academic staff in the area of high voltage engineering, but for them to utilize my experience in high voltage engineering, if I was actually ready to move there, I have to accept to be demoted for 4 years because COREN said so. And I can’t grow no matter my research output till I am registered with COREN. Amazing offer! It will take a complete idiot to accept such an offer. That is the reality of the compartmentalization of our university system and the destruction of the Nigerian university system and the structure by supposed professionals.
This was completely different from my experience in my two universities in Europe. Prof. Len Dissado had a first degree in chemistry and a PhD in chemistry but was a Professor of Engineering at Leicester because his research area was in Dielectrics, a topic very relevant to High Voltage Engineering. He was retained as Emeritus when I left in 2012. Dr. Steve S. Dodd had his first degree in Physics and PhD in Physics but was employed as a Senior Lecturer in Engineering (High Voltage Engineering group) because his research area was in Electrical insulation materials. He retired as a Reader in High Voltage Engineering. The HoD of the Electric Power Engineering as at the time I left the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in 2015 had a PhD in Physics and was a Professor of Electric Power Engineering. Universities in the rest of the world are closing gaps, while we are widening the gap. Since I could not close the gap, so we decided to have a High Voltage Laboratory in the Physics department.
In universities, we are academics and research workers. Irrespective of the field, we are employed to teach and do research. The yardstick for evaluating your performance is research output. Engineering graduates in academia are not left out. They are not employed as Engineers. Universities have their Engineers to do the engineering work. As an academic, you can be COREN registered to enable you to practice outside the university but not for the classroom and research labs in the university. I once asked a colleague some years back if as a university worker, he is an Engineer for real or a teacher and he was silent. I asked about the value of COREN registration in his teaching of Engineering courses, research output, and student project supervision and he could not give me a straight answer.
I still find it weird that COREN, a body regulating practicing engineers on the field is now setting standards for promotion in the Engineering departments of Nigerian universities. They will soon be telling Nigerian universities what to teach and what not to teach. The other councils of professionals will soon follow to set what they perceived as standards for the respective faculties or departments.
The interference of the Councils of professionals in the affairs of Nigerian universities has grown beyond setting promotion guidelines. They are now deciding the establishment of faculties and the duplication of academic departments. It does not matter the burden of running such faculties and departments on the universities. I am still wondering how they are able to twist the hands of NUC and the universities’ Senate and Governing Council to achieve all that. Not long ago, the Faculty of medicine in Nigerian public universities were converted to Colleges of Medical Sciences with 4 faculties and several departments, thanks to the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria.
What baffled me was the fact that the Department of Biochemistry, for example, that has taught medical students the biochemistry they know since the inception of the study of medicine in Nigerian universities is suddenly no more qualified to teach medical students because the Lecturers do not have a degree in medicine. Very amazing! We now have duplicated Biochemistry departments across Nigerian universities that they called “Medical Biochemistry” in the college of medicine. The “medical biochemistry” will possibly be taught by the Medical Doctors based on what they learned from the Biochemists in life science while in medical school. Could this be a case of trading quality for ego?
We also, for example, have a medical microbiology department in the college of medicine, a microbiology
department in the faculty of life science, and a vet microbiology department in the faculty of Veterinary medicine.
The microbiologists will be able to explain to us the difference between the different versions of the microbiology.
I was in Norway in 2014 when the Norwegian couple at NTNU shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine with a Professor at the University College London (UCL). I tried to check the structure of these 2 universities. The faculty of medicine at NTNU has no biochemistry department. The Department of Biotechnology and Food Sciences, a replica of the Biochemistry department, is in the faculty of natural science and they provide service to the faculty of Medicine as we had before the coming of the colleges of medicine in Nigerian universities.
How the increased number of departments helping to improve the quality of our academic output is what I can’t figure out. Rather than the duplication of service departments that will only increase the number of academic departments and won’t really add much value to the system but increased running cost, we should have created a college of life sciences and pulled the relevant faculties and departments into it.
Individualistic research is going extinct and most of the novelties of the 21st century are from interdisciplinary researches. One of the winners of the 2014 Nobel prize in medicine John O’Keefe is a neuroscientist in the Faculty of life sciences at the UCL with his degrees in Psychology. But the others, May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser are both neuroscientists from the Faculty of Medicine at NTNU and received their first degree from the Department of Psychology and PhD in neurophysiology at the Faculty of Medicine in Oslo.
There is nothing more fascinating than the fusing of different ideas together to produce a unique product. That is the exploration in the 21st century. The world has left us behind in individualistic ideology and moved into multidisciplinary academics. If we must make progress in our universities, we must break our erected artificial barriers that are keeping us apart. The academics in physical sciences and engineering must come together with possibly a research centre that is into cutting-edge research that will involve research groups from all the relevant departments. Same way to bring life science and medical complex together.
I have seen graduates of mathematics that became Professors of Econometrics in Economics departments in universities in Europe, but not in Nigerian universities. I have seen a graduate of Chemistry that became a Professor of Engineering in Europe, but not in Nigerian universities. I have seen a graduate of Physics that became a Professor of Electric Power Engineering in Europe, but not in Nigerian universities. In Nigeria, I have seen Engr (Prof) XXX boldly written on our doors in the department but not in the universities in Europe. Are we having an identity crisis?
Professional bodies that are supposed to focus on the regulation of Professionals in the field should focus on their mandate and not be given free hands to change University policies as it pleases them. If we don’t end their interference, just like the medical council, COREN could wake up one day to tell our universities that there is a need for colleges of Engineering with departments of mathematics and physics to service the college because those in Mathematics and Physics departments are not qualified to teach engineering students because they don’t have engineering degrees. Vet council, Pharmaceuticals council, builders council, architects council, Quantity surveyors council, etc, may follow. So, how are we going to handle that?
Let’s stick to the founding principles of the university. Universities have world standards. We can stick to our British standard or borrow a leaf from the world’s top universities to improve our system, instead of allowing professional bodies to manipulate us and create barriers within the university system that will further slow down the progress we are to make.
Our universities are not in it’s best form and we have to do what we have to do to improve them. We should be more preoccupied with that. We should be discussing how to reposition Nigerian universities to be able to stand up to our various challenges and not duplicate departments without facilities because some Councils of professionals said so.
Finally, to my colleagues in Electric power engineering or high voltage engineering in Nigerian universities, you are welcome to experience our High Voltage Materials Laboratory in the Department of Physics, Ahmadu Bello University Zaria. We have a 400 kV DC generator and 100 kV AC source with a partial discharge measurement system to serve you. Join us to learn the physics of electric power equipment. We do not have barriers!

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Sports

Galadima Knocks Nigeria Sports Handlers Over Laziness in Talent Development,

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By Abdulgafar Oladimeji.

Former chairman, Nigeria Football Association , NFA Ibrahim Galadima(MFR) has faulted the administration, promotion and development of sports in Nigeria, noting that  the continuous  degenerating  global  status of Nigeria on the  sporting  arena could be attributed to laziness.

The outspoken sports administrator   stated that the absence of  clear  cut policies  on how  sports should be driven in Nigeria  constitutes parts of the factors that  has enrolled Nigeria on the path of total  failure.

Galadima in his remarks  on ( Thursday)at a one day workshop organized by Sports Writers Association of Nigeria, SWAN  Kano state chapter held at the conference hall of the Kano state Sports Commission with the theme “Early Warnings and Security Vigilance At Sports Events, he said “we re yet to clearly structure and drive the message clearly to say whether we   are in sports for business or  for leisure purposes.”

“our sports is going through difficult times, certainly, the Kenyans have  a clear concentration, they  have  shown clearly where they belong by dominating marathon races, recently they came to Kaduna and stamped their dominance.

“The abundant talent in Nigeria remained untapped, no age group graduation, even if you are in Chad, you are considered as a foreign based athlete, we are now so lazy in identifying talents.” Galadima lamented.

He alleged that lack of trust and confidence has  sent sponsors out of the industry, adding that potential brand sponsors are shying away from injecting their monies into  the industry for the fear of unaccountability.

 

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