Haha! Is Nigeria Happening To Me?

People talk a good game about how the economy is not smiling. Yet, we all seem to be getting fat. Don’t even bother trying to figure out how a bad economy suddenly translates to Nigerians growing a larger waistline. Nothing about this place follows any particular logic. Nigeria is where logic comes and gets effed in the ass.

A short while ago, only a handful of persons could be seen running or walking or just engaged in some simple workout routine at nighttime along the 1-kilometer stretch of road where I reside. Since I still can’t go to the gym (I haven’t been vaccinated), I’ve taken to running at night too whenever I can. The air is easier to breathe at night and I hardly run into any large mass of people. These days though, I’m having to second-guess myself cos the entire street is always filled with all kinds of people running (shapely and robustly shapeless alike). 10 or 11pm at times, you’d still find people panting on the street and struggling to breathe through every available hole in their body. Children sef are running at night. Can you beat that? When I was a child, we didn’t run to burn any fat. We had no fat to burn. We only ran from ojuju Calabar or the mere mention of it. What are children eating these days bikonu?

Too many heavy-breathing people on the road only means too many unseemly and unseen particles being deposited in the air, including Covid infected particles, I would imagine. Covid hasn’t disappeared yet. Not so fast. This past Wednesday, the dreaded Delta variant sneaked into my family and took my late cousin’s wife. The children are now orphaned. So I’m back to taking extra care. Even the seemingly safe nighttime run might not be so safe for the unvaccinated like me anymore. I’ve always made sure to keep a healthy distance from people whenever I go running. But if I could smell people’s cologne or body odour from about 12 feet out, then I could still breathe in whatever unseen particles they left in the air, right?

Kai! I shouldda gotten that vaccine the very first week it became available jeje o. It was one yeye woman that totally bewitched me. I had gone to the Ayinke House in Ikeja for the shot when this woman accosted me and literally tossed me through the open doorway like I was a rabid dog swarming with rabies.

“But I thought this thing is now open to the public,” I protested as the woman began to shoo me away.

“Yes, but you’re not a health worker,” she said to me. “We’re prioritizing health workers for now. I’m so sorry. Thank you. Bye.”

I could sense that she was struggling to be polite even in her obvious aggression. If I had said one more word, she would’ve summarily called the hospital security on me. So, I tucked in my bruised ego and walked back to my car.

The second time was a bit more confounding. I was told at a different health center that the priority had shifted to people who were 50 and above. But while the officials who stopped me at the gate were struggling to explain the new ‘directive’ to me, I saw a number of Asians, mostly Indians, already seated inside the center waiting to get their shot. I could swear that some of them weren’t even 30 yet. In my mind I was like “there you go again. Ordinary vaccines wey other nations dash us o, na hin una don already take dey do man-know-man.” It’s a sad tale of how Nigeria always manages to happen to us. SMH

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