The Class Economics of a COVID Lockdown
“Odun yi a tura ko ni le koko mo mi …”
A plantain seller in my neighbourhood is singing as she arranges green plantains in a heap on a bowl not designed to take that much. Her song, an affirmation of faith, in English means, “This year will be pleasant. It won’t be difficult for me.” She sings mindlessly as she adds another green bunch on the laden pile as I walk on.
For 5 days, I have been indoors mostly, keeping busy with creative ventures both personally and on my work as a real estate professional. But despite my best attempts at staying occupied, I have suffered vertigo of a different kind — one heightened by the meaninglessness of these times and a sensory overload of detritus washing in by the second from social media channels. My sense of balance is further distorted by not knowing neither date nor day of the week any more. In those 5 days, my family and I have subsisted on our hoarded staples to a point of satiation and I have driven aimlessly around a couple of times just to borrow air and regain a false sense of freedom from my involuntary incarceration. Our estate gates are shut to prevent entry or exit and our collective focus has shifted to jogging and morning walks as a way of keeping fit and killing time.
And it has just been 5 days.
Across the chasm from me and my coterie of Nike-swaddled morning walkers, is a sprawling community of tin roofs and power poles of tangled wires etched like a toddlers’ pencil scribbles against the blue morning sky. In this community, no one is taking morning walks. Traders peep through the half-open doorways of their shops, ready to shut it in a heartbeat if they sense a threat from the authorities enforcing the lockdown as they strain to draw in the hands of commerce dangling beside our walking forms. A fruit seller is arranging his stock not too far from where I had passed the singing plantain seller. Clucking chickens cooped according to their sizes keep up a steady chatter at a makeshift shed beside where the rains had blown the roof off a makeshift stall the night before. Even vendors selling light bulbs and knick-knacks that don’t fall under the category of ‘essential items’ as prescribed by the State government, wait by closed stalls, ready to heed the call of demand.
These folks live day to day. They can’t panic-buy, neither are they buying the panic. The threat of a contagion that crosses the seas on economy and business class seats may be too remote for them to relate to. But the resultant effect on their daily survival is apparent.
In a society with little or no welfare cushions, a lockdown is a luxury that few can afford. Even if it is the logical response to a disease, hell bent on rewriting our collective history in an unseen hand that wields the quill of the apocalypse. Unfortunately, COVID-19 will not recognize class boundaries. It will move with touch and float through the air like an evil spirit loosed from its pit in hell. It will follow the spittle-saddled words of the “I just Got Back” spoken over the exchange of a naira note that holds the promise for the receiver’s survival. And if or whenever the virus crosses this divide because the rich are too dependent on the poor in meeting their basic needs; and the poor are too dependent on their daily income to survive a lockdown, we are doomed. Because by then, the consideration of the poorer among us will not be how to sequester to save the herd, it will be which to surrender to — disease or hunger. There will be no fancy ventilators to accommodate our teeming numbers. We will no longer have the luxury of morning jogs and lockdown socializing. Our tracking systems will not be able to trace the poor to their unaddressed homes. They will stay at home and drink agbo*, or drop their sacrifices in earthen bowls at our junctions instead, as they appeal to a god unknown to us. And this evil spirit’s ploy to become faceless will be complete.
OSUNDOLIRE Ifelanwa
Musing on class conflicts and a conundrum of survival.
*agbo — local herbal potion concocted to cure various diseases
