How pandemic made witches out of ordinary people
They say that one becomes a witch through inheritance, initiation, or – as the coronavirus pandemic revealed – despair. Despair usually kicks in slowly then takes over. And, as the virus was biding its time to reach our shores, we watched its progress as it passed from nation to nation and got closer and closer, and we saw how it was laying to waste nations far more developed than ours. So, when it was finally here, a feeling of resignation had already set in.
The biggest question was – how was our fledgling healthcare system going to cope with a surge of critical patients given the shortage of ventilators? That was a serious concern. After all, there was a nation in Africa that had more vice presidents than ventilators then!
According to one source, Muhimbili, Tanzania’s biggest hospital, only had 36 ventilators then, and they were usually 100 percent occupied by other patients. That means that there were literally zero ventilators for extra patients. Greater despair.
So, we pointlessly turned online for answers. And one day we learnt that a doctor in New York who used a medical technique called proning on critical Covid-19 patients was claiming better results than others. Excellent news, so let’s forward it to doctors, and it was like making a deposit today knowing that we will have to collect soon. That’s how fear works.
How were we to know that proning is a routine technique in medicine? But the prospects of being at the mercy of a health system that we understood its deficiencies made our hearts sink even further.
A year later, one reads a report that says that many people have died at points of care because of lack of critical care equipment and – wait for it – because doctors didn’t use even proning! Very predictable, isn’t it? This is Africa, after all.
But God is not Athumani – we are still here, aren’t we?
Nonetheless, the pandemic has uncovered a side that is good, incredibly good, and a side that is ugly, exceedingly ugly, about our society.
Imagine you are in a daladala in Dar es Salaam and everyone is seated. It is nighttime, so you all know that there are no traffic officers watching! Yet, from the driver, the conductor, and the passengers, they all regulate themselves and don’t allow a single passenger to stand.
Who could have imagined seeing that Tanzania? The virus brought a change that decades of a poorly conceived and poorly executed education system failed to deliver. Thus, besides our devil-may-care attitude, when push comes to the shove, we demonstrated the capability to change. As a result, we went through “the first wave” relatively unscathed.
Then, the geniuses in our midst invented the politics of Covid denialism! And that was ugly. Like pigs, we rushed into the mud pool, played in it, and forced others to do so!
So, we didn’t only question the wearing of masks, we ordered others to take them off too! Similarly, we didn’t simply deny that the virus actually existed. We ended up rejecting vaccines too. But, we hadn’t hit rock bottom yet.
One NGO struggled to donate personal protective equipment to public hospitals for six months, but nobody dared receive it because that would have been tantamount to admitting that the virus existed! That wasn’t rock bottom still.
Early in January, a friend felt that he was having difficulties breathing, and the doctors instructed him to take a coronavirus test. He was advised to go to a clinic used by many expatriates to guarantee that he would get reliable results.
When the results were out, he was told to collect them physically, in the evening, when others had checked out. However, with his condition worsening, he insisted on going earlier. So, he was taken to a back room, and the doctor opened his computer and used his hands to cover the names of other patients who had taken the test. This was how he got his results! This is what modern medicine was reduced to at one of the best clinics in the city! Still, that wasn’t rock bottom.
The man tested positive. He had an underlying medical condition which made him a high-risk case if he were to catch the virus. So, he had been isolating himself. But when he had to attend a long meeting organised by a certain dignitary with dozens others in attendance, politics forced him to take his mask off. He survived by the skin of his teeth.
Unfortunately, his father wasn’t as lucky. And, if reports flooding social networks were anything to go by, many more weren’t.
Is this the mysterious “second wave” that the presidential commission referred to? Not rock bottom still.
For me, probably rock bottom was when the best medical institution in the land built a sauna as a remedy for the virus! When the absolute best in the society join in the mud dance and start to call right wrong, and wrong right, that’s rock bottom because there is no going back.
Systems have controls to ensure that when they fail they will be forced to auto-correct at some point, but when all institutions fail to arrest a downward spiral that can completely ruin the society, that’s incredibly dangerous.
Finally, lacking any other avenue for hope, people start to wish that the virus would do what everyone else has failed so that sanity may be restored.
And that’s how the pandemic turned decent men and women into witches.
