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Short of any good news, we might resort to our elders and ancestors

dulpic
The name Nkurunziza means “good news” in Icirundi, the language of Burundi. As you know, they have not had much good news out there lately, despite their getting a new president in the person of Gen Evariste Ndahishimiye. Bwana Tumbo, in Betrayal in the City, says that a president should have a name with a tough pronunciation.
Mandela is certainly a simpler name to pronounce. It is, indeed, the best-known African name in the world. The name is also borne by a host of monuments that remind us of our best-news ancestor. One of the monuments named after the ancestor is the Nelson Mandela Stadium, about 10 kilometres east of Kampala on the main highway to the Kenya border.
The Mandela Stadium leapt to my attention in a grim mention by President Museveni, in his Heroes’ Day (9th June) speech. He announced that the stadium is being prepared as a possible 40,000-bed “emergency hospital” for Covid-19 patients. That might sound positive as an aspect of Uganda’s proactive response to the pandemic, but it is not quite “nkurunziza” (good news).
Indeed, the context in which Museveni gave the news was far from optimistic. Despite his country’s impressive record of low Covid-19 infections, striking recoveries and, up to then, no confirmed death from the disease, Museveni was complaining about the increasing laxity of his compatriots towards the preventive measures that had kept them relatively safe thus far.
Museveni’s warning came against the chilling realities of Burundi’s health tragedies. Former First Lady Denise Bucumi had to leave a Nairobi hospital bed in order to go and mourn her suddenly departed husband. One of the new president’s first official functions will obviously be presiding over the funeral of his predecessor, who was poised to become the “Supreme Guide of Patriotism” to him and the nation. This handshake has gone way beyond the elbow.
We all, understandably, wish to get back to our normal lives and businesses as soon as possible. But what is happening in Burundi, East Africa and the whole world today is very much business as unusual. Pretending that the coronavirus is not a serious threat, or that it should just be left to run its course until we develop “herd immunity” to it, as some East Africans are doing, is a recipe for catastrophe. There is just no “nkurunziza”, no good news, down that road.
Badly as it hurts in the Burundian bereavement, the memory lingers that World Health Organisation (WHO) officials were expelled from the country, apparently for their efforts to intervene (“interfere”) in the Covid-19 pandemic in its early manifestations. But we are all, Burundi, our beloved Jumuiya (EAC) and the whole world, in this together.
This virus makes no distinctions among high or low, rich or poor, president or boda-boda rider, and we must combat it together. A lockdown is not Bwana Kagwe’s or Uhuru’s lockdown, nor is a compulsory face mask Museveni’s, just because one of these leaders declares it. Each of the measures is as much the business and responsibility of the matatu tout and the market woman as it is of the Supreme Leader.
The growing impatience with some of the measures is understandable, on three main grounds. The first is the failure or reluctance of many, including some leaders, to appreciate the severity of the disease, flipping it off as just “a little flu”, or even imagining that it does not exist.
Secondly, we just do not know how long it will last. Every time we are beginning to think that we are over the worst, the beast rears its ugly head again with an even scarier threat. The agony remains either when it is going to end, or when we are going to learn to live with it.
Third and most important are, of course, the economic and social hardships inflicted on us by the anti-Covid-19 measures. It is a fact that a large number of our people live and work in crowded and congested surroundings. They depend on daily earnings for their survival, what we call a hand-to-mouth (chungu meko) existence.
For these people, the agony of the prolonged maintenance of anti-Covid-19 measures can hardly be overstated. Do we observe and die of hunger and deprivation or do we ignore and die of Covid-19? This is bad news, leaving us in a classical dilemma.
But obviously we cannot give up on the fight. In waging it, we might want to borrow a leaf or two from hardened fighters, like Museveni and Mandela. We are beginning to realise that our fight against the coronavirus is going to be a “long walk to freedom”, as the title of Madiba’s biography has it. In other words, the struggle will take longer than we realised, and we certainly need to adapt our lifestyles to tougher patience, discipline and self-control, even as our leaders and experts devise ways of easing up the lockdowns and other restrictions.
From Museveni we heard of the “people’s protracted struggle”, as he called the Ugandans’ campaign against the misrule in their country in the 1970s and early 1980s. For me, the people’s struggle against Covid-19 starts in our realisation, as I said earlier, that we are all in the battle together. Our health educators tell us that by protecting ourselves we are protecting one another.
Back to me, optimism is our best morale booster in the fight. A fair amount of good news keeps emerging every day. I told you that a vaccine might be on the way, much sooner than conventional experience had envisaged. Now the prediction is that there could be a marketable formula as early as September, or in any case, before the end of the year. You may also have heard of good old dexamethasone, lately found to help the body fight Covid-19 by regulating its immune response to the virus.
But I should leave the technical details to the experts.

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