MY RESPONSE TO A “STAY AT HOME ADVOCATE” IN NIGERIA

You can’t totally blame the people for ignoring the rise in the number of cases of coronavirus cos if you force people to stay at home in no time you will have increase in number of deaths through hunger, domestic violence, suicide due to inability to provide, inability to access health service cos everybody is a coronavirus patient now (all these things we have been experiencing now)…

The government is not treating the virus as the threat but they are treating the people as the threat. You can’t ask people who live by daily income to stay at home without providing for them and believe they will not hit the streets in less than one week. Let me remind everyone that a lot of people who believed they have a good job has lost that job due to stay at home that does not have any framework to protect workers and their livelihood… just stay at home. Act Hub Africa which is my baby organization had a project on 4th May, 2020 where we distributed food item worth of N3,000 per family, while carrying out the first batch we were almost beating cos even the able body men wanted to get the food without any shame or restrain. As much as I believe in “Stay at Home and Stay Safe” slogan, the government needs to do the needful for the populace to stay at home.

Lastly, according to my survey, a lot of stay at home advocates are people with either enough savings or secured salary earners. They discuss stay at home without weighing the pros and con’s of this stay at home gospel. One thing that I believe strongly is that, we have to do our best in our own little way to help people around us cos the fact is that government alone cannot solve this problem, in fact they don’t have what it takes to reach people of this country not because they don’t have the resources but because they don’t have data for development but they often have provision for ballot boxes and how it can get to the very interiors of interiors during our ever disputed elections.

Still thinking loud.

John Oluwafemi OLLA
Team Lead: Act Hub Africa www.acthubafrica.com.ng
+2347030658304