Responding to the Coronavirus: prescribed solutions graduate to instruments of war

By: Ibrahim Jalloh - (Jallomy)✍️

The Coronavirus pandemic has posed a deadly challenge in our time. Current happenings across the country have placed us at the crossroads and tested our resilience, maturity to embrace the moment of truth, spirit of sacrifice and self denial for the public and Common good.

The Ebola outbreak and ravaging consequences were to be lessons enough to embolden and strengthen us to confront and contain the sister Coronavirus but emerging trends have neatly overthrown these opportunities.

The Coronavirus like Ebola stay clear of a scientific cure. What is available is an attitudinal frame of mind that will enhance behavioural patterns that will provide a succour. 

The Coronavirus is deadly but requires cost effective sequence of compliant patterns to reverse the deadly trend. 

All prescribed IPC measures and related precautionary measures are doable and cost effective. All that it takes is a deciplined character. 

Handwashing and social distancing can be practised with relative ease. Stepping on the brakes of handshake, Community clustering for funeral and burial rites were relevant values of our sociological build up but not relevant today. However, sacrificing these cultural values for the common good is noble and rewarding.

Why must enforcement of compliance with the prescribed safety regulations be converted to disruptive behaviour and conduct? 

The Tombo incident was brutally revealing and indicative of a community in hopeless resistant to established protocols designed to protect and sustain them. Correspondingly, there must be sustained action to return the Tombo Fishing Community to a sense of responsibility and a state of normalcy. The growing Internal resistance to doable Coronavirus precautionary measures is worrying and hopeless. Is it that we are a country determined to end our history this way?

The reality is that the existing social and economic infrastructures cannot appropriately accommodate certain aspects of the Coronavirus security protocols. 

Lockdowns are purposeful and useful but can be hurting and debilitating to low income earners. Social distancing can be compromising in slummy settlements and communities with dimished Social facilities. 

Notwithstanding, the need for sacrifice and self denial should take prominence. It is about saving a nation on the brink.

An obvious and visible catalyst to the growing resistance is politics and the political culture. The syndrome of deep seated political denial and resistance to the changing political and governce landscape are salted ingredients! We have lost the space for statesmanship. Graduated statesmen and women are still holding great appetite for power and will seize every opportunity to make political capital, even out of a crisis situation

We are failing to leverage on the abounding and gracious political will magnanimously offered by the Chief Executive of State, president Bio. But history will not remember us well if we continued on this path.

Political considerations must not take us off the rails. Sierra Leone is bigger than any one of us, any political party and drive to callous political megalomania.

The tide is low, the road is full of thorns and briers.