A Reader’s Impression of The Mechanics of Yenagoa by Michael Afenfia (2020)

Reading this novel as I did over the better part of two days during the Eid break felt like binging on accumulated episodes of a TV series like Grey’s Anatomy, House, or Bones. The episodic nature was unmistakable, a carryover of the way the novel was birthed. It started life as a weekly blog. The …

COVID-19 Diary: June 22

COVID-19 cases and deaths continue to soar. During the weekend, the NCDC DG, WHO Officer-in-Charge, and the NCDC Director of Surveillance were in Lagos to listen to our plans for strengthening surveillance and data management and coping with the challenges of case management and isolation. The outbreak is entering a new phase. But it was time …

COVID-19 Diary: June 7

It was time to get back to the thick of things. For the field epidemiologist, the place of work, by definition, is the field. But the airports had not opened yet and there was no special Presidential Task Force flight going to Lagos. So, again, I hit the road after sixteen days away from the epicentre. I …

COVID-19 Diary: May 21

The lagoon was a vast sea of quicksilver reflecting the golden light of the morning sun. The rising sun appeared in a hiatus between grey floating clouds, which soon sailed in front of it, the reflection on the water vanishing for a few moments. Today, at the first Third Mainland Bridge interchange, instead of taking …

An outbreak of terminological inexactitude

The ongoing pandemic of a respiratory infectious disease known as COVID-19 which started in December 2019 has occasioned an explosion of information and an outburst of myths. This has been described as an infodemic. More interesting to me as an epidemiologist and teacher are the medical and epidemiologic terms that it has introduced into common …

On the train again

Saturday, February 1, 2020 It was the time of the year when the nights were longer than the days. So that, by the time we finished morning prayers, it was usually some minutes past six. There was little time to get home, call Uber and get to the train station early enough to catch the …

Another close shave

January 19, 2020. There was a motorcade ahead of us preventing us from overtaking. One of the vehicles was a police pick-up while the others were black SUVs. The SUVs were full of men in military fatigue wielding guns. They menacingly waived down anybody that tried to overtake them. But their speed was not bad …

Universal Health Coverage – the right thing, the smart thing

One cold evening in 2005 I was with my cousin in Grays, a quiet town in Essex County some 35 km east of London. Glued to the computer screen as was my wont for several hours every day, I was utterly oblivious to my surroundings until I began to hear a barely audible, almost musical …

From compassion and charity to health economics

We learnt more than clinical medicine at the bedside. We also learnt that poverty and ignorance could make people deadly sick. We learnt that illness could also further slide already poor people into deeper poverty. We learnt that a lot of people were suffering from acute and chronic diseases but could not help themselves. We …

Nigeria at 59: we need to rekindle the dwindling patriotism

Individually and collectively, we need to build a Nigeria that our children can be proud of. Some have to start from a point of patriotism and optimism and work to give the rest something to be patriotic and optimistic about.