In case you missed it, South Korea is in the grips of a Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) epidemic. Surprisingly, there is yet to be visible attempts to contain the disease in international travel and news media.
I recently transited through Paris on my way from Washington, D.C. in the USA to London in the UK. Interestingly, at the airports, I noticed no visible warning indicating the festering MERS epidemic in South Korea. However, the vestiges of the Ebola warnings remained for West Africa-bound travellers.
The South Korea MERS outbreak has already amassed 19 deaths, 160 infections and over 3,000 people in quarantine. Compare the figures with the Ebola outbreak in Nigeria, which led to 8 deaths and 20 infections over a longer period.
Yesterday, I flew through a Washington airport where a US immigration official asked me if I had visited an Ebola country during my trip. A memo on his glass wall showed Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. I inquired if South Korea was on any sort of list and his response was “No. But we are working on something”.
When the Ebola crisis started in West Africa, there was a media frenzy with apocalyptic depictions of the region in western media. All travellers from the region where treated as potential Ebola vectors. There were several documented cases where immigration officials meted out repugnant treatment to travellers from West Africa. All sick travellers and, in some cases, sick residents of West African descent in some European cities endured traumatic experiences, sometimes with fatal consequences. During this period, FOUR Nigerians lost their lives to non-Ebola medical causes. Their demise was no doubt aided by aggravation arising from their treatment. We witnessed cases where Nigerians were denied treatment in Canada, Saudi Arabia, and Germany under the auspices of border control and quarantine.
In sharp contrast, there is absolutely no public talk of banning flights from South Korea, talk less of South East Asia. The media coverage is sympathetic against the adversarial narrative used for the Ebola outbreak. From a policy perspective, South Korea’s government is neither distracted by a media frenzy nor the embarrassment of having their citizens victimized in foreign countries. They have been dictating the rate at which they react. They have had freedom to adjust interest rates for the potential impact on the economy and take sensible fiscal action for secondary ramifications of MERS. Nigerian policymakers (with far fewer resources) were mired in dealing with the cacophony from the media and foreign policy-induced panic.
While we join with the rest of the world in offering our thought and prayers to South Korea at this time, there are sober learning points for the Nigerian citizenry and our politicians.
We have elevated western media ahead of our local media. We jubilate and propagate stories on social media that denigrate Nigeria and senior Nigerian officials, particularly when it concerns people of “conflicting” political, ethnic or religious sympathies. International media houses have in the past received a free ride in their commentary (frequently inaccurate) that diminishes our “revered” national institutions. It is unclear whether Nigerians fully appreciate that the office of president is a symbol of national pride and character. We must do more to fiercely protect our negative characterisation in foreign media. Very recently, BBC Swahili service concocted a fairytale about a hotel in Anambra State that offers human meat on its menu. Closer examination – even superficial investigation – should have halted proliferation of the story. Instead, it was amplified by international news platforms like the Daily Mail and other large British media houses. Sadly, in an absolute dereliction of duty, a major Nigerian news circulation named after a pugilist action (certainly not BusinessDay) carried the story without checking its veracity and thinking through the BBC’s assertions, even though the story included an implausible quote by the Nigerian police. The BBC later retracted the story.
There is an adage in my dialect that roughly translates to “If you insult your parents in the streets, you give others permission to insult them.” None of these stories is ever done with the best intentions for Nigeria and indeed Africans. There are many studies over the years that reveal a marked negative bias against Africa in international media, including scholastic research done by my humble self under the auspices of American University. With this awareness, we should learn to adopt a more protective stance towards our institutions and defend them from external persecution. There is a widely quoted Arabic (Bedouin) saying that goes thus: “I against my brother, my brothers and I against my cousins, then my cousins and I against strangers”. This advocates for a progression of loyalties based on proximity of kinship. We should have the same attitude as Nigerians. It is bad enough that we cannot defend our country and continent. It is much worse when we join the mob to haul stones at ourselves. There is a prevailing wanton disrespect for most African countries, especially Nigeria, and the institutions or individuals that represent us in the western world. Interviewers betray a lack of decorum and respect when they speak to (or of) senior Nigerian officials. We should foster a sense of outrage when we see a foreign report that denigrates our leaders and elected officials. The international media hesitate before putting forward unsubstantiated injurious assertions against most countries and typically reserve the sort of treatment Nigeria gets for countries hostile to the NATO-EU countries.
I conclude with the admonition that our country is a broader definition of ourselves. It is naive to think that one can be truly respected if his or her country is actively disrespected. We should also call out brazen media bias against us as a protective mechanism for ourselves.
CHIKA MORDI
