The Postmaster-General and Chief Executive Officer of the Nigeria Postal Services, Dr. Ismael Adebayo Adewusi, has advised Governor Seyi Makinde of Oyo State to ensure the 10,000 people he promised to test for Coronavirus get tested first before directing workers to resume work.
The trained Economist and lawyer, who hails from Eruwa in Ibarapa East Local Government Area of the state, gave the advice on Saturday during a radio interview in response to the announcement made by the governor that workers will resume duty on April 20 after the imposed three-week partial lockdown order to curtail spread of the pandemic Coronavirus disease.
While suggesting that the Pacesetter State should have been put on total lockdown, lest the number of confirmed cases not exceed 11 that it was, Adewusi said: “I think partial lockdown is not good enough. What I would have expected the governor to do was to lock down for a minimum of about a week or two and see what will happen, and he can then begin to relax it. This is because as it is now, it will be difficult to control the spread of the disease. I even heard that the Governor is planning to open the Secretariat on April 20 and it will be business as usual. This problem is still there. This community transmission possibility is still there. People are still moving round in Oyo; people are still coming into Oyo, and we don’t know where this thing is coming from. This is why we need to take this Coronavirus of a thing as a very serious matter”, he said.
To the former Commissioner for Finance, Budget and Planning under the administration of Asiwaju Bola Tinubu as Lagos State, “From the recent study we got hold of through some sources including China, this problem will be here for some time. It is not going to disappear overnight and that is why I said it is going to take a fairly long time before all this process is ended. It is going to continue for another six months or a year. So, it is not something we should take a short-time view of.
“In short, I must be honest, I don’t believe it is the right time that the governor should open the Secretariat on April 20 and get the workers back. I love my people, but the situation is critical and we may not see it. But we need to see whether there may be new cases coming up before we take that decision. Part of the problem is that testing is not being administered, and I can tell you as we are now, if the governor puts test facility in place, and people are being tested, and we have some kind of figures and data to back up, he will know whether workers should go back to work or not. To me, opening the Secretariat and directing workers to resume is premature. The governor himself has promised to test about 10,000 people for this Coronavirus disease. That has not been done. So, I think resumption should be premised on that. That testing should take place before anything can be done so that we can have data to work on.
“Look at what is happening in the U.S. There is a top expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, who has been at loggerheads with President Trump. The reason is that he had insisted that data and figure must back whatever decision was to be taken. The President of America wants the economy to go back and be re-opened, but there is a lot of danger in that. That was why the President had to back off and listen to the expert. Oyo State has over five million people, and so I think if he should test only 10,000 people, what percentage of five million is even that? I think it is still premature and I want to advise my brother governor to review this very critically before getting people back to work. This is very, very important”, he said.
Disclosing that he had since about two weeks ago been distributing several bags of rice to the aged and the poorest of the poor people in his community of Eruwa, as part of palliatives to soothe the agony of the people who find it difficult to feed in this trying partial lockdown period, the former Oyo State gubernatorial aspirant spoke on his new post, saying that what he met on ground as the CEO of the Nigeria Postal Service was very bad.
His words: “What I met on ground in the few months I assumed office is very bad. In the last 22 years, Nigeria Postal Service has never received a kobo in capital funding by the Federal Government, although we have access to technology. It was the decision taken by the previous administrations. But what we are trying to do now is to unbundle the Nigeria Postal Service into companies. We will have Postal Bank. In the past, we had Post Office Savings Bank when we were growing up. That bank suddenly disappeared and today, that bank is the Fidelity Bank. In the past, people could transact business in post offices through Money Order, Postal Order, and all that. All such disappeared. But in the global arena for postal business, mail delivery has almost flattened out. Nobody is sending letters again because of advent of technology, particularly, Internet access. We are going to improve on all this in line with best global practice”, Adewusi said.
