There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to the market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, “Master, just now when I was in the market-place I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned, I saw that it was death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there death will not find me”. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop, he went. Then the merchant went down to the market-place and he saw me standing in the crowd and he said, “Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?”

“That was not a threatening gesture”, I said, “It was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”

The foregoing story titled, “Death Speaks”, is the most popular offering in Jeffrey Archer’s collection of stories titled “To Cut a Long Story Short”, perhaps because it carries a profound message about life and its inevitabilities. It is also one that resonates, especially as we learn more about how Mr. Patrick Sawyer (who imported the Ebola Virus into Nigeria), left his country apparently thinking he could run away from what eventually became his fate.

From all available facts, by the time Sawyer boarded his last flight from Monrovia to Lagos, he knew he had contracted the Ebola virus from his deceased sister. Because he chose to live in denial, he played a fast one on the Liberian health authorities and but for the vigilance and professionalism displayed at the First Consultants, the Lagos private hospital which diagnosed his ailment, he would have wreaked more havoc than he has already done even from his grave. Unfortunately, the Sawyer story is not an isolated one with regards to how the deadly virus has spread so fast within the West African sub-region.

Indeed, if there is anything that has contributed to the Ebola menace, especially in Guinea and Liberia, it is the fact that many of their citizens refused to accept the reality of the situation. I watched a television documentary last week in the United States where most of the people spoken to in both Guinea and Liberia denied the existence of Ebola. In fact one Liberian journalist who was interviewed on camera said: “We all know where this is coming from. Our government is very broke, everybody knows that; so they have come up with this Ebola scam to collect money from international donors.” Others were seen eating dried monkey meat, despite the fact that their government had placed a ban on such “delicacy”, just to make the point that there is nothing like Ebola.

It is heart-warming, however, that the relevant authorities in our country have handled the Ebola case with a high sense of responsibility. Health Minister, Professor Onyebuchi Chukwu, Lagos State Governor Babatunde Fashola and President Goodluck Jonathan have demonstrated leadership on the issue and they deserve commendation. For once, the president acted with despatch--without setting up any committee on Ebola!

However, there are still glaring inadequacies in the manner with which we are handling the issue. I say that because I arrived back to Nigeria yesterday morning and at the immigration point in Abuja airport, we were subjected to Ebola “screening” in which some ladies wielding something that looked like torch-light beamed a ray of light on everyone’s head. How that would detect whether anybody carries the Ebola Virus I still don’t know but the real joke of it was that all the “big people”, including those who have no official designation but were not on the queue, evaded the “screening”.

Unfortunately, if there is any lesson that the death of Sawyer should teach, it is that Ebola does not recognise any “big man”. I understand that the late Liberian-American actually carried a diplomatic passport and wielded considerable influence. That perhaps accounted for why the ECOWAS protocol official who was with him (and had innocently assisted the Liberian in his moment of distress, by offering him his mobile phone to make calls) is now also deceased. So if Ebola could get Sawyer, it can get anybody.

As a nation, we must do all within our power to contain this dreaded disease that at the moment has no known cure. But we won’t succeed in doing that by festering public hysteria or stigmatising those unfortunate to catch the virus. Neither would isolating victims and practically leaving them to die without medical attention in the name of quarantine. If we continue to adopt such a cynical approach, people who contract the virus would not come out (one of the Lagos Nurse under observation ran away to Enugu yesterday) and everybody would be at risk. What we should all bear in mind is that it would be a tragedy of monumental proportion if we end up with Ebola epidemics on top of all that ails us in Nigeria today.

•This piece by Adeniyi (shown in photo) originally appeared in his column “The Verdict” in today’s edition of ThisDay. He can be reached via olusegun.adeniyi@thisdaylive.com

Update news