COVID-19 education: Soft words and a big stick

The dreaded coronavirus seems to have a mind of its own and keeps popping up in different parts of the country. In a space of one month, we have moved from two cases to 566 (as of Sunday evening).

That is quite a sprint and quite a number of my friends seem resigned to the expectation that come later this week, the President will extend the partial lockdown by yet another week when the current one expires on Monday, April 20.

Chorkor Beach party

Over the weekend, many were shocked and outraged by the story of a large gathering of people at the beach at Chorkor, a suburb of Accra, ostensibly to celebrate Easter as they milled about or took a dip in the Atlantic Ocean.

The concept of social distance and its implications seemed lost on them as they enjoyed themselves in apparent defiance of the President's lockdown orders.

With the Ghana Tourism Authority (GTA) having shut beaches in the country under its jurisdiction about three weeks ago, it appeared that this was just a matter of people gathering at the seafront just down the road to enjoy themselves but this did not detract from the seriousness of the situation.

Last week, I wrote about the need for the state to mind the yawning gap between the haves and the have-nots not just as a matter of social justice, but also because in situations like this, we are joined at the hip, really, and our fates are intertwined.

All of us, therefore, have to be on the same page as far as observing the necessary protocol and taking this pandemic seriously is concerned. Clearly public education is key.

But what should be the components of such vital public education so that we can all be equally aligned?

Foreign feeds

Many of us are avid consumers of foreign news and we are fully in tune with developments out there. The Corona season, if I may call it thus, has taken over the international news network and literally on an hourly basis, we are bombarded with the mortality and infection figures coming out of western countries.

We get a daily fill of heart-wrenching interviews with exhausted medical staff and other key workers. Scenes from their overflowing hospitals invade our living rooms. 

We listen to experts gravely intoning the dangers facing mankind. We see coffins lined up in preparation for mass burials and refrigerated trucks being used to store corpses because mortuaries are full.

We learn of familiar faces testing positive and it drives home our angst. Many of us felt almost Italian as the country struggled to cope with the waves of death, peaking at over 900 within a 24-hour cycle. Locally, the rising number of infections is making many nervous.

The danger, from both the local and the international platforms, is real to us and it is scary because the information and the images are drilled into us. Instinctively, many of us reach out to do what we are told by the authorities, practising social distancing to the letter and observing all the hygiene protocols. We refuse to step out unless it is absolutely necessary.

I know people who have not seen beyond their front gates in the last two weeks and have literally imprisoned their family members in that period, keeping eagle eyes on their near-rebellious teenage children.

Public education

These images from abroad, especially,  shock and connect and drive home the message and make us sit up, like it or not. And that is a huge factor in public education if we are to make headway in this fight. It is important to be aware of the harsh reality of the challenging times we are going through.

But not every citizen is hooked to CNN or Al Jazeera to enable them to receive the horrifying images and statistics and thereby shape their thinking and appreciate the gravity of our situation.

Amazingly, I have heard that in some quarters, there are some who believe COVID-19 is just a big scare and who challenge anyone within earshot to confirm whether they have ever seen a coronavirus patient before.

The need for expansive public education is, therefore, particularly urgent.

Shock, awe

In the public education arsenal, I think the most effective weapon is what I would call the shock and awe effect, to borrow from the terminology used by the US in its 1990 war with Iraq under President H.W Bush.

From both local and international sources, the dissemination of imagery in particular must be brutal, frank and in-your-face. Many of our citizens need a massive jolt of reality to bring them out of their comatose situation and align them with the reality of what we face as a nation.

Especially on our local language television stations, I would love to see state-sponsored short documentaries drawing from the horrors of other countries.

I would like to see local language interviews with our frontline medical staff on the realities of what they have to deal with.

Alongside screenings at the community level, I think this will go a long way to increase awareness of this disease.

Beyond shock, awe

It is said that Ghanaians are generally stubborn and that unless you apply physical violence, they will refuse to obey simple instructions or allow education to sink in. I do not share in this view.

I suppose many of us are hardwired to the tenets of military governments and revolutionary justice and therefore see some glorification in the visitation of physical violence on other citizens in the name of discipline.

That said, I believe the security forces have a huge role to play in public education in ensuring that the tenets of the lockdown ordered by the President under the various Executive Orders are adhered to. I believe it is possible for them to be fair, firm, insistent and apply the law without inflicting physical violence on citizens.

The late President Theodore Roosevelt of the US believed that his country's foreign policy must be hinged on her ability to speak softly and carry a big stick. I believe we can drive the coronavirus education on this principle.

The idea of the big stick must not be to bring it down on the skull of recalcitrant citizen over the slightest infraction, but to complement an aggressive public education regime. The citizen must not be left in doubt that an infraction of the rules will attract full punitive measures within the framework of the law.

That should usually be enough to focus the mind and inform compliance.

 Floreat Legon!

Over the weekend, I came across a press release from the Public Affairs Directorate of my alma mater, the University of Ghana, that scientists at its Noguchi Memorial Institute had successfully sequenced genomes of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Of course, my liberal arts mind could not grasp what it all mean and despite the good efforts of my science-minded friends, I have still not grasped it.

I refuse to stress my mind further. I know enough to understand that this is good news, so I will raise a glass of something special in celebration, not only of the finest university in the country but also of the amazing scientists at Noguchi.

For now, the bottle of pink champagne sits comfortably on ice awaiting the ultimate announcement, “we have a vaccine!!” Do I hear an ‘Amen!’?

E-mail: rodboat@yahoo.com