When the first cases of COVID-19 were made public in Nigeria, I was still lightheaded — first with relief from seeing my final year results — and also with joy from graduating with a first-class Economics degree from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife.
The ink on my final year project was barely dry when the internet was abuzz with news of the virus. I had barely made it back home to Lagos when the lockdown order was given towards the end of March, and "stay-at-home" became the new phrase on everyone's lips. Offices closed, markets thinned, and fewer Lagosians plied the ever-busy Lagos roads. "Self-isolation" became popular. Events and owambes reduced to trickles. More and more people resembled ninjas as nose masks grew in popularity.
Beneath it all, I was in a state of horror at the deaths I saw on the news. The headlines didn't get any better. People were dying, companies were folding up, and I clearly remember the headline stating that Vladimir Putin was releasing Siberian tigers on the streets in Russia to enforce the lockdown. Whether that was true, I still don't know. Every now and then, the name of a popular football player or celebrity would pop up amidst the numbers diagnosed, only to hear they'd recovered a few weeks later.
Given I had submitted my final year project and had seen my final results a few weeks before the lockdown, I was filled with glee at avoiding an extra year, unlike some of my peers in other institutions who weren't so lucky. But the human mind is rarely content and is always reaching for something new. I quickly became disheartened my service year would be delayed, unlike those who'd started before the lockdown was announced. I would later hear stories of them remaining at home for months while at the same time receiving their allowance. It further deepened my sense of frustration at a delay I could do nothing about. I felt like I was missing out on a party. By choosing health and avoiding death, it seemed I was avoiding life, and by extension, living. It was this frustration that made danfo drivers grudgingly fill their buses with three passengers per row rather than the usual four. Being a lifelong Lagosian, it was surreal to witness Lagos become a semblance of a ghost town. It felt like I was away studying in Ile-Ife while Lagos had become an unrecognisable city, one distinctly different from what I was used to. I believe that sense of delay, that feeling of being caged, was a mutual feeling I saw on the faces of people when I went around my neighbourhood. I recall a conversation with a woman one evening as I bought vegetables. It captured the life/death trade-off I felt. While she acknowledged the need to stay indoors and reduce the spread of the virus, she lamented lower sales and jokingly mentioned she and her children dying from hunger as the alternative. I still remember the wry smile on her face as she chopped the vegetables into smaller pieces. It was ironic to lose one's life in the process of trying to preserve it. That conversation, though brief, was paradoxical and yet emblematic of the situation the pandemic caused.
On the television, I watched football games played in empty stadiums. It was unusual to witness high-profile football matches resemble training sessions. No loud roars of the fans, only the yells of the players and coaches punctuated by the referee's whistle. Players and managers touched elbows instead of shaking hands.
The lockdown brought lots of time for me to do a lot. However, I had little to do. I was often bored, and I tried to kill that boredom with James Hadley Chase's fast-paced noirs and Sidney Sheldon's mind-turning novels. Lending "Omerta" from my brother's shelf introduced me to Mario Puzo's gritty world of Italian-American families and organised crime. Aside from losing myself in the world of crime fiction, I tried to put my fresh Economics degree to use by assisting my academic adviser in drafting academic papers for publication. Writing had always felt familiar, but now, it felt even more natural.
I settled into a rhythm — stay off the news, try to guess which footballer would test positive next, skim through academic papers, and get lost in the fictional world of crime. The quick-paced nature of Chase's noirs left me thirsty for more. Each one I read made me expectant for another. I read over ten of his novels in a few months. Never having been a huge social media user, the inactivity forced me to create a Twitter (X) account in October that year, where I would later get used to banter on the platform, come across literary magazines, and make a handful of bookish pen friends from all over the world whom I still talk to till today. I later landed my first job on Twitter not long after as an article writer for an agricultural consulting company.
When the restrictions were relaxed in October, I saw Lagos come alive like a patient waking after a coma. Danfo drivers reverted to four per row, people jostled and shoved each other at BRT queues, and markets were filled to overflowing. Nonetheless, some semblance of the pandemic still lingered. Security officers outside banks used handheld thermometers and enforced nose masks for customers. #EndSARS met me with my phone clutched, spending an unhealthy amount of time on Twitter until it unraveled in a dark, harrowing end. As people met up after what seemed like ages after a forced hibernation, I found myself contemplating attending several reunions.
In December, NYSC would post me to faraway Gombe, where I would spend two nights and a day commuting, get robbed on the road, arrive at camp with my eyes watermelon red due to sleep deprivation, and be assigned to one of the blocks earmarked for COVID patients as a "punishment" for resuming three days late. This "punishment" was a huge room with fans, functional sockets, and fewer roommates, significantly less than other rooms. With all ten of us isolated from other corpers, this sometimes spared us from the early morning parades in the chilly Gombe weather. I laughed at the irony of it. My "punishment" was a better room than everyone else in camp. My trip back to Lagos was less adventurous after nearly three weeks in Gombe.
To this day, I use hand sanitizers on a near-daily basis. The pandemic left me with a habit of adding pocket-sized sanitizers to my shopping baskets. 2020 left me with a couple of memories and a few souvenirs. It left me with images of football matches played in empty stadiums, an affinity for Twitter, and hand sanitizers permanently on my shopping list.
It was certainly the year life paused, yet went on, in its own mysterious way.
