By Ikem Okuhu

Here, on this Facebook alone, I have read at least four obituaries posted by friends who lost friends and their beloveds to COVID-19.

One was the case of a staff of Union Bank. He had symptoms (of acute malaria) and was self-medicating along that line. He died.

He was not smart.

The other was even a doctor who died at LUTH. Very young man. One thing led to another and he got the disease. He died.

A doctor.

He couldn’t have been a smart doctor.

There was yet the case of another man, a lawyer. My friend who posted it talked about all the projects they had done together and the plans for new ones. He was a consumer rights advocate. He died.

Not sure, from what I am hearing, that he was smart too.

The very first head of department that I met as a student in the Department of Mass Communication, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, is currently in a morgue somewhere in the United States.

He apparently wasn’t smart enough to have avoided being taken down by COVID-19. And he was such an imposing figure.

I have also read very touching accounts of two women who survived their own COVID-19 infections. Very scary stories.

I think these two were also not smart but somehow, lucky.

It is increasingly looking like there are only two very smart Nigerians who got hit by acute malaria and some people tried to colour it as COVID-19.

They are so smart they recovered rather very quickly and are now in pole positions to tell us a lot of what we didn’t know about the pandemic.

They are father and son. So smartness is also very likely to be hereditary, something you find in strands of the DNA of rare people.

And you know what? These two are smarter than UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson who allowed himself to be afflicted and treated of “acute malaria” that was passed off as COVID-19.

They are also smarter than New York Governor, Cuomo, who had barely slept in the past 8 weeks, daily engaging his people and trying (almost in vain) to limit the damage this acute malaria has on his people.