Coronavirus presents Nigeria with a unique opportunity to give the world a first

By Ayo Akinfe

(1) It was the French who gave us the culture of stripping criminals naked in public. They introduced this after the liberation of Paris in 1945. Women who collaborated with the Germans were stripped, had their hair shaved and paraded through the streets in shame

(2) It was Japan that gave the world suicide bombing with its Kamikaze pilots

(3) It was the Italians who gave the world its first Christian state when the old Roman Empire adopted Christianity as its official faith in 303 AD

(4) It was Saudi Arabia that gave the world its first Islamic theocracy in 1929

(5) It was the US that gave the world evangelical Christianity. Nigerian-style Pentecostalism is essentially the Americanisation and commercialisation of Christianity

(6) We will never be told this but it was the Arabs who gave the world mathematics. Algebra is actually an Arab word

(7) Do you know it was Peru that provided the breakthrough for malaria. Quinine, the first ever cure for malaria, was first isolated in 1820 from the bark of a cinchona tree in Peru. Bark extracts have been used to treat malaria since at least 1632 but in 1737, Charles Marie de La Condamine managed to come up with an effective remedy which was then improved upon by French researchers Pierre Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Bienaimé Caventou in 1820

(8) It was China that gave the world gunpowder in the 9th century. Today, we take munitions for granted forgetting that historically, man fought wars with swords and bows & arrows

(9) In 1769 the first steam-powered automobile capable of human transportation was built by Frenchman Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot. Since then, the world has not looked back

(10) Nigeria is great at copying all these practices and using these inventions but hopeless when it comes to joining the race of inventors. Shame on all the Nigerian scientists who have not deemed it fit to begin the search for a cure to coronavirus. Clearly the remedy is tropical but alas, my people are waiting for the government to come up with the answer. By now, we should be close to a breakthrough with this virus