STRANGE STATESMEN
As politicians struggle to cope with the coronavirus pandemic’s relentless global spread, SD TUCKER finds that some leaders’ autonomic immune response is to bury their heads in the sand...
Political panaceas
When in late April it was reported that Donald Trump had advised worried Americans to inject themselves with disinfectant to combat Covid-19, the lying fake-news media suggested that, of all political leaders in the world, the US President was handling the coronavirus crisis the most ineptly. Really? Trump may not have covered himself in glory, but certain others have done far, far worse. Even in the US itself, Trump’s fellow Republican, Ohio representative Nino Vitale, has refused to obey the order of his own State Governor for shoppers to wear masks on the grounds that “everyone else’s freedom starts at the tip of my nose” and that it is not “the role of government to protect us from death, which is inevitable”. And given that we are all created in the image of God – as “seen the most by our face”, which is “the image of God right there” – covering his own divine visage with a mask would have been a kind of sacrilege, Vitale argued. He has also posted online his view that Bill Gates created the virus in the first place, hoping to thereby “profit by charging us for mandatory vaccinations”.
1 According to other highly dubious online rumours, meanwhile, North Korea’s leaders had developed a foolproof way of ensuring that their coronavirus death-rate remained at zero – by shooting patients before they could die of it. Those who die with coronavirus rather than of it need not necessarily be included in final statistics, and a bullet to the head is surely the best way to achieve this aim. As for
2 inconsistency of response, Trump was easily outdone by Chechyan strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, whose initial 11 March medical advice was to channel Franklin D Roosevelt by saying that fear itself was the truly deadly thing; unlike FDR, he also advised drinking lemon-juice laced with honey and eating garlic to boost immunesystems with “clean blood”. By 27 March, when the first deaths in Chechnya had been reported, he was changing tack, arguing that those who spread the virus around carelessly were “worse than terrorists” and should be thrown into a big pit to die. By 29 March, a lockdown was in place and masked police were wandering the streets beating people with large plastic pipes if they didn’t comply. This is in contrast to their
CORONAVIRUS CAN BE PREVENTED BY EXPOSURE TO TRACTORS
A man plays the accordian to an audience of dummies at a Belarussian football match. BELOW: President Lukashenko remains uncowed by Covid-19.
initial role of hunting down those spreading ‘rumours’ (i.e. facts) about Covid-19’s presence and forcing them to issue public apologies. “Everyone will eventually die,” Kadyrov had earlier reassured his people – at least if he has anything to do with it.
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THE PRESIDENT’S FARMER-COPOEIA
Another popular response of autocrats is simply to deny that there is any problem at all, as adopted by a group dubbed the ‘Ostrich Alliance’ by Brazilian academic Oliver Stuenkel. Chief Ostrich is Belarussian dictator and former collective farm manager Alexander Lukashenko, who has complained about a “coronavirus psychosis” gripping the world and refused to implement any true lockdown on the grounds that, as Trump has also fretted, it would leave his economy “crippled… and then what would we eat, huh?” – which, to be fair, is true.
Less true are Lukashenko’s other musings on coronavirus, such as that it can be cured or prevented via simple exposure to tractors. Belarus was famed for its tractor production during Soviet times, with Minsk still being a leading producer of such vehicles, as is evidently celebrated in national media. “It’s nice watching television,” said Lukashenko
in March, as it broadcast relaxing images of “people working in tractors” in which “no-one is talking about the virus”. Why not? Because, it seems, “the tractor will heal everyone, [working in] the fields heals everyone.” Belarussian TV is also currently broadcasting live footage of football games, theirs being the only European league not to have closed down, together with icehockey tournaments in which Lukashenko himself competes (and generally wins). Such mass gatherings pose no danger, the President explained, as: “Sport… is the best anti-virus medicine,” particularly ones like ice-hockey which take place in a giant “fridge” in which diseases cannot live. “Did you see any of them flying around?” he asked in one post-match interview. “I don’t.”
Becoming an alcoholic is another sure-fire way to die of something other than Covid-19. “I don’t drink,” Lukashenko has said, “but recently I’ve been saying that people should not only wash their hands with vodka but also poison the virus with it. You should drink the equivalent of 40-50 millilitres of rectified spirit daily. But not at work.” Then you might crash your tractor. Going to the sauna before washing out your insides is another good medical tactic, as is petting baby goats. Widely criticised for such advice (outside Belarus, at least), Lukashenko has since claimed his suggestions were just jokes. “No-one will die in our country of coronavirus. I publicly guarantee this,” he said in April – and, by his reasoning, they still haven’t. To Lukashenko, Covid-19 only finishes off people who were going to die soon anyway; it doesn’t kill them on its own. Thus, when faced with news of various victims, he has publicly blamed and shamed them for their own deaths, accusing them of being too fat or old to go on living: “If somebody’s going to turn 80 tomorrow, then why are you walking around on the street? … How can you keep living if your weight is 135 kilogrammes?” Anyhow, “It’s better to die on your feet than live on your knees,” Lukashenko argues, a sentiment echoed by compliant media in lines such as “Belarus is not a hysterical young lady who covers her face with a mask.” Some basic public-health guidelines like “do not rub against each other” have been issued, but life in Belarus carries on almost as normal, making the small number of reported deaths there seem highly surprising – until you remember that an ‘election’ [sic] is due in August, and Lukashenko controls the media.
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STRANGE FRUIT
One way of warding off coronavirus that long-time Miss World fan Donald Trump might approve of was suggested by King Amon N’Douffou V, traditional chief of the native Ivory Coast sub-kingdom of Sanwi, who has revealed that Covid-19 is in fact a “bad spirit”, and that, as such, holding a mass-parade of naked women might scare it away (see p.4).
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Even less credible are the beliefs of another African leader, President John Magufuli of Tanzania. Known as ‘The Bulldozer’ due to his robust methods of cutting national expenditure – which have included sweeping roads clean with a broom himself, encouraging the police to steal and sell on car tyres from illegally parked vehicles and rejecting a “killer Chinese loan” on the grounds that “only a drunkard” would accept its poor terms – Magufuli has bet his chances of re-election on fostering a growing economy and a lean State, both of which are threatened by the coronavirus. As such, his response has been to refuse most lockdown measures as financially ruinous and begin promoting a series of bizarre but coincidentally cheap non-cures to solve the problem instead. Praying, for example, is free, so, while banning some mass gatherings, the Catholic Magufuli has allowed churches, mosques and other such places of “true healing” to remain open, on the grounds that Covid-19 is “the Devil”, and that as “it cannot live
in the
body of Christ, it will burn instantly” in the bodies of attendees. In April, he called for three days of national prayer to exorcise the virus from the land. Anything which might cost public money, however, is to be condemned as “stupidity” and “total bullshit” – including facemasks, test-kits and disinfectant sprays. When hearing antiseptic had been sprayed across the chief commercial city of Dar es Salaam by local authorities, he was outraged: “What if [the spray] has coronavirus in it?”
Official advice from The Bulldozer is for citizens to rely on inexpensive traditional herbal remedies such as mwarubaini, which involves boiling leaves with onions before inhaling their steam: “This is a scientific thing, steam above 100°C temperature can blow up that virus. Those using onions and mwarubaini, please go on.” A former science teacher and industrial chemist, Magufuli knows what he is talking about, especially when it comes to Covid-19 testing-kits, which he says do not work. Allegedly fond of disguising himself as an ordinary voter to inspect public offices for waste before sacking spendthrift officials on the spot, Magufuli hatched a plot to send out fake non-human test-samples to a lab to see what would happen. Thus, a sample of “vehicleoil labelled Jabir Hamza aged 30 years, male, tested negative. A jackfruit sample which we named Sara Samweli, 45 years old, female – results inconclusive. When we sent a papaya [paw-paw fruit] sample and named it Elizabeth Anne, aged 26 years, that papaya was positive!” Samples from birds, goats and rabbits were also not noticed, which led to the lab’s head being suspended: that’s one less parasite on the public pay
roll. Footage of secret nocturnal burials taking place has now gone viral on social media, leading to rumours of a cover-up of Tanzania’s true death-rate. The Bulldozer himself has spent much of the crisis holed up in his home-village of Chato rather than the capital, Dodoma, but any nervous MPs who follow his example by self-isolating, following the deaths of three colleagues, will have their allowances withdrawn, aiding Tanzania’s necessary thrift even further. President Magufuli is very good at saving taxpayers’ money; taxpayers’ lives, rather less so.
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MARVELLOUS MEDICINE
One thing Magufuli is willing to splash cash on is a planeload of a new wonder-tonic from Madagascar named Covid-Organics, as promoted by the island nation’s President, media tycoon Andry Rajoelina. Rajoelina appeared on TV on 8 April, announcing he had received a letter from someone who had discovered a possible cure for coronavirus, which could “change the course of history”. He gave few details until, on Easter Sunday, he tweeted that the panacea was “an enhanced traditional remedy” made of native Malagasy plants, the primary one of which later turned out to be artemisia, an ingredient in certain anti-malarial treatments. Madagascar has the world’s largest supply of this plant, so bottling its extract as coronavirus medicine could really help out a nation with only six ventilators for 27 million people.
Sceptics were reassured by a documentary broadcast by one of Rajoelina’s TV channels on 16 April in which a Brazilian prophetess was revealed to have flown over the island in November 2019 (in a plane, just to be clear), with her route taking the shape of Christ’s cross, before being inspired to utter the following prophecy: “The world will
soon experience a terrible pandemic. But Madagascar will hold the cure.” This proved Rajoelina’s “intuition” that Madagascar had been “chosen by God” to save humanity.
A massive State-funded production programme of Covid-Organics was ordered, with the bottled herbal tea drink offering an easy route out of lockdown. Scientists spent “over a month” developing the cure and, after it was tested on as many as 20 people, none of whom died after drinking it, schools were allowed to re-open provided pupils agreed to drink preventative doses scooped from large buckets; meanwhile, armed soldiers dished it out for free to the poor and vulnerable door-to-door or in the streets in scenes likened to the druid Getafix spooning out magic potion from his cauldron. President Rajoelina has since begun exporting Covid-Organics all across
Africa, with profits going to a national medical research lab. As Madagascar is one of the very few places on Earth still to suffer regular outbreaks of bubonic plague, there is another cure they need urgently to perfect.
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LOVE IS THE DRUG
Also claiming to have developed a coronavirus cure is Cuba, whose Communist leaders have opportunistically tried to plead for the lifting of US-led trade embargoes against it so it can export this alleged treatment, named Interferon alfa-2B, abroad. This came as good news to the
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President of Nicaragua, former Marxist Sandinista rebel leader Daniel Ortega, and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, whose supporters have used news of the Cuban cure to argue against imposing lockdown in their country and thereby trashing the economy. Instead, the couple have actively encouraged mass gatherings to take place, from food festivals to beachside bikini-beauty contests and ‘Zumbathons’, culminating in a big street-parade, ‘Love in the Time of Covid-19’, in which workers manned floats brandishing banners reading ‘Welcome, coronavirus, to a free Nicaragua!’ – a Nicaragua so free that many participants were forced to attend.
To Ortega, coronavirus is a “sign from God” condemning US military imperialism; this is why the US is currently being the world’s worst-affected nation, while Nicaragua itself is mercifully almost free from the disease… or so Ortega says. When he temporarily disappeared from view, rumour was he had it himself, but in truth he was just letting his First Lady rule in his stead, which she usually does from behind the scenes anyway. This is regrettable, as Rosario Murillo, known as ‘The Witch’ to detractors, is a New Age nutcase who genuinely believes the power of love alone
can save her people from death. A follower of the disgraced big-haired Indian guru and reputed gay rapist Sai Baba (see FT276:2829), who styled himself an “avatar of God”, Murillo has tried to make herself and her husband into similar national deities in Nicaragua: he is the new Christ, and she the second Virgin Mary, whose cloak can even protect her chosen people from earthquakes. The power couple’s flagship micro-credit scheme was called ‘In the Name of God!’, thereby rendering any criticism of it blasphemous. The resurrected Christ himself has recently been seen sending “affectionate hugs” to his disciples from behind a TV screen – the only safe way in current circumstances.
Around the turn of the millennium, Murillo discovered a model elephant in her home, which she interpreted as a “binding object” teleported there for her by Baba, who was well-known for his ability to make luxury watches appear on his wrist from thin air. Proclaiming her allegiance, Murillo created a 22-page First Manifesto on the Power of Love, which she had distributed outside supermarkets. Within, she detailed her Baba-inspired plans for the future of Nicaraguan politics, which included creating ‘Committees of Love’ and a ‘National Congress on the Power of Love’, some of these ideas being expressed via the medium of poetry.
Since becoming VP, Murillo has altered the Sandinista colours (and her husband’s clothing) to match Sai Baba’s aura, which was white, pink, yellow and blue, apparently. As Nicaragua’s usual presidential palace had “bad vibes” which caused previous occupants’ children to die, Murillo has ensured she and Jesus rule from Sandinista HQ instead, where she has her husband receive diplomats in front of a large mural depicting a giant snake-encircled hand with an eyeball in the middle, to protect him from all baleful influences, viral or otherwise. When in the reception hall, some visitors are surprised to hear that they have already been ‘seen’ by Murillo without setting eyes on her; she views them clairvoyantly, and requests those with dirty-looking auras to go away and get them polished first. Murillo has also had dozens of bright, multicoloured 2-D plastic ‘Trees of Life’ installed across the capital Managua at the cost of several million dollars, for reasons that remain obscure. Possibly they will help draw down love from Heaven and ward off coronavirus.
Her interminable daily TV and radio speeches really do preach that love is the best way to defeat disease in “our Holy Nicaragua”. On 28 March, she spoke of how “Good Feelings, Good Emotions and Great Hope” would help the populace pull through plague, with God himself desiring the economy be kept open, with the Deity currently “working in the Markets, in Commerce, in corner stores, in all the Small and Medium Businesses”
ORTEGA IS THE NEW CHRIST AND SHE THE SECOND VIRGIN MARY
which lovingly continued to stay open at her husband’s behest. All coronavirus cases were “imported” from capitalist lands abroad, she said, and diagnostic tests beneficently continued to be performed “on those who deserve it”, not that these were really necessary, as citizens would continue feeling the blessing of God every morning “in the form of Energy” anyway, not to mention enjoying the regular “visits of our Love Brigades” to their houses. “Love in a big way” was always the best medicine, particularly in “these learning circumstances we are going through.”
The national poetess finished by reciting the following lines of her own composition:
Let’s listen, Brothers and Sisters, let it be heard,
The Song of Joy,
The Song of those who await the New Day! We sing, sing, dream, singing,
Let’s live dreaming of that New Sun In which Men, Women,
Women, Men,
Will be brothers and sisters again.
We don’t doubt it!
I do. According to reports, Jesus and Mary are hoping to break the infection chain themselves by self-isolating in their residence with 100 gallons of hand-sanitiser. With that much hand-washing going on, Ortega seems more likely to be the avatar of Pontius Pilate than Jesus Christ.9
DENTAL HEALTH ISSUES
If only there were some world leader out there with genuine medical qualifications to his name…
Step forward President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov of Turkmenistan. Sadly, the President’s credentials are in dentistry, not virology, but fortunately Gurbanguly considers himself a genius, able to fly planes and drive tanks by innate instinct alone, and has in the past even performed operations to remove tumours from behind people’s ears – dentistry and cancer surgery being basically just the same. The President is also the world’s greatest expert on herbal medicine, whose multi-volume Medicinal Plants of Turkmenistan is considered the very best book about the topic ever written, and his solution to Covid-19 was to obliquely suggest that the native herb known as harmala or yuzarlik be burned in homes and public places to fumigate them. Addressing his cabinet via videolink (thereby avoiding any chance of infection himself) Berdymukhammedov advised that yuzarlik could easily kill pathogens “invisible to the naked eye”, with this “sacred plant” having been known to eliminate bacteria and repel insects by his countrymen’s wise ancestors for “millennia”.
Unfortunately, as Covid-19 is not a bacterial pathogen but a virus, and is not spread by insects, this would do little good. Nonetheless, Gurbanguly’s word is law, and before long old women were smoking out a UN conference in the capital, Ashgabat, and officials doing likewise to schools, government offices and, just to be on the safe side, cemeteries.
It was also widely reported that the President had banned the use of the very word ‘coronavirus’ in an effort to deny it even existed, although this wasn’t quite true. While State media only refer to the pandemic in euphemisms like “the complex situation that has arisen in the modern world”, Turkmenistan did act early to block flights from China and developed advice leaflets and hotlines to advise citizens about the pandemic – just without any of them using the word ‘coronavirus’. The President didn’t have to explicitly ban the phrase; simply by
avoiding using it himself, he gives a signal to others that they should not do so either, lest they incur his displeasure. Reports of secret police arresting those overheard uttering the word in public are probably just examples of over-eager lackeys rather than any official policy per se.
However, one official policy Berdymukhammedov really was once responsible for came during a former spell as Health Minister, when he was tasked with closing down all the nation’s hospitals outside the capital on the grounds they were unnecessary; if anyone got ill, “they can come to Ashgabat,” it was said at the time.
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In comparison to all this, the idea of mainlining some Dettol sounds positively sensible.
Next time: President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil tackles coronavirus with the aid of an exalchemist guru who believes science itself to be a giant Communist con-trick.