This archive report was first published on 19 May 2020.
It was March 21, 2020, when I left Nairobi for Nigeria, just a week after the first COVID-19 case was announced in Kenya. My destination was Lagos, where I was to oversee a three-day project, followed by a trip to Owerri, a rural town in the South East of Nigeria.
Upon arrival at Murtala Muhammed International Airport, I was screened for high fever and offered a sanitiser for my hands. However, the social distancing message had yet to register in most people's minds, as there was crowding and pushing on the queues at the immigration counters.
After a two-hour wait due to a system failure, I finally got my 30-day visa and exited the airport. I hit the ground running on my second day, trying to keep up with the news about the new coronavirus, hoping to get the project running before things got worse.
But as I soon found out, people in Nigeria were not really worried about COVID-19. They believed it was a disease that affected only those who had travelled by air. That evening, Nigeria's president announced that the airport would be closed the next day.
Despite consulting with a colleague back in Kenya, we decided to proceed with the project, thinking that the directive to close the airport would not be so strict as not to allow a few more flights out of the country. We were mistaken, and I soon found myself in a desperate bid to return home.
Published on May 19, 2020, at 12:02 AM.
