"The day my Commissioner rejected my handshake", by Fashola

As Lagos Governor, a Commissioner once refused to shake Fashola's hand. This is the story of what happened.

Fashola clears the air on closure of Third Mainland bridge, Lagos.

A former Governor of Lagos State and current Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Mr. Babatunde Raji Fashola, has shared the story of how Lagos and the rest of the country beat the deadly Ebola virus in 2014.

The next couple of days would leave all of Lagos in panic mode. It was at a time when Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone had been declared Ebola epicenters. It was at a time when all of West Africa was in panic from having Ebola creeping through their borders.

The rest of the world was praying that Ebola never found its way into Nigeria, a country of over 180 million people. The consequences for the rest of humanity if it did, were better imagined.

Fashola avoids Uganda but couldn't avoid Lagos

During an interactive session with TheSheetTV, Fashola said he had declined a speaking invitation to Uganda shortly before Ebola arrived his doorstep of Lagos, Nigeria.

“I was supposed to speak at a Ugandan bar association forum a year or two before and Ebola broke out in Uganda, so I avoided it. And a year after, Ebola came here. I remember that I was returning from lesser hajj when they told me.

“When we knew what had happened and all of that, we had help from the Center for Disease Control (CDC), the United States, and we also had help from Doctors without Borders…we started writing letters and we started reading up and we found out that this was the first time Ebola had really manifested in an urban center. All of the other known cases occurred in rural areas. And so it was easy to contain those villages, burn off the huts and so on.

“The one we had to deal with here was bumper to bumper, handshake to handshake and all of that.

“I decided to visit the place where we were now preparing for containment and we had the Sawyer man in there.

“I just sat down at home and I couldn’t sleep. And my friends were saying they were leaving Nigeria. That they were leaving Lagos because of Ebola. But I couldn’t leave because I was the man in charge. So, if I ran, where was the hope?

“At about 1am, I called ( then Fashola’s Commissioner for Health) and I said where is that Sawyer man and he said he is at Yaba. So I called the ADC and I said ‘look, we are going out at 6am. Get your men ready’. But I didn’t tell him where we were going.

“So, we entered the vehicle and I said just drive through 3rd mainland bridge and I directed them until we got to the gate.

“When we got to the gate, I said ‘look, this is where the Ebola man is’. You now have a choice. I have to go in. those of you who don’t want to go, can stay here”.

“Of course I told my wife I was going there and she went, ‘don’t come back here!’”

When your Commissioner rejects your handshake

Fashola said he was initially taken aback when one of his aides rejected his outstretched arm.

“In the event, when we got in, there is a photograph of me with my hands in my pockets. And this is where I begin to talk about luck and about near misses. I was trying to shake Dr. Adesina who had gone ahead of us. But at that time, she refused to shake me.

“My response was, if my commissioner refused to shake my hands, it then meant that everybody should keep his hand in his pocket!

“And then when Dr. Adesina returned to the office, she said “I’m sorry Oga, but I suspected that I might have made contact with Sawyer, that’s why I didn’t touch you. I’m monitoring my own temperature for the next few days”.

Dr. Adesina as it turned out, didn’t contract the Ebola virus and Fashola counts that as one of the “good slices of fortune” as his state battled to keep the disease from spreading across Lagos.

Lagos dodges bullet

The minister also told of how the Lagos state government deployed contact tracing and isolation techniques to stop Ebola from spreading into the city from a bank and hotel.

The index Ebola patient in Nigeria, Sawyer, died on July 25, 2014.

On October 20, 2014, the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared Nigeria Ebola free. The disease had infected 19 people and claimed 7 lives in Africa’s most populous nation.

The Democratic Republic of Congo is currently battling its 10th Ebola outbreak since the disease was first detected there in 1976.

The hemorrhagic virus disease has so far claimed more than 164 lives in DR Congo, according to health authorities.