by Jude Egbas

Meanwhile, I have nightmares without a sanitizer tube every other night and I head to work with my hands firmly tucked in my pockets. I can’t recall shaking hands with anyone recently and I won’t dine at any restaurant without a sanitizer.

It was girlfriend, Dr Oluwaseun Gbadebo, who inducted me into the “hand sanitizer hall of fame” last summer.

What should have been a routine romantic trans-Atlantic phone conversation would snowball into an aseptic lecture on keeping my laptop and all other electronic gadgets germ free.

To drive home her point, I was delivered a carton of hand sanitizers via courier the following week. “You must use them, Jude. Every day. You are glued to those gadgets, you practically live on your gadgets, so you have to make them safer for you”, Seun would say.

Or she’ll begin subsequent phone conversations with a terse question: “Have you used your hand sanitizer today? You know, you can latch it to your key holder. That’s why it has that handle-bar tapering toward its end…”

So, I subsumed my laptop, smartphone and Ipad in a sea of sanitizers. My hand sanitizer tubes became my companions on the bus ride to and from work. I became a mobile sanitizer, literally. I used them sparingly for a while and Seun’s pack of hand sanitizers lasted me an entire year until I got a new shipment. I exhausted a tube in a month.

Fast track to July 20th,2014 ; when Liberian Patrick Sawyer lumbered into Nigeria with the Ebola virus disease oozing through every orifice of his massive frame. Word immediately went out that to keep oneself from contracting the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD), stocking up on hand sanitizers would be a must.

I have since gone from one hand sanitizer tube in a month to three tubes in a week. There are two tubes on either side of my bed, one tube on the dining, two tubes line the entrance to the restroom and one hangs from the kitchen ceiling menacingly. I am forever squeezing hand sanitizers from harassed tubes all day long–before a meeting with a client and before paying up for groceries. I wake up in the middle of the night to wink at a tube of hand sanitizer and then return to bed; rest assured that Ebola wouldn’t be within touching distance with that tube guarding my pillow.

Last week, the unthinkable happened: I ran out of hand sanitizers.

Completely. Zilch. Nada.

It was as though my world was coming apart. Breathlessly, I stormed into Shoprite at the Ikeja mall, panting as I made for the aisle where I was sure to find some. The racks had everything but hand sanitizers. I hurtled from one aisle to another, but there was no hand sanitizer in sight. A rarity in a shop where I was once handed a tube or two of hand-sanitizer as a gift for purchasing other items. With my lips quivering and my eye-balls all but out of their sockets, I reached for the closest attendant:

“Pl….e…a..s…e, I…am….looking for…for… hand sanitizers”, I stuttered.

“We are out of stock”, the attendant hollered back without even looking my way. She was engaged in small talk with another female attendant. They were talking boyfriends, I suppose.

Her words felt like a death sentence. It was 6pm and the mall was the last place I could possibly have got sanitizers to keep me safe from Ebola that night. Not to have any shade of sanitizers at home immediately looked bizarre; like an anomaly. I tried three other shops, but there was little luck everywhere I showed up.

There are several other Lagosians like me, I suppose. Together, we have ensured that the price of sanitizers hit the roof or that the product never hits the shop shelves. Lagosians have long mastered the art of panic buying and they have swarmed on the hand sanitizers making their entry into the Nigerian market from the sea ports.

A colleague relayed how she got a little Dettol tube of the product for N350 (three hundred and fifty naira) last week (it was sold for N150 BPS—Before Patrick Sawyer). She said she was lucky to find that last tube on the shelf. Young women now have sanitizers draping their necks and decorating their hand bags. My elder brother got two tubes for his driver who must use the liquid on his palm before touching the steering wheel. At a ‘Buka’ in Lagos last week, everyone used a hand sanitizer before settling down to lunch, never mind that they had just washed their palms with liquid soap. One dude submerged a wad of bank notes in sanitizers before shoving them into his pockets from an ATM; his eyes darting this way and that like Ebola was lurking in the shadows. Every office I have been to since Patrick Sawyer arrived Nigeria, there is a hand sanitizer tube on every desk.

We have become a nation of obsessed hand sanitizer users. I still don’t know where to find one as I type these words, so my palms are tucked in hand gloves before hitting the laptop keypads until I am able to find my way to Mega Plaza next week, where Avery (my Filipino friend– has informed me while keeping his own sanitizer tube under his office desk; well away from my gaze) that that is my surest bet if I intend to stay alive in Ebola hit Lagos. If I can’t find them at Mega Plaza, it will be another tough, scary week in prospect. The Ebola specter hovering over this city is no joke.

Meanwhile, I have nightmares without a sanitizer tube every other night and I head to work with my hands firmly tucked in my pockets. I can’t recall shaking hands with anyone recently and I won’t dine at any restaurant without a sanitizer. So, when I can’t fix a meal, I go to bed with hunger pangs gripping my intestinal walls and sorry frame.

I know I’ll exit this world someday, but it had better not be from Ebola.

How are you coping, dear reader?

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Jude Egbas is Head, Content and Creativity at Royal Lens Media. He is on Twitter as @egbas