By Bala Ibrahim
Turnaround maintenance, mostly referred to as TAM, is a scheduled activity, wherein an entire process unit of a factory, or refinery, is taken off stream for a period, in order to reset or rehabilitate it. In Nigeria, the term TAM is synonymous with the country’s national oil company, the NNPC. Turnaround provides the opportunity for addressing various maintenance issues, particularly those that cannot be fixed while the plant is in operation. During Turnaround, the entire plant is shut down by the engineers, as work commences.
With Covid-19, nature seems to have come with a similar ambition, under a different doctrine. Instead of shut down, the world is put under a lockdown, as God resets and rehabilitates the globe. Today, the earth order has changed, through the fear of the Coronavirus.
In its early days, COVID-19 was thought to be limited only to China, but within a short period of time, the disease has travelled all over the world, violating international visa protocols, without the fear of any sanction. Regardless of the pandemic stage, today it is everyone’s problem. Even where governments are making decisions, their decisions are only limited to whatever information nature availed to them. The world is undergoing a reset similar to TAM, in the name of Covid-19.
As in TAM, COVID-19 has forced the world into a lockdown, turned everything upside down, as everyone everywhere is struggling to understand what’s happening. Everything has been impacted, from the way we live and interact with each other, to how we work and communicate, or how we are going to be moving and travelling when God is done with the reset.
Different countries and different organizations, have been taking different decisions on how best to confront the situation. But no one has succeeded yet, in coming up with a universally acceptable solution to the pandemic. Unlike in the industrial TAM, which works with a timeline, the timeline of the TAM of Covid19, is completely unknown to mankind. God’s decisions are superciliously superior to governments decisions.
Every aspect of our lives has been affected, including our mode of worship. Decisions made now and in the coming months will be some of the most important made in generations. They will affect people all around the world for years to come. As in shut down for TAM, which permits for an internal inspection of equipments that would otherwise be impossible while the plant was running, nature’s Covid-19 TAM has compelled a lockdown, wherein everything is reviewed, rejigged and reset, in accordance to how God want’s to see the conscience of the world.
Industrial TAM serves to improve the efficiency of the plant and also enable workers to fix or prevent problems before they cause more costly cases. Through the Covid-19 TAM, nature is resetting the world order in a way that is making everyone more efficient in hygiene, efficient in public relations and efficient in detecting religious direction and dedication to duty. Yes, a virus has come to teach the world the disbenefit of arrogance and ignorance. Through the Covid-19, God has lowered the arrogance of leaders, nations and many individuals, that hitherto thought they were infallible. The ignorant is now in a haste for knowledge.
COVID-19 has removed the barriers of ‘we and they’, ‘here and there’, by forging the unity of togetherness and the appreciation of the value of belongingness amongst communities. The importance of God is now appreciated more than ever. The world is now forced to work as one single interdependent community, whose chain is as strong as it’s weakest link. Through the TAM of Covid-19, global problem is now the problem of every community.
The COVID-19 pandemic has presented the world with an unprecedented global challenge, touching every community in every nation of the globe. The pandemic is changing the way of work, methods of education, systems of finance and the entire etiquette of mankind is undergoing a reset, after a lockdown that halted or grounded domestic lives everywhere.
I was in the university when the Kaduna refinery was completed and commissioned in 1980. Two of my teachers at the School of Basic Studies, SBS(ABU), were amongst the first set of staff of the then newly established petrochemical company. I heard the word TAM for the first time, from one of them, when we met much later in life. By some coincidence, I ran into him at the bank last week. I couldn’t recognize him immediately. Quite all right he has aged, but the face mask made him look more distorted. I greeted him and reminded him of how he taught me the meaning of TAM years back. He laughed and said, yes, you can see how nature is carrying out a similar TAM on us now. May the lord see us through, and I said Ameen sir.
Today, multitudes are engaging in diverse religious observances, where followers of different faiths are joining forces to worship under a multi-religious arrangement in one place, because of Covid-19. Yes, God’s TAM is influencing and changing our values, our attitudes, our behaviors and overall actions, millions of years after the creation of the universe. Unlike the industrial TAM of mankind, which if delayed or denied, can cause mechanical accidents, because machines have no patience, nature is both tolerant and patient.
The failure to carry out TAM in Nigeria’s refineries for an aggregate of over 40 years, came with a cost to the country, which has been paying dearly because of the suffocation in fuel supply.
The TAM of Covid-19 pandemic across global economies, has impacted more than what is happening to Nigeria, by affecting the world supply chain, due to the virtual dependence on china.
