15th April, 2020
By Emmanuel Ezeagwu
There is an alarming increase of cases of broad daylight robberies across Lagos. Everything from money to pots of stew are being stolen. This shows the current extent of hunger and desperation in the society. Aside from this, there is an overwhelming sense of agitation brewing among the populace because of the discomfort and the shift from normal life.
Adding salt to injury, yesterday, 14 April 2020, the president extended the lockdown by another fortnight which is a very uninformed move. We are better off using safety measures to protect ourselves instead of a full economic shutdown.
Some countries like Japan & Turkey (I stand to be corrected) didn’t implement a total lockdown of business and movement. And I believe they’re faring well as regards the extent of the reach of the infection. These countries have registered confirmed cases slightly higher than ours, but at present, the rate of infection has been negligible. And these countries have a poverty rate much lower than ours.
Europe has a much larger number of infected people and deaths and a much lesser poverty percentage. And so it is understandable why it enforced a strict level of shut down.
Besides these, many of these European and Asian governments distributed stimulus packages to small and medium businesses and some form of palliatives to the citizenry to cushion the effects of the lockdown. South Korea even handed online learning devices to all its pupils.
Africa has recorded a relatively lower number of coronavirus infections. Even if it’s as a result of the low number of testings being carried out, some may argue, the fact remains that judging from statistics, Africa is still much lower on the ladder.
However, it could skyrocket, as projected, if extreme care is not taken especially in Africa’s numerous rural areas and slums where households are clustered together and basic amenities are shared or non-existent. It is worthy of note that most cases in Africa have been in rich urban areas where index cases have been imported.
A mistake that has repeated itself several times and from which Africa has apparently not learnt anything is merely copying European styles. We see that, for example, in our form of government, including the legislative and judiciary. We just “copy and paste” without examining if they would work for us or, at least, tailoring them to our peculiarities. We seem to assume that since it’s European, and that they were our colonial masters, then it’s fine.
Replicating the European policy of lockdown to battle coronavirus is not fine with us. One, the number of infected cases is much lower in comparison. Two, the number of poor in our countries is even more than the entire population in most, if not all, of these European states. Three, the government is corrupt enough and inept enough to dish out stimulus packages and palliatives to even a fraction of the population. And four, there is inadequate power supply, security and other social amenities to go round to sustain a total lockdown.
A more viable option would have been this: Instead of a lockdown, allow people to go about their businesses but enforce the use of face masks by all and sundry in the public. Secondly, rather than restrict peoples movement, ensure that no persons leave the urban areas for the rural areas, and maybe vice versa. In other words, ban interstate travels. Moreover, all businesses, shops, service providers, religious and social centres, etc must be compliant in providing hand sanitizers or running water and soap to their customers, etc.
Other things the government can do to help is ramping up tests for COVID-19; increasing the capacity for contact tracing; distributing face masks; localizing the production of face masks, hand sanitizers and other relevant medical gear; sensitizing and educating the masses about personal hygiene in times of disease pandemic.
Several nations adopted various strategies in tackling the spread of COVID-19. They did this by an understanding of scenarios that would or would not work for them. It is only logical if we have an in-depth study of the situation of the pandemic, our economy and our Nigerian ideology and come up with a system of ours that perfectly suits us to fight this outbreak rather than borrowing the lockdown approach because it worked in a “white man’s land”. It is blatant foolishness to assume that policies will work alike in a developing and in a developed country.