• Tuesday, March 26, 2024
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BusinessDay

How COVID-19 is unraveling Nigeria’s deepest problems

Covid-19 pandemic

Over the past few weeks, governors in some northern Nigerian states have been pawning destitute children across state-lines upon fears that they will spread COVID-19 as years of promoting dubious religious education that left youths amenable to political control, through a broken Almajiri system, takes a toll.

As the Nigerian government struggles to manage the fall-out from a deadly coronavirus pandemic that has sickened over 5million people and killed over 350,000, it is learning that though it has been spared the worst effects reporting less than 300 deaths, all the fault lines that held this beat-up federation, could very well unravel.

After nearly two months of lockdown, the nation is on the cusp of reopening with many disappointed that the lockdown hasn’t led to improved testing nor has the truly vulnerable benefited from government’s palliatives. Yet billions of naira has been voted on various programmes that barely yielded tangible results.

According to a UNICEF data, there are over 9.5 million Almajiris in northern Nigeria. These children were shipped to Imams for Islamic education but without a regulated and well funded system, they have become tools for religious extremists and political anarchy. Now they have become super spreaders of COVID-19.

The Almajiris constitute the bulk of Nigeria’s out-of-school children and right up the alley are girls who continue to be denied an education as poor people in Northern Nigeria marry off female children barely in their teens to save up on the cost of feeding and educating them.

The Federal Government can no longer pretend this will not snowball into a crisis. Currently, over 60 percent of the population are young and have inherited a fractured educational and healthcare system. These young people are growing up with social media providing an outlet for their pent-up emotions but soon they will begin searching for more options.

Prior to COVID-19, successive governments treated healthcare funding as an after thought. The ease at which public officers and their families fly abroad for treatment removes any urgency to fix the country’s dilapidated healthcare system. Even the president who spent months outside the country tending to his own health in his earliest years in office, has not done better than his predecessors in funding the health sector.

However, the coronavirus with its attendant suspension of foreign travels has revealed that medical tourism to India as state policy is untenable.

For years successive Nigerian governments insisted on maintaining a wasteful subsidy on petrol despite abundant evidence that it does not benefit the poor touted as its reason. NNPC data shows that the Federal government has burnt $63billion on subsidies between 2006 and 2018.

Even after the economy went into a recession at the end of 2016, the Buhari administration only maintained a price modulated regime rather than scrap the policy and soon after when oil prices recovered, Nigeria continued frittering away billions subsidizing petrol for citizens in Lagos and Abuja who buy almost half of all petrol imported into the country according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics.

Many countries instituted a lock-down to control the spread of Coronavirus and Nigeria too did the same. But unlike most countries, millions of Nigerians have no homes hence the streets are packed with people. Lockdown in Nigeria is a little more than roads being empty of vehicles and offices, schools and churches under lock and key. Away from the major roads, lockdown is just another public holiday with no end notice.

Children in many countries have continued education through the internet using video conferencing applications. Many public schools in Nigeria do not have running water and even private schools lack good teachers. Universities and Polytechnics are on lockdown and the few elite private schools in session cope with dodgy internet services.

But Nigeria fritters valuable resources every year paying lawmakers unconscionable allowances, subsidising foreign currency to prop up the naira, and fund religious pilgrimages as well a host of other wasteful spending. These can no longer be a priority unless the endgame is self-immolation.

If COVID-19, has taught us anything, it is that elections have consequences. Electing inept people will bring disastrous consequences irrespective of their tribe, state, local government, religion or political party. The quality of leadership is directly proportional to the solutions they create during a crisis. Any government seeking to muzzle a free press is burrowing through the last bastion of the public – do not enable it as the consequences are always lethal.