Last night, President Muhammadu Buhari announced a 14-day extension to the lockdown that has brought Nigeria’s economy to a halt for the past two weeks. My position on the subject of Nigeria’s lockdown is hardly a secret, given that I have spent the past few weeks talking about almost nothing else. This position has even been endorsed by none other than WHO. Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Gbebreyesus, who has openly stated that a full lockdown is not a practical solution for a poor developing country fighting COVID-19.
To those in the know, however, it is clear that “lockdown and Inshallah” will be to the Nigerian coronavirus fight this year, what “border closure and Inshallah” was to Nigerian economic policy last year. At this point, another column about the lockdown would not be flogging a dead horse so much as turning it into a zombie and making it compete at the Grand National. Clearly this lockdown is not going anywhere because the decision makers, in their usual habit, have made it a policy hill to die on, for reasons best known to them.
Consequently, I will no longer write about the lockdown itself, but I will instead pivot to the efforts being made to cushion its disastrous effects on Nigeria’s poorest and most vulnerable people.
One billion naira is a lot of money. It is also a vanishingly tiny amount of money
My focus this week is on the Coronavirus Intervention Fund, an unfolding N1bn experiment that has caught my attention for a number of reasons. Taking off in Abuja today, it would ordinarily be a prosaic, bog-standard palliative distribution effort that is meant to help the most vulnerable in Nigeria — something all the contemporary palliative distribution efforts also claim to do, with varying degrees of truthfulness.
Some key details about its intended execution plan and some of the personnel involved, however, make it something that may be worth keeping a close eye on.
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One billion naira is a lot of money. It is also a vanishingly tiny amount of money. Both of these statements are true at the same time. To an individual, say someone tasked with managing a N1bn fund to obtain and distribute materials that are in high demand to people who have little or no voice, it can start to seem like a lot of money. So much in fact, that N5m here and N8m there might probably not be missed if it were not properly accounted for.
To the approximately 200,000 households being targeted by the programme organised by the Victims Support Fund, N1bn is cumulatively little more than a drop in a bucket. Without the lockdown, these people already existed in eye-watering levels of poverty. With the lockdown, their condition is positively miserable. They need food – rice beans, vegetable oil, salt, garri and other typical staples. They need medicine. They also need Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and essential hygiene products because they are most at risk of geometric COVID-19 spread. A billion naira, or less than $3m, is hardly going to take care of all of them.
What this fund hopes to achieve is not to rescue the entirety of Nigeria’s ultra-poor with the objectively small sum of N1bn, which is impossible. It does, however, intend to prove that it is possible in Nigeria, for N1bn to be spent on exactly what it was appropriated for in a fully accountable and auditable manner. According to Toyosi Akerele-Ogunsiji, the Chairperson of the Victims Support Fund COVID-19 Taskforce administering the fund, this week’s tour — going through the FCT, Lagos, Ogun, Borno, Adamawa, Yobe and Taraba — will be a case study in accountability.
Between Tuesday and Friday in this preliminary intervention phase, the fund says it will distribute among other things, 50,000 bags of rice, 50,000 bags of beans, 7,000 respirator N95 masks, 100,000 face masks, 100,000 latex gloves, 10,000 bottles of hand sanitiser, 41,760 tablets of disinfectant soap to health workers and vulnerable populations across Abuja, Lagos, Ogun, Borno, Yobe, Adamawa and Taraba. All collections and disbursements will be fully itemised and auditable, with a data management mechanism and auditors on hand to receive and count all items from suppliers at designated locations across these states.
Instead of going through the layers of bureaucracy that typically increase leakages and inefficiency, the Fund intends to work with local governments and to donate a percentage of its inventory to credible civil society organisations that already work with vulnerable people. Following the distribution process, it says it has set up a post-distribution evaluation process which will include photo and video evidence of distribution, lists of beneficiaries, and random visits by anonymous agents to the affected communities, where they will ask people if they received the donated items.
Already, at least one of the state governments in question has responded in a questionable manner. Rather than indicate that it will provide support in immediately disbursing the donations to those in need according to the plan, this state government wants to receive the donations on behalf of its vulnerable population and then hold on to them, after which it says it will then carry out disbursement by itself at the end of April. Presumably the deprived populations can hold out for another two weeks without food and sanitary materials.
Can the Fund’s David hold out for a week against the twin Goliaths of individual temptation and external pressure from people with the usual ulterior motives? That is what we are about to find out.
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Inaugurated by Victims Support Fund Chairman T.Y. Danjuma, the fund’s task force is made up of Borno State Civil Service Commission chairman and Borno State Red Cross Society chairman, Bulama Mali Gubio, former Cabinet Affairs Office Permanent Secretary John Gana and Victims Support Fund Board Member Sunday Oibe. Other members are Refugee Commission spokesperson Alkasim Abdulkadir, UN Senior Policy Advisor Sunday Ochoche, and Rise Networks founder, Toyosi Akerele-Ogunsiji who is the Taskforce Chairperson.
What catches the eye about this lineup is that it is dominated by remarkable professionals with decades of real-world experience. Such committees in Nigeria are typically dominated by politicians and individuals whose main economic activity appears to be the profitable grift of sitting on endless boards and committees with no measurable impact. This time it appears that someone took a deliberate decision to break with the status quo, which promises to be quite the spectacle if the Fund pulls off what it says it wants to.
Task force members like Ochoche and Alkasim Abdulkadir for example, who are both internationally respected professionals who have reached the pinnacle of their respective fields are precisely the sort of people who (at least on paper), should be able to do their jobs with maximum competence as well as maintain their composure and integrity when in close proximity to large sums of money.
The VSF COVID-19 Task Force Chairperson is another intriguing subplot. Apart from being the founder of Nigeria’s first AI-powered learning, research and work readiness centre, she also is the poster child of a new breed of young Nigerians with leadership capabilities who have cut their teeth in civil society, social entrepreneurship and emerging technologies, in addition to world class public policy education, in her case from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
Nigeria of course, has no shortage of similarly opinionated, well educated, bright Young Turks in and around governance and public policy circles. Indeed one of them is the writer of this article. The key difference here, and what makes this an exciting development to keep an eye on, is that for the first time, one of such people is actually the decision maker in a position of significant power.
Mrs Akerele-Ogunsiji is by quite some distance the youngest person on the fund’s task force, as well as the only woman and the only person from Southern Nigeria. Exactly why the unusual decision was made to make her the Chairperson is anyone’s guess, but it does present a delicious opportunity to demonstrate that at least one person from the next generation of Nigerians that purport to have leadership credentials, actually have the superior competence and integrity that they claim to have.
Is the VSF Coronavirus Fund going to do what it says on the tin, or will it end up in the same category with so many other big-talking hot air dreams we have seen in the past? Time will make that judgment in a matter of days. Hopefully, if the lockdown and its steadily advancing security breakdown do not put an end to Nigerian civilisation as we know it by then, we will be here to observe the verdict.
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