President Muhammadu Buhari on Sunday ordered a total lockdown of Lagos, Ogun and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) from 11pm on Monday to curb the spread of the deadly coronavirus. He, however, later extended the take-off date for Ogun to Friday.
While the lockdown is bound to have huge impact on people’s lives and livelihoods in all the affected states, it is specifically putting to test the dynamism of Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial nerve-centre which is home to over 20 million restless inhabitants.
On Monday, the announcement caused panic withdrawals at banks’ automated teller machines in Lagos, with scores of residents making frantic efforts to get enough money to stockpile food and other daily needs.
“I have to withdraw as much as I can so I do not get stranded within this period,” young Emeka Umanu, who spent one hour and 15 minutes at a Zenith Bank ATM at Okota, Lagos, said.
“When you visit ATMs at a period like this, the response you get most times is ‘out of service’ or ‘unable to dispense cash’,” Umanu said.
The number of Nigerians with the virus has surpassed 130 and there are possibilities that the number may hit 39,000 in the coming weeks if good social distancing is not observed by the public, Akin Abayomi, Lagos State commissioner for health, said.
Meanwhile, the Federal Government on Tuesday announced plans to open additional test centres in Kaduna, Kano, Maiduguri and Sokoto States in continuation of its containment strategies.
Osagie Ehanire, minister of health, who stated this in Abuja at the second briefing of the Presidential Task Force on Coronavirus, reiterated that all tests are at no costs to any individual.
He also disclosed that results from the monocular labs would be recognised as genuine by the Federal Government.
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Ehanire said additional efforts were being put in place to support the current efforts, adding that already, hundreds of ad hoc staffs have been recruited while retired NCDC staff have also been recalled to strengthen the current efforts to halt further spread of the virus.
While a lockdown has become a global best practice, analysts say it may create a ripple effect on residents of Nigeria’s commercial hub.
Lagos residents who have been forced to stay at home will struggle to have regular electricity to preserve their food or watch favourite programmes on television.
Many will rely on generators and will run out of cash in two weeks, Onyeka Okechukwu, a small business owner, said.
Many may not have regular cash supply as pressure on ATMs crowds out many families in need of cash.
A lot of families will struggle to feed as the Lagos State government’s food supplies remain limited to 200,000 households. Buhari’s Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programme (GEEP) stimulus may not work as it relies mainly on the operations of businesses to work.
In Italy, Spain, the UK, the United States and other countries where lockdown is in place, families are provided with food to dissuade them from trooping outside. The US President Donald Trump has pushed $1.2 trillion stimulus to enable families get direct payments of $1,000 and above within two weeks.
Nigeria has almost 100 million extremely poor people, some of whom live in Lagos.
Nigeria could have resorted to the use of Point of Sale (POS) transactions, but that would not be possible since retail businesses are not expected to operate in the state.
“There will be a lot of social stress,” Muda Yusuf, director-general of the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI), said.
“We have quite a large number of population that lives on daily income. What we could have done is cash transfer. In Lagos, almost 80 percent of the people have bank accounts. When you do transfer, which is a better and wider framework, you let people determine what their priorities are,” Yusuf said.
He explained that the country has not done well to those who are vulnerable.
Data from the Nigerian Interbank Settlement System (NIBSS) show that the volume of POS transactions stood at 41.3 million in January 2020, a drop by 4.83 million from the N46.13 million in December 2019.
Similarly, the value of POS transactions fell from N372.68 billion in December 2019 to N313.42 billion by the end of January 2020.
The decline was despite the number of registered PoS terminals by the banks increasing from 446,453 to 449,998 within the same period.
Sick patients may be endangered as transportation and logistics to hospitals become very difficult.
Also, lack of any means of transportation would also add to the growing list of problems as workers on essential duties without their own cars struggle to get to their areas of assignment.
“I understand lockdown is a good way considering the way the virus is spreading, but I think government has to come up with more palliative measures to make life easy for people that would stay at home,” said Moses Hammed, a research analyst at financial services firm, Investment One.
Read also: Fate of 36m unbanked Nigerians in limbo amid coronavirus lockdown
“Where people are asked to stay at home and don’t have anything to do, you might see crime rate increasing,” he said.
Many Lagos residents won’t have access to clean water this period. They rely on boreholes and now expensive packaged water. The water needs of Lagos are put at over 700 million gallons per day. The state has capacity of a little over 200 million gallons per day, but actually produces and distributes between 145 to 150 million gallons each day from its facilities, leaving a huge gap of over 500 million gallons, according to Lagos Water Corporation (LWC).
The Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) advises the government to extend tax holiday to companies on corporate tax, and waive the Value Added Tax (VAT) after the lockdown while reducing the burden of personal income tax as a way of increasing the disposable income of an average Nigerian worker.
Wale Olusi, head of research at United Capital, said the lockdown would restore Lagos economy, citing the lockdown of Wuhan as an example that it is not totally wrong.
“I do not think the government is happy enforcing the lockdown seeing how much the country is losing, but we need to flatten the curve as we can’t afford to allow what is happening in other countries to happen due to the fact that we do not have the required number of bed spaces, neither do we have the health care system that can contain the pandemic of this scale,” he said.
ODINAKA ANUDU, MICHAEL ANI (Lagos) & Tony Ailemen (Abuja)
