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How a pandemic is increasing national coordination in Nigeria
Private organizations, religious groups, and the government are working together for the first time in 21 years of democracy. All it took was a global pandemic.
On the 18th of March 2020, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was aired on national television, and in a nationwide broadcast to the German people she uttered the words: “Since World War II, there has never been a challenge for our country in which acting in solidarity was so very crucial.” No other statement could be more precise to capture the effects of the COVID-19 on Europe. In less than three months, not a single shot had been fired, but over one hundred thousand people were dead worldwide. The economic numbers that are showing up on country statistics are the same people saw in 1917, just before the first World War. The World Health Organization listed COVID-19 as a global pandemic.
Nigeria is not new to pandemics. Two people die every four hours through road accidents, and half of Nigeria’s youth population (over 80million people) are without jobs. The country has been fighting against an Islamist insurgency for over ten years, a group that has killed over 6,000 people. Health-related mortality rates are also staggering — Malaria alone kills over 25,000 people every month, a Lassa fever outbreak since January has killed almost 200 people, and one in every three Nigerians do not have access to clean water.
On the 27 of February 2020, the Nigerian government announced that a case of the coronavirus — a virus caused by the SARS-CoV-2 had been detected in Lagos state. An Italian citizen in Lagos for a short consultation had tested positive for the virus. The growing fears of a spread of the virus if stricter measures were not put in place, led Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari to make a nationwide broadcast which instructed an immediate quarantine for three major states (Abuja, Lagos, and Ogun) — states that are home to almost 30 million people. Several other states immediately took this as a cue and the whole country went into a full lock-down.
Nigeria had been expecting the virus. In January this year, the World Health Organization listed the country alongside 13 other African countries identified as ‘high-risk’ locations for the spread of the virus.
