Just a rant
The coronavirus is showing Nigeria up in a big way. Government revenues have entered the toilet and are unlikely to come out soon. So much so that the government wants to seize COVID donations and use them to fund the budget. A rather shortsighted move if you think about it, but here we are, and it is all as a result of government laziness which shows that all the talk of wanting to diversify the economy is nonsense.
The numbers bear this out, Nigeria’s economy is already diversified. Oil is 7.32% of GDP. Agric is 21.2%, industry outside oil is 18.5%, services is 52%. I wrote about all that in today’s BusinessDay.
The problem is that the govt has more or less refused to do the hard work of getting the rather large informal sector (many of them in agric and services) into the formal net.
We instead prefer the easy route of waiting for oil to be pumped out of the ground and sold in the international market. We can’t even be bothered to refine it. The work is too hard.
This same attitude is what is showing in our rapid acceptance of the “miracle cure” from Madagascar.
Here is the issue with this Madagascar thing — as far as I know, it has not undergone any peer-reviewed clinical trials. Madagascar’s president has raised the racism spectre by saying that if it were a European country, there’d be no doubts about the efficacy of the cure. But he made this statement four days after the WHO called for clinical trials of the cure, and a week after the African Union asked Madagascar for technical data concerning this cure.
This is where we run into trouble. As far as I have seen, no one has said the cure is fake. What they have asked for is trials, which is the standard path towards getting a new drug on the shelves. Has Madagascar given the AU the technical data it asked for? What are the side effects?
It all boils down to our disdain for hard work and process, that’s why we are always looking for a miracle cure which may well turn out to be a placebo…
Interestingly, some traders (we tend to consider traders as uneducated here for some reason) seem to be quite lucid as to what to do as regards Nigeria.
“We cannot be solving one problem and at the same time creating another. There is a need for us to weigh the options and strike a balance that will have a human face.”- Tony Obih, president of Balogun Market Business Association.
Chikwem Obasi, a beauty care importer, who doubles as patron of Balogun Market, said intensifying testing capacity was key.
One of our big challenges regarding coronavirus in this country is this: how do you lockdown a country where the vast majority of its workforce is in the informal sector and depend on daily wages?
But Mr Obasi’s statement cuts to the heart of the whole thing. We locked down anyway, then promptly failed to test.
I mean, as of the end of the lockdown just over a week ago now, we had done about 15k tests. Now it is up to 27k as of 10 May, but, and I can’t stress this enough, this is samples tested, not people tested.
There is a difference.
As of yesterday, we had 902 people in Nigeria who have recovered. Each of these recovered persons must have been tested at least three or four times. Do the math and remove that from the number of tests, then do the math of each of the 4641 people still positive, then on the 150 people who have passed away, and you find that we have tested about 10k individuals.
In a country that claims to have more than 200m people?
That is ridiculously low, and if we continue at this snail’s pace, we may be forced to lockdown again, attendant possible social unrest notwithstanding. Again, it all boils down to our failure to plan…