Revisiting Soludo’s position

BY KEN NJOKU

Prof Soludo’s corona thesis is quite detailed and remarkable, as usual. I couldn’t read to the end but I did go far enough to grab the juice of his argument. He says the western world is attempting to eliminate the pandemic by trial and error. He opines that America is throwing any and everything at the menace. He holds that African nations are simply engaging in copy and paste with regard to the lock down, and that the absence of interventions like robust stimulus packages, makes that unsustainable. And he questions the viability of social distancing in our shanties.

Brilliant analysis. Only there’s a little problem. This is a completely medical and public health challenge. And secondly, it is a global public health emergency.

We are right in the vortex of a catastrophic volcano, and the only people that should provide thought leadership at this moment are virologists and public health professionals.

Once we get the world out of this ICU, then politicians and economists and sociologists can then gather around the camp fire, and create the broad dashboard and giga structures and swath of geographical nuances that will help the world better manage recoveries and further outbreaks of stuff like this. Economists and politicians belong in the post mortem, not in the emergency surgery theatre of this humongous menace.

And so far, the consensus from the global health community has given us very few choices. Lock down and lock down early. Enforce social distancing. Wear masks. Watch ur personal hygiene. Build up your personal immune systems. Make the necessary investments in the public health system. That’s it for now. That’s the hand we’ve all been dealt.

Plus the virus has only one existential protocol, applicable with no variation across countries and continents: ” When people move, I surge and spread. When they stop moving, I decline and die. My sweet spot is the dense population. And if u don’t want me to wipe off ur condensed populations, then lock me out by locking down ur borders and do so very early in the day. And I will continue my march of death till u have the discipline to play against my protocol and until u find a vaccine to cut off my head”

That’s the way of the beast. And Africa will not have a different set of rules.

And that’s been the play book all across the world. That’s how Vietnam got out of it. That’s how China is getting out of it.
It’s not America that is throwing any and everything at it. It is the narcissistic political survivor, Donald Trump who is touting hydroxychloroquine and disinfectant injection and every thing his spineless enablers suggest to him.

So here’s the thing for Nigeria. We are right now stranded as a nation, in the very combustible convergence of a lethal pandemic and an economic collapse. As BusinessDay rightly noted recently, Nations are being advised that to get out of this epidemic, they should be ready to spend at least 10% of their GDP consistently for at least 12 months. But Nigeria is now a failed state. We have squandered our Excess Crude Account that used to have a balance of as much as $20bn in 2008, money that should hv been transferred to and managed by our sovereign wealth authority. And so with our current GDP of about $410bn, this is a spending threshold we could hv easily met. But we can’t. But Norway, a country with less than 10% of our population and blessed with oil as we are, now has a sovereign wealth fund of $1 trillion dollars. With their oil wealth, they have built a fortress balance sheet to secure them against any headwinds in the crude oil market

And so as oil prices continue to dip precipitously, hobbled by vaporized global demand, Norway couldn’t be bothered. But that same catastrophe is effectively drawing the curtains on Nigeria’s prosperity for the foreseeable future.

The way forward is first to salvage what we can of our population by seriously enforcing existing COVID rollback rules. Two, the states must revisit their individual budgets as the revenue assumptions hv totally collapsed. Three, faced with the binary choice between lives and livelihoods, priority must shift to securing lives. States must use the little resources they gave to begin feeding their people and stave off social unrest, even if it comes at the expense of capital and infrastructure expenditure. Governors ‘ security votes should be collapsed to feed the people programs. States should also coalesce into regional policy and execution federations to address the challenges. The hard work of leveraging human capital to build local economies must also commence in earnest. Redundant youth energy has to be channelled into agriculture.

These are by no means exhaustive. They won’t solve all the problems. But at least they can be said to be the beginning of a constructive beginning.
Either way, we can’t avoid the pangs of the looming prolonged pain that is to come.

Ken Njoku, a Management Consultant, contributed this piece from Lagos.