Coronavirus Pandemic and Nigeria’s Social Contract: Re-Examining the Covid – 19 Palliatives

Anthony EjueEgberi^* , Isa Munkaila

^*Department of Public Administration, Federal University Wukari Taraba State, Nigeria

Corresponding Author Email: egberi@fuwukari.edu.ng

DOI : https://doi.org/10.46890/SL.2022.v03i02.003

Abstract

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The covid-19 pandemic is known to be a part of the worldwide pandemic of Coronavirus disease 2019 caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome Coronavirus 2(SAR – Cov – 2) (www.en.m.wikipedia.org). At the advent of the Covid-19 case in Nigeria (27thof February 2020), like any other nation, Nigeria decided to put in place measures such as wearing a face mask, social distancing, and lockdown of schools, government offices, businesses, interstate movement, religious worship, flights movement, the entire economy among other things was put on hold. The measure was to curtail the spread of the virus. The common slogan then was; that the virus does not move. It is we human beings that move the virus. So, to prevent further spread it was necessary to prevent the movement of human beings through the lockdown.
Why all these measures to check the spread were rational and justifiable in all ramifications, the obvious challenge that confronted the citizenry was the difficulties in feeding, health care assistance, unemployment compensation; housing subsidies, energy and utility subsidies, and assistance for other basic services to poor individuals were absent in Nigeria. The Nigeria government never saw the need to cushion the effect of these challenges that were staring at the faces of her citizenry unlike what was seen obtainable in other countries of the world, even down to Africa with a clear example of Rwanda, South Africa, and a host of others. Nigeria never had adequate palliative measures, and neither did the government activated her social contract law to cushion the effect of the lockdown. The weak, unemployed, downtrodden, and the less privileged were left at their mercy.
Social contract as a policy is a fundamental principle of legitimizing governmental organization and the management of social goods for the benefit of the general society. The policy, abi-ni-tiois provides a starting point for a rational explanation of the origin of the state. The idea was that the authority that government has over supposed subjects or citizens is derived originally from an agreement between ruler and ruled in which the former agrees to provide advantages such as peace, security, social welfare, and order in return for obedience from the latter.
The social contract theory is, therefore, the theory which posits that “individuals, by nature free and equal, agree to renounce part of their natural liberty by entering into civil society and constituting a political authority to which they subject themselves for the sake of the advantages provided by the civil society (Falaiye&Okeregbe, 2016). John Rawls in his work “A Theory of Justice” (1971) in Falaiye&Okeregbe (2016), proposed a contractarian principle of justice to address issues of fairness in socio-economic and political situations. The abstract philosophical nature of his theory lies in the fundamental question his theory seeks to address, namely, what could be said to be a just social contract in addressing socio-political issues. He further posited that a just social contract is one whereby rational individuals in a hypothetical original position, that is, a condition in which they would have no foreknowledge of their place and fortune in the society they agree to, reach an agreement on certain general principles of justice and legal organization in society. If behind the veil of ignorance, they suspend their individual preferences in abeyance and are ignorant of where they would belong in the social scheme they agree upon. The policy maintains that any rational person in the original position and placing him or herself behind the veil of ignorance would reject utilitarian, egoistic, perfectionist alternatives for justice as fairness. This principle of justice is captured by this sentence:” All primary goods – liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect – are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any or all of these goods is to the advantage of the least favored.”
Drawing from the foregoing Covid-19 pandemic in Nigeria and the relative abysmal management of government palliative cast so much doubt on the existence of a social contract policy. Could one agree that the Nigeria government adequately manages the distribution of palliative with fairness, equity, and justice to the advantage of the least favored? This paper will explore the connection between Nigeria’s social contract and the management of government palliative during the Covid-19 pandemic in Nigeria. The paper will try to answer the following questions: what lessons can be drawn from the management of palliatives during the Covid-19 in Nigeria? How can the derive lessons facilitate and improve the Nigerian social contract policy?

1. Conceptual Discuss
   Coronavirus
   The coronavirus began in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China. Residents who lived in Wuhan had some link to large seafood and live animal markets, suggesting that the mode of transmission of coronavirus was from animal to person. The virus had been named “SARS-CoV-2”, and the disease it causes had been named “coronavirus disease 2019” (abbreviated “Covid-19”). The first known patient of coronavirus started experiencing symptoms in Wuhan, China, on 1 December 2019. Since then, there have been over 800,000 reported cases worldwide (Ozili, 2020). On February 27th, 2020, the coronavirus entered Nigeria through an infected Italian citizen who came in contact with a Nigerian citizen who was subsequently infected with the coronavirus. The coronavirus then spread to other citizens in Lagos and to other parts of the country(Ozili, 2020). As of June 2020, after exactly 100 days of Covid-19 in Nigeria, the table shows a record 342 deaths and 12,233 confirmed cases. This had brought much brought-untold fear and left a harsh burden on the citizenry that desire a well-coordinated palliative from the government to cushion the effect of this burden. The effect of Covid-19 has resulted in immediate job and income losses by Nigerian small business owners occasioned by the pandemic lockdown, showing the inter-dependence of the world economy at all levels, even in towns and villages. The effect had also been hard on tourism, aviation, the sporting world, and the owners of the soccer leagues viewing centers across Nigerian cities, towns, and villages where sports fans pay to watch these matches. With the suspension of the various leagues, it had been zero income for this sector, also on borrowers’ capacity to service loans, which gave rise to low banks’ earnings and eventually impaired bank soundness and stability (Ozili, 2020). Further to that were workers’ pay cuts, reduction, and casualization delay in salaries by government and private organizations, pay cuts, retrenchment, and casualization.

Pandemic
Ogunde(2020) noted that contrary to the many spuriousun scientific explanations and conspiracy theories on the origin of the disease being peddled on social media and by some religious personalities – including the notion that the new non-ionisation radio wave 5G technology is linked to the origin of Coronavirus, the truth is that Coronaviruses are not strange to the medical world. They have been studied in the past. The name Corona had to do with its appearance under the electron microscope, and it had a fat layer envelope shaped like a crown (‘corona’s in Latin means ‘crown’). One of the germs that caused the common cold (catarrh) is a type of Coronavirus that affects many people but soon resolved on its own. In other instances, coronaviruses have been known to jump from some animals and infect humans (a phenomenon called zoonotic infection) and then spread further via human-to-human transmissions, such as the case with the coronavirus that caused the 2012 Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS Coronavirus or MERS-CoV) and the one that caused the 2003 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS Coronavirus or SARS-CoV), thought to have come from bats. The present pandemics are caused by a virus whose genetic content mapping is very close to the genetic map of the virus that caused the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome. It is the similarity earned with the new coronavirus with its similar nomenclature, SARS-CoV 2. It was also previously referred to as 2019-nCoV or Wuhan Coronavirus.
Towards the end of December 2019, this novel coronavirus was identified as the cause of the sporadic severe respiratory tract disease cases in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province, China. It rapidly spread, resulting in an epidemic throughout China, and then move to other parts of the world like wildfire, affecting every continent except Antarctica. The World Health Organization (WHO) later designated COVID-19, which stands for coronavirus disease 2019, and declared it a pandemic on 11 March 2020.

Lockdown
As part of the efforts to curtail the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government of Nigeria ordered a lockdown first on three major states; Lagos, Ogun, and the FCT Abuja, for an initial period of two weeks starting 11:59 pm, 30 March 2020, then now extended by another 2 weeks from 13 April 2020. Many other states applied the stay-at-home rule, while others applied state boundaries closure. Ironically, However, locking people down at homes in the Nigerian context is like asking people to go hungry for the duration of the lockdown. More than 60 percent of Nigerians survive on daily pay from menial jobs and petty trading. A lockdown means their means of daily income and livelihood were locked down. The plight of private-sector employees were also not better. Many private employers maintained a ‘no salary during the lockdown’ stance, or at best a 50 percent pay cut(Ogunde, 2020). Some even completely laid their workers off.
A typical example was the 400 workers laid off by the American University of Nigeria owned by Atiku Abubakar, and 400 workers lay off by Access Bank, among other private organizations. This means that these persons have either been sent to their early graves or pushed to the street to start robbery because their means of livelihood have been taken away. The government never rose to the challenge to cushion the effect of this sudden loss of jobs, especially without proud notice and compensation. Unlike in other nations where there were both bails out to organizations and individuals to cushion the effect of the pandemic. The lockdown brought untold hardship and losses to both individuals and organizations and its effect is felt to date.

Palliative
Kalu (2020) noted that although President Buhari promised the citizens some palliative measures, including disbursing funds and food items to those most affected. But the reality on the ground was a far cry from the promises made by the President; only a small proportion of the population attest to receiving any support. As a result of the inability of the government to meet the expectation of the populace, many of the citizens had no choice but to disobey the lockdown order with the hope of making sales or trying to earn money through other services. Ogunde (2020) noted that pangs of hunger lead to widespread anger. Because citizens were finding it difficult to survive without sources of income and no government intervention in the form of palliative. Protests in different forms were seen within the communities, towns, and cities. People protested against a lockdown without palliatives, and even rejected all manners of palliatives that smack of insult to their intelligence, such as packs of food that were not enough to feed a family of six in 2 weeks being distributed to be shared among 60-80 families in a cluster. The protest mood brewed had the potential to transform into a movement that posed a serious challenge to the lockdown because the hunger question was not resolved. It got a lot worse, in Lagos and Ogun States where layers of lumpen youths, pushed to extreme hunger by the lockdown, went on mass looting of shops and houses, carting away people’s food and belongings. This long-standing anger was the fuel that ignited the endsars protest which saw the destruction of properties and loss of lives.
Social Contract
Ozili (2020) posit that although the coronavirus outbreak which started in the Wuhan province of China had spill over effect in Nigeria and many countries of the world, the reason why the outbreak became uncontrollable in Nigeria and caused suffering to poor citizens was because of weak institutions that were ineffective in responding to the pandemic and the lack of social welfare programs that would have catered for poor citizens and vulnerable Nigerians who were affected by the crisis. Ozili (2020) further emphasized that Nigeria does not have a national social welfare programme or policy that offers assistance to individuals and families in need such as health care assistance, food stamps, bail out for organizations, unemployment compensation, disaster relief, and educational assistance. The consequences of the absence of this national social welfare program became evident during the coronavirus outbreak of 2020. During the outbreak, people had little to rely on; poor citizens did not have welfare relief that could help them cope with the economic hardship at the time. There were no housing subsidies, energy and utility subsidies, and assistance for other basic services to individuals most affected by the coronavirus outbreak. The situation and its effects were so scarring and staring at the faces of the vulnerable because all their means of livelihood vanished before their very eyes. They were plunged back to their darkest days of life. The government was nowhere coming forth with assistance because the government itself had no lay down documented plan to meet the needs of such a pandemic.
Honestly, providing social welfare services to vulnerable citizens is the most proven way to protect them from economic hardship in bad times (Ewalt and Jennings Jr, 2014 in Ozili, 2020). The lack of such welfare services for vulnerable people, households, and poor individuals during the coronavirus outbreak in Nigeria caused severe pain and economic hardship to households and poor individuals (Ozili, 2020).

2. Nexus between Nigeria Social Contract and Palliative
   Kazeem (2020) noted that while the need for a lockdown might have seemed inevitable amid the Covid-19 outbreak, its abruptness and the inadequate palliative measure had left millions of low-income households battling hunger. Atiku Abubakar in Sowunmi(2020) observed that as the coronavirus pandemic ravages the world, Nigeria state governments have proactively taken measures, such as issuing stay-at-home orders, and shutting down non-essential markets and other places of mass gatherings, while also giving guidelines for social distancing. However, we must accept that much of the Nigerian public has a subsistence existence. Many of our people do not have the financial capacity to withstand long periods of lockdown. Therefore, it is incumbent on the Federal and state governments to provide palliatives to the Nigerian people to enable them to survive, even as they abide by these necessary measures for their safety.
   The President of the Senate, Ahmad Lawan, in Abdullahi (2020) also urged the President Muhammadu Buhari-led Federal Government to put up palliative measures that will aid smooth compliance of Nigerians to the global pandemic accompanied by the hardship that has arisen from such sudden life changes occasioned by the incidence of the pestilence in the country. The need for relief provision for Nigerians whose daily life is affected cannot be over-emphasized. The Senate President further argued that there must be adequate provision for the poor and oppressed in the country, whom the lock-down posed great challenges in terms of feeding and well-being, noting that such action without proper consideration for the fewer privileges may likely lead to more problems for the government, which may frustrate its plan of curtailing the pestilence. Lawan said the apex government must ensure the release of funds to purchase food and pharmaceutical supplies for ordinary Nigerians, adding that an indigenous method must be devised to help mitigate the spread of the virus without unleashing hardship on the citizens. “Since we have shut down our country, then as a government we must be prepared to have some relief for the most ordinary people. If we lock up Nigeria today, we will wake up trouble, because most of our citizens go to the market every day before they can get something to eat.
   Kazeem (2020) further posits that the Nigerian government had only provided cash relief to 3.6 million poor households during the lockdown, a tiny figure in a country where 95.9 million people live in extreme poverty. Having surpassed India as the country with the most extremely poor people in the world in 2018. The government’s inability to cater to its poor reflects a long-running lack of a functioning, nationwide social welfare system. While President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration has attempted to set up more social intervention programmes, from feeding school children to cash transfer the stark realities of the ongoing lockdown show those efforts are nowhere near enough.

Lessons from Covid-19 Palliative Management in Nigeria
Covid-19 has exposed the inadequacies in Nigeria’s social contract system and risks excluding the country’s poorest and its most vulnerable people. “Millions of Nigerians who observed the COVID-19 lockdown lacked the food and income their families needed to survive. Covid-19 pandemic palliatives management was largely compromised in Nigeria. Much of the palliative packages did not reach the majority of those for whom they were intended; which include cash transfer, loan repayment, waivers, and distribution of food items. In states most affected by the lockdown, the overwhelming majority of citizens whose daily means of livelihood had been interrupted and without alternative sources of income could not benefit from the palliatives. Unfortunately, as later on exposed by endsarsdemostrators, most state governors who received palliatives material sun behalf of their citizens rather hurded the items so received.
The process of dispensing Covid-19 relief packages as wit¬nessed was laced within adequacies. Millions of Nigerians deserving of support never got the support or benefit from the conditional cash transfer which also involved the disbursement of cash in neighborhoods coordinated by the National Social Investment programme (NSIP)and the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Develop¬ment. Undoubtedly, the obvious inadequa¬cy that had attended the distribution of palliative amongst Nigerians glaringly shows the depth of lead¬ership deficit in the country. Lack of commitment to creating a credible database for social safety net programs, programs the political affiliation does not convey the genuine intention of eradicating grinding poverty in the country. Nigerians, more than ever before desire transpar¬ency in the distribution of any palliative packages. The lessons of this pandemic and what transpired with regard to the management of palliative were better heard than experienced. It is also a wake-up call to all stakeholders in the Nigeria project.

Policy Prescriptions and Recommendations
The Nigerian government must aim to protect its citizens and provide them with the necessary commodities or funds to help mitigate the consequences of any pandemic.
Lockdown must come with adequate provision of food and essential household requirements for all in need.
Guaranteed salary for all workers within the period of lockdown is important; no job losses, appropriate housing, and other essentials for all while we keep safe at home to keep the virus at bay to flat the curve.
The government at all levels owes it a responsibility to deploy more efficient measures to democ¬ratise the distribution of palliatives across the board to douse feelings of neglect. The government at all levels must prioritize the compilation of credible database to reach out to citizens in need of social intervention supports from the government. Therefore, the need to take the lessons of Covid-19 induced social crisis seriously to avoid a poten¬tial recipe for a wide-scale uprising in the foreseeable future.
 

References
[1]. Abdullahi,I.(2020)Lawan advises the federal government to provide palliative measures for Nigerians before lockdown.
[2]. Falaiye, M. &Okeregbe, A. (2016) Social contract theories and governance in contemporary Nigeria “In ethics, Governance and social order in Africa”. Easy in honor of Godwin .S. Sogolo, Oyeshile, and Offor (ed). Ibadan: Zenith Books House Ltd.
[3]. Kalu, B. (2020) Covid-19 in Nigeria: AHunger disease. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1016/S2213-2600(20)30220-4
[4]. Kazeem, Y. (2020) Ordinary Nigerians are filling the country’s major social welfare gaps amid coronavirus.
[5]. Ogunde, O. (2020)The impact on Nigeria of the coronavirus pandemic: socioeconomic pandemonium.
[6]. Ozili, P. (2020) Covid-19 pandemic and economic crisis: The Nigerian experience and structural causes. 1 – 19 DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.3567419
[7]. Sowunmi, I. (2020) Coronavirus: Nigerians deserve palliative measures; I Pledge N50m towards government’s stimulus package, By Atiku Abubakar.
[8]. Editorial (2020) Beyond COVID-19 Palliative Politics: Nigerians deserve better. Independent Newspaper Friday, 17th April.