Nigeria’s priorities in a post-COVID-19 world include restoring economic growth in the immediate term, building resilience in the health sector, and repositioning the economy on a sustainable footing in the medium term while saving jobs and building domestic capacity and local production in critical areas.
These were the summations of Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, SAN, during a virtual Chatham House interactive session on Tuesday themed: “Priorities for Nigeria’s Post-COVID Recovery”.
During the Chatham House interaction, the Vice President discussed the challenges posed to Nigeria by the global COVID-19 pandemic and the Nigerian government’s response aimed at ensuring lasting socio-economic recovery and development.
Prof. Osinbajo highlighted the sizable impact of the Buhari management’s Economic Sustainability Plan (ESP) as a essential pivot in assisting the u . S . Respond to the fallouts of the pandemic.
He defined that “the Buhari management’s first precedence changed into to guard humans and their livelihoods in response to the fallout of the pandemic. One of the ways was to help the essential MSMEs sector through the Survival Fund scheme, a issue below the ESP.”
According to the VP, “one of the precise interventions underneath the ESP become what we describe because the Survival Fund, which essentially became a fund to guard jobs and to ensure that during the direction of the pandemic and right now thereafter, casual employees specifically or private sector people specifically those in the casual area, had been as a minimum capable of preserve to earn some wages."
Prof. Osinbajo said that via the Survival Fund scheme, over 300,000 beneficiaries, in addition to groups have been supported in the course of the pandemic “by offering salaries for three months for beneficiaries, which include private college instructors, artisans, avenue transporters, taxi cab operators, and business tricycle operators within the urban areas .
“We additionally sought to shield the most susceptible, specifically, the city terrible who have been additionally hard hit. What we did changed into to offer direct cash transfers to the city terrible, lots of them who're captured in a social sign in. In the primary segment of that, we are able to advantage about 1 million beneficiaries, and we're now in a function using the equal social sign up to scale up the programme to approximately 20 million beneficiaries.”
The Vice President additionally highlighted the work being done through government inside the regions of improving broadband connectivity and increasing the country’s countrywide identity base, which he said would help in developing the us of a’s present social check in and different pro-bad programmes beneath the Buhari administration’s Social Investment schemes.
Also, to stimulate manufacturing within the financial system, Prof. Osinbajo stated that the Federal Government is “focused on energising existing value chain in agriculture, creation and renewable energy,” at the same time as he highlighted the impact of the ESP’s agriculture scheme and social housing programme in enhancing nearby productiveness and growing jobs.
“Our agriculture programme (below the ESP) aims at expanding productiveness, developing a complete of about five million jobs. What we have finished so far is that we have been capable of register and geotag about 5 million new farmers to farmland regions. The programme is likewise assisting smallholder farmers with the aid of linking them to extension offerings and occasional-hobby enter financing.
“We also have a mass housing programme which is designed to supply less costly homes via direct intervention within the housing construction zone geared toward developing 1.Eight million jobs collectively with the construction of three hundred,000 houses inside the first segment. At the instant, the programme is ongoing in 12 states so one can be improved to all the states in the federation.”
The Vice President similarly explained that the ESP was developed as a short-term method to deal with the 2-fold undertaking posed with the aid of the pandemic: to both public health and the national economic system.
For example, inside the fitness sector, Prof. Osinbajo stated that a critical region for authorities inside the fallout of the pandemic “is in doing far greater with our studies establishments and making an investment a ways greater in those institutions.”
He said, “seeing that February 2020 (when Nigeria confirmed its first COVID-19 case), we've drastically ramped up our trying out and case control capacity. We have activated from about five molecular laboratories to approximately one hundred twenty, most of them public laboratories.
“We have elevated the footprint of our sovereign public fitness response ability, mainly on the sub-national level, and in areas wherein such abilties didn’t exist earlier than.
Prof. Osinbajo similarly stated authorities turned into additionally focused on promoting a subculture of preparedness throughout all tiers of the us of a’s health care machine by using constructing resilience within the health area.
“Going forward," he stated "we are committed to constructing at the exemplary dedication of our medical experts and strengthening the capacity of our fitness structures to face up to shocks created by way of infectious sicknesses and pandemics together with we are experiencing.
“One cause why we've been capable of manipulate this pandemic better than anticipated is that we did have some current public zone infrastructure to paintings with, the Ebola outbreak in 2014, our ongoing battles with Lassa fever, our successes with polio eradication all helped us to tighten our pandemic contingency plans, improve our emergency coordination and surveillance capacity and also enhance investments in public health laboratories.”
The Vice President highlighted the authorities’s efforts thru the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) in tackling the pandemic, including that it additionally prioritized the strengthening of the country’s public fitness infrastructure
“While it is real that during many respects, our sanatorium infrastructure still lags behind in standards, in particular when compared with richer nations of the arena, we've been able to draw at the resilience and flexibility of our attempted and examined network health system,” he stated.
The VP also referred to as for international action in ensuring get admission to to vaccines, specially in poorer nations, noting that, “there are justifiable concerns, for my part, about the understanding of truthful and equitable access to vaccines, in addition to the chance that poorer countries might be left in the back of if the distribution of these vaccines is decided by the nationalistic sentiments.”
“As part of our restoration efforts, Nigeria has taken transport of about four million doses of the COVID-19 vaccines beneath the international COVAX scheme and we've commenced vaccination of our people. This yr, we can receive eighty four million doses of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine under that equal scheme, which could be sufficient to vaccinate about 20 in step with cent of our populace.”
According to the VP, “in our globalised surroundings, countrywide self-hobby is inadequate to cope with the project of a international pandemic, Indeed, in a world that is interconnected as ours, any plan other than a worldwide plan is bound to be counter-productive.”
The Vice President similarly said that a coverage imperative of the Buhari administration is likewise hinged on encouraging price addition in every zone of the economic system, especially to consolidate regions where the country had comparative advantage.
The stay occasion was chaired by way of a senior legitimate of Chatham House; Dr. Renata Sevan.
Laolu Akande
Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media & Publicity
Office of the Vice President
23rd March 2021
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