Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on governance-Bashir Kabir

The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic might have started as a one-dimensional health crisis that now translates into both political and socio-economic disasters.

The year 2020 brought to fore devastation the COVID-19 pandemic impacted in the areas of people’s livelihoods, basic human rights and most importantly health sector administration that left the world still struggling to recover.

In Nigeria, before COVID-19, the country was already struggling in the areas of governance. Concerns of access to information, fragile and volatile political atmosphere, transparency, and accountability concerns have always been issues seeking redress.

The 2020 Transparency International’s Anticorruption Perception Index (CPI) rates Nigeria as the 149th. Making it the second most corrupt country in West Africa and also showing a decline from the previous CPI.

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With the COVID-19 pandemic, it is safe to assume that more challenges will prevail in the governments’ conduct. The criticality and urgency of the pandemic situations would call for a different approach for the effectiveness of service delivery more than ever.

A study indicates that the pandemic will widen the gap between the rich and the poor economically. The several actions or inaction of the government is what is understood to be the reason for this gap widening. The world has changed and, therefore, the governance responses to the crisis must be different if the expectation is to survive various these crises.

Ill political decisions that in the past transpired into the descriptive health sector will cost more than was bargained now. The not-so-impressive healthcare establishments are already stretched out as a result of the pandemic. With a limited chance of medical tourism that caters for the rich, now the work to build a reliable health sector lies ahead.

The way the governments conduct business has to change as the world is changing very fast. Safeguarding the compliance and implementation of democratic practices will go a long way in bringing sanity into governance. This is absolutely necessary if the socio-economic and healthcare catastrophe is to be avoided.

It is not just in Nigeria that governance is suffering in terms of really connecting with the citizens at these very difficult times of performing in the pandemic. Governments are having a hard time sincerely intending to strike balance between the inconvenience of the decreed measure brought about as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak in their countries, and satisfactory service delivery.

From the US to Europe, the messiahs of democracy and good governance, protests are breaking out with the citizens demanding for more convenient ways that don’t restrict business, affect making a livelihood and social control.

Measures of total lockdown, indefinite closure of businesses, stay-at-home for the public servants, and lousy intervention programs will understandably have the tendency of aggravating the socio-economic grievances people in Nigeria already have.

It is also a red flag of corruption risk when decisions shifted to prioritizing pandemic management. Power abuse prone situations such as lack of access to information both on the health situation and on the socio-economic impacts of the crisis are likely going to be more pronounced.

Therefore, Strengthening controls on abuse of authority and corruption and ensuring transparency is paramount.

Public procurement, another red flag zone in governance during COVID-19 has also presented opportunities for corruption due to the state of emergency. In Nigeria, the urgency has led to lousy procedures that completely ignore due process, diversion and siphoning of public funds meant for intervention, deliberate inflation of prices of medical equipment, etc.

Bashir Kabir, a public analyst writes from Kano