By Abdulmumin Giwa
Preventing COVID-19 in Kano is similar to preventing it in the north, Nigeria and West Africa because it is their centre of commercial convergence especially for the north. If for any reason Kano is closed down, most of the northern states will tragically be affected economically.
It is only with funds that you can prevent the spread of COVID-19 and without funds what can you do? How do you give palliative, how do you pay for logistics in all its ramifications, how do you provide substitute funds to sectors of the economy that have been shut down by COVID-19? Definitely he needs the money and is even bold enough to seek for it despite the insults.
Kano is the most populous and indeed vulnerable state in Nigeria that needs serious attention from the Federal Government to fight against COVID-19.
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From what we are seeing, President Muhammadu Buhari has overlooked all the tendencies and starved the state of not only funds but the needed care. He gave Lagos and Ogun a whooping N15b in addition to all the services by NCDC. But he has not given Kano such attention.
You as northerners are joining them in the south to stop Buhari from providing funds to your state, for your own safety, health and economy. It makes one wonder the kind of brains our people harbour in their skulls? Why do you keep stabbing yourselves by yourselves? Of what benefit will it be to you when the Kano state Governor is starved of funds by the President at this crucial moment of life and death?
In fact, Kano deserves the funds more than those states that were funded by the President. What Lagos alone generates economically makes it survive even without federal allocations. But is not like that with Kano which even last year the Internally generated revenue of Kaduna state, which has only 23 local government areas, was more than that of Kano which has 44.
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But yet there are more physical infrastructural development projects in Kano than Kaduna.
Kano has a very vulnerable population of poor people that are massively unenlightened about the problem at hand, and you still think that you don’t need money in Kano to prevent the spread of the novel of Corona Virus? Let’s be serious about this issue. Kano truly needs funds, keep all sentiments aside.
Abdulmumin Giwa is a Kano-based journalist and Public Affairs Analyst
