Buhari Will Keep Protecting Nigerians During The Pandemic – Osinbajo

Nigeria’s Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo has come out to say that Buhari‘s government has done a solid job during the coronavirus pandemic.

Yemi Osinbajo recently disclosed this during a virtual Chatham House interactive session, and Nigerians have been reacting.

According to him, the significant impact of the Buhari administration’s Economic Sustainability Plan (ESP) should be commended as it has played a crucial role in helping the country respond to the fallouts of the ourbreak.

He added that the Buhari administration’s first priority is to protect people and their livelihoods during these troubling times, and one of the ways to make that happen us by supporting the critical MSMEs sector through the Survival Fund scheme, a component under the ESP.

His words, “One of the specific interventions under the ESP was what we describe as the Survival Fund, which essentially was a fund to protect jobs and to ensure that during the course of the pandemic and immediately thereafter, informal workers in particular or private sector workers especially those in the informal sector, were at least able to continue to earn some wages.”

“We also sought to protect the most vulnerable, in particular, the urban poor who were also hard hit. What we did was to provide direct cash transfers to the urban poor, many of them who are captured in a social register.”

“We also have a mass housing programme which is designed to deliver affordable homes through direct intervention in the housing construction sector aimed at creating 1.8 million jobs together with the construction of 300,000 homes in the first phase. At the moment, the programme is ongoing in 12 states which will be expanded to all of the states in the federation.”

“Since February 2020 (when Nigeria confirmed its first COVID-19 case), we have significantly ramped up our testing and case management capacity. We have activated from about five molecular laboratories to about 120, most of them public laboratories.”

“We have expanded the footprint of our sovereign public health response capacity, especially at the sub-national level, and in areas where such capabilities didn’t exist before.”

“Going forward,” he said “we are committed to building on the exemplary dedication of our health workers and strengthening the capacity of our health systems to withstand shocks created by infectious diseases and pandemics such as we are experiencing.”

“One reason why we’ve been able to manage this pandemic better than expected is that we did have some existing public sector infrastructure to work 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, strengthen our emergency coordination and surveillance capacity and also enhance investments in public health laboratories.”

“While it is true that in many respects, our hospital infrastructure still lags behind in standards, especially when compared with richer countries of the world, we’ve been able to draw on the resilience and adaptability of our tried and tested community health system.”

“As part of our recovery efforts, Nigeria has taken delivery of about 4 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccines under the international COVAX scheme and we have commenced vaccination of our people. This year, we will receive 84 million doses of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine under that same scheme, which would be enough to vaccinate about 20 per cent of our population.”

“In our globalised environment, national self-interest is insufficient to address the challenge of a global pandemic, Indeed, in a world that is interconnected as ours, any plan other than a global plan is bound to be counter-productive.”