Pandemic policy without facts

In 1966, after a stint as head of Nigeria’s Economic Planning Unit, the economist, Wolfgang Stolper wrote a book titled ‘Planning Without Facts: Lessons in Resource Allocation from Nigeria’s Development’.

His point is that development planning without data is little more than groping in the dark.

Rethinking Nigeria’s education system in a pandemic

Changes wrought by the pandemic

Twenty-four years after, another economist, Paul Mosley borrowed Stolper’s title to explain that Nigeria’s Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) failed not necessarily because it was bad policy, but because we had embarked on the reforms without first collecting reliable data.

So while policy action was enthusiastic, Mosley claimed, it was often wide off the mark as the government repeatedly went far beyond even the expectations of the IMF and the World Bank in stripping public entities.

Today, we may well be groping in broad daylight with a viral pandemic.

COVID-19 is primarily a healthcare crisis, the biggest for many countries in a century, in terms of huge numbers of patients, overwhelmed healthcare systems, threats to frontline workers, and most sadly, large numbers of deaths.

Its secondary impacts on government, economy and society, however, are no less significant.

But the pandemic has also been very local and contextual, manifesting differently across regions and countries, and even within countries.

When in March this year our federal and state governments announced measures to shutdown work-places, schools, businesses, homes and streets, it was simply the right thing to do.

Then, the first priority was to avoid the catastrophic public health crisis that many predicted.

However, six months into the pandemic, it is quite clear that the public health dimensions of COVID-19 in Nigeria, as in much of Africa, looks very different from what we have seen so far elsewhere, as even a report by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 13th August clearly stated.

Yet, we are still officially under partial lockdown.

Schools remain closed.

Majority of civil servants have not returned to work.

Businesses in the private sector, including banks and financial services, have significantly scaled down their operations, while many in the informal sector have closed shop altogether.

What then are the costs of the continuing partial lockdown on our schools, on our businesses big and small, and on other areas of health?

It is well possible that Nigeria’s real challenge in this pandemic may be more about recovering from its secondary impacts on the local economy, education and other areas of public health than avoiding further spread of the virus.

Consider the reluctance to open schools.

If in March it was necessary to close the schools to avoid further spread of the virus, is that necessity still urgent today?

From a policy perspective, the only way to justify the continuing shutdown of schools is to show that the public health costs of COVID-19 as it manifests specifically in Nigeria outweighs the developmental costs of school closures.

And doing that requires sound data, not just on the former, but also on the latter.

The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) tracks COVID-19 in Nigeria every day through five indicators: tests, confirmed cases, active cases, discharged cases, and deaths.

Over the 190-day period from 29th February to 5th September 2020, some 1,054 Nigerians have, sadly, died from coronavirus, out of 54,905 confirmed cases and 422,100 samples tested.

This means an average of six COVID-19 deaths daily over the same period, which cannot be called “excess” deaths.

For a population of over 180 million people, six additional deaths per day could easily have come from natural causes, accidents or some other diseases.

Most importantly, there is little evidence anywhere in Nigeria that hospitals are flocking with severely ill COVID-19 patients who require emergency treatment or intensive care.

In other words, there is so far little indication that COVID-19 is a public health crisis for Nigeria, certainly not like what we have seen in other countries.

But what about the costs of closing schools for six months to students, teachers, families and our overall human capital development?

According to recent simulation by the World Bank, just five months’ school closures due to the pandemic will result in “learning losses that have a present value of $10 trillion” globally, while some seven million children could drop out of school.

Other studies have cited many more negative impacts including increased inequality, social exclusion and arrested human capital development that could linger on for decades.

These are global estimates, but given that Nigeria already accounts for 20% of global out of school children, and without digital resources for remote learning in public schools and universities, it is well probable that it will take additional 10 years or more to recover from the lost human capital development caused by the six months of learning missed so far.

This is likely to happen even if schools resume today.

Yet, the situation with the education sector is only indicative.

The indirect impacts of the pandemic on non-COVID-related health challenges such as malaria, maternal and child mortality, nutrition and so on could be worse.

Indeed, a recent estimate warns that if anti-malaria campaigns and case management alone are disrupted in Nigeria for just six months, it could lead to over 81,000 malaria-related deaths, more than have died from COVID-19 during about the same period.

Perhaps it is time to shift policy direction from preventing infection to not just mitigation but full recovery from the secondary impacts of the pandemic on lives and livelihoods.

We may not yet know the full extent of the shocks, but we must find out.

Otherwise, we will be groping in broad daylight.