2nd Edition of Public Health World Conference (PHWC) 2026

Abstract

The study seeks to reimagine Nigeria's handling of COVID-19 not in terms of administrative failure and civic irresponsiveness, but rather in terms of a rational process wherein institutional logic and survival instincts intersect. In this narrative, COVID-19 did not create dysfunction; it merely revealed to us the operating system of Nigeria as it is. While we have been conditioned to see Nigeria's handling of COVID-19 in binary terms in terms a dysfunctional, performative government set against a recalcitrant, uncompliant citizen, the realist narrative challenges that binary by arguing that both parties have been rational actors in their own right, each with a fidelity to incentives inherited from postcolonial administrative landscape all along. While the Nigerian bureaucracy, unable to track or contain the spread of COVID-19, seemed to have been in a state of dysfunction, it merely returned to what it knew best, i.e. managing budgets, sustaining institutions, and managing perceptions. While it had no infrastructure to track or contain citizens, it merely performed control, not particularly in areas where COVID-19 was most rampant, but in areas where economic activity was most visible like markets, motor parks, and interstate borders. This was not administrative failure; it was merely the rational extension of our fiscal DNA. While unable to tax the informal sector in any meaningful way, our bureaucracy merely used lockdowns to extract rents and sustain their own relevance. Even though palliatives have been described in almost every narrative of Nigeria's handling of COVID-19 as a failure, they merely succeeded in their own right in terms of their storage in warehouses that served as patronage vaults. The citizen is seen in almost every narrative of Nigeria's handling of COVID-19 as a recalcitrant, uncompliant subject, we merely see in this narrative a rational actor. For the Lagos trader, lockdown meant not a choice between health and economy, but between starvation today and a probabilistic infection tomorrow. In a state that provided no safety nets in times of peace, the call to economic sacrifice in times of crisis was actuarially illegible. Non-compliance was not moral failure; it was survival optimisation. When citizens declared that “corona is a scam,” they did not offer a medical judgment; they offered a social one. They had been presented with a state that had used public health to justify predation, and they, with no redress, had opted out with semantic resistance.