Nigeria is one of the few rich and big countries of the world currently organising their academics, big pharmaceuticals and donors to discover vaccines against the dreaded Covid19. Although millions of the citizens of the other foremost countries have received doses of the vaccination discovered by their best brains including some Nigerians who work for foreign governments, many countries are still lagging. The Nigerian government recently released billions of Naira for Covid19 Vaccine Research while its national assembly is busy seeing to the sharing formula. It appears that the Nigerian government adopts a kind of reverse strategy for the vaccine research process in order to catch up with the other countries like the USA, UK and Germany who have since gone ahead. In addition, there have been cases of negative reactions amongst those who first took the vaccination in other countries, it should not be unexpected given the complex diversity of human biology. More so, this might be the reason Nigeria government prefers a late start in order to correct the mistakes made by the other countries. It is a common rationale for the reverse strategy.
Although it appears Nigeria is trailing the other forward-looking countries; that is not the real problem- if any, but we should find out below. To start with, those other countries who invested in Covid19 vaccine research did so by first understanding the pathology of the disease based on several samples obtained from infected people. Luckily the actual cases of infection and resultant fatality are very low in Nigeria and most parts of African compared to other continents. While that was fortunate, the unfortunate thing was the way government reacted to the mystery of that luck. In the midst of so many unfounded local theories such as temperature and African gene being responsible for the low cases recorded, some popular clergy publicized their usual claim of miraculous healing by laying on of hands in their places of worship.
The real foundation of the reverse strategy in Nigeria was apparent in the unaccounted billions of money spent during the first wave of the virus. The only proof of those humongous expenses were the palliative warehouses discovered during the last protest and it was only a fraction of the whole unaccounted billions. It is difficult to determine if the Nigerian government believed initially that the Covid19 pandemic actually existed and the spurious release of N10b for vaccine research confirms it. The move was simply putting the cart before the horse. Nigeria has no reliable study to form the basis of that decision or let’s say credible argument at least on why the infection rate and fatalities have been low in Nigeria and the rest of Africa. Findings of such studies amongst others based on primary data would normally serve as an overture for the vaccine research. The current reverse strategy adopted by the Nigerian government is fatally dead on arrival.
In reality, gambling cannot work where decisions should be based on empirical analysis. There is a need for deliberate planning upon which good strategies could be deployed. This order cannot be removed from any form of management, whether of resources, people or situations such as the global Covid19 crisis and no serious team should skip or reverse the process.
At the International School of Management (ISM), we design robust plans and implement skillful delivery methods to help our delegates embed the skills and crafts required for efficiently linking aims/objectives to operational activities. The general idea is to achieve maximum results without maximizing costs.
