Dysfunctional? Then how did Nigeria beat Ebola?

Nigeria’s problems go beyond Ebola to corruption that hinders the political development of the oil-rich country, writes Alan Phipls

Nigeria has successfully contained Ebola. Sunday Alamba / AP Photo

In April, Boko Haram militants kidnapped 276 girls from a school in north-eastern Nigeria. Amid a global wave of outrage at the jihadists and sympathy for the families of the 219 girls who remain missing, the Nigerian government seemed strangely unmoved.

Six months later, the Nigerian security forces appear to have made no progress towards freeing the girls, though the authorities last week announced a “ceasefire” with Boko Haram. The worldwide coverage of the girls’ plight has served to reinforce the impression of Nigeria as a dysfunctional state where politicians care for nothing but looting its vast oil wealth.

This week a different Nigeria appeared. While the Ebola virus rages in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, it was contained in Nigeria. The World Health Organisation has declared Nigeria Ebola-free thanks to what it called “world-class epidemiological detective work”.

The virus was brought to Nigeria by a traveller, the Liberian American Patrick Sawyer, who arrived at Lagos airport in July very sick. He was taken to a private hospital where he claimed to be suffering from malaria. The true cause was quickly discovered and he was kept in the hospital. A doctor at the clinic, Ameyo Stella Adadevoh, and its director, Benjamin Ohiaeri, have been praised for detaining the patient, despite legal threats from the Liberian government to let him go free. Dr Adadevoh was one of nine people in Nigeria to die of the disease.

The health authorities tracked 894 people who had been in contact with Sawyer, carrying out 18,500 interviews to identify people who might have been exposed to the virus. A “war room” was set up to mobilise resources. A first-class virology laboratory at the University of Lagos teaching hospital processed tests within 24 hours.

Had things been done otherwise, the 21 million inhabitants of the teeming city of Lagos could have been home to what the US consul-general, Jeffrey Hawkins, described as an “apocalyptic urban outbreak”. So what went right?

It was fortunate that the Ebola carrier arrived in Lagos, a city that is more efficiently run by its governor Babatunde Raji Fashola than the country as a whole.

It is true also that Lagos was prepared. Three Ebola outbreaks since 2000 have been quickly contained. The polio eradication programme supported by the Gates Foundation and others has provided a template – teams equipped with GPS systems who have experience in tracking down every child that needs vaccination. Nigeria has had only six recorded cases of polio this year, and intends to become polio-free.

Lagos is now a place where young people who have studied abroad can hope to find suitable jobs in their speciality. Unlike in the years of military rule, salaries are more likely to be paid on time and telephones are more likely to be functioning. With a vibrant media culture, there was no difficulty in getting out the message that hand hygiene was the key to preventing the spread of Ebola.

All this is very different from Liberia and Sierra Leone, both ravaged by long years of civil war, and Guinea, held back by decades of one-party rule. With weak health systems, it took these governments four months to announce that Ebola had arrived in their border regions, an area where the local populations are distrustful of central authority and unused to receiving any medical assistance.

Nigeria’s success is part of the “Africa rising” narrative. In West Africa, the idea was that Nigeria, Africa’s largest oil producer, would pull the region towards prosperity. With growing populations of consumers and valuable resources, Africa was going to fully integrate into the world economy. In April, Nigeria was declared Africa’s biggest economy, overtaking South Africa.

But the global economic crisis, combined with Nigeria’s security problems and the difficulties of middle-income countries such as Ghana in rising up the ladder, have undercut the Africa boosters. Cynics say that the only thing rising in Africa is income inequality. The truth is that in technical fields such as public health, progress in countries such as Nigeria is rapid.

What is surprising is the note of amazement in some commentators that the administration functioned so effectively with elections for president, national assembly and state governors looming in February. The assumption is that politics will ruin everything.

There is a clear opposition in the minds of commentators between progress and politics: the subtext is that members of the political class will stop at nothing to boost their share of the spoils of oil wealth. To be fair, holding a country as vast and diverse as Nigeria together is a near impossible task, and these days it seems to be achieved by off-budget oil money sloshing into the pockets of the powerful.

The former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Lamido Sanusi, wrote to president Goodluck Jonathan in February to complain that more than $1 billion a month in oil revenues went unaccounted for during a 19-month period. Mr Sanusi was suspended by the president for “financial recklessness and misconduct”. The state oil firm said the claim, which is under investigation, was unsubstantiated.

Mr Sanusi had touched a taboo topic. The appointment of globally respected figures to senior positions, such as the former managing director of the World Bank, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, as finance minister, has boosted confidence that endemic corruption can be curtailed. But how long will that take?

There is no desire for a return of the military: General Sani Abacha is said to have stolen $4.3 billion during his five-year rule in the 1990s. But the political class is still seen as a threat to the progress earnestly desired by technical elites. It seems Nigeria can cope with Ebola but politics is a bigger challenge.

Alan Philps is a commentator on global affair

Twitter: @aphilps