‘What FG Must Do To Tackle Covid-19 Impact On Households, Businesses’

As the Federal Government intensifies efforts to address the negative impact of Covid-19 pandemic on the economy, economic experts have said there is need to come up with interventions to address the harsh economic environment.

The Covid-19 pandemic which affected all sectors of the Nigeria economy, had left many homeless and jobless.

The Chief Executive Officer, Economic Associates, Ayo Teriba, said this while assessing the response of the government to the impact of Covid-19 on the Nigerian economy.

Teriba, in his address at a virtual meeting organised by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit noted that while most pandemic-related threats are preventive, mostly involving cases of corporate/household economic morbidity rather than mortality, others are likely to have already crystalized in the most cases of pre-pandemic fragilities.

He said, “Clear distinctions must be made between interventions to address pre-pandemic fragilities and interventions to address pandemic-induced fragilities.

“For instance, most of the interventions proposed in the Economic Sustainability Plan are job creation, housing, roads, farm projects across the 774 local government areas.

“There is no intention to trace and isolate the specific states, LGAs, sectors, companies, communities, jobs, households, and other cluster groups that are threatened by Covid-19 pandemic ripple effects for urgent intensive care.”

According to him, trauma of isolation and deaths,could cause challenges such as insolvency, bankruptcy among companies as well as jobs and income losses among individuals and households.

He said, “One ripple effect of Covid-19 is that livelihoods are threatened in the bid to save lives.”

He further explained that for vulnerable groups of companies, households, individuals or employees, loss of livelihood means loss of life,

“While Covid-19 is perhaps the most contagious pandemic the world has ever seen, its ripple effects are not only more contagious than the disease, often reach locations where the disease might never reach, and are likely to lurk around much longer than the pandemic,” he added.