By Our Reporter
Mrs Adedimpe has four children and lives in Ikotun, Lagos. But almost everyone where she lives knows her as Mama Akara because that was what she does for a living- frying bean cakes.
Mama akara had two spots where she fried and sold her wares. She was doing very well, training her children in school with the money she raised from her business. She was also able to build a three-bedroom bungalow she shared with her children and husband who was a retiree.
With the COVID-19 pandemic and the total lockdown that followed in March 2019, her business went down.
Because her business was a daily one, she could not open for over a month. She and her family had to fall back on her little savings. Soon, the savings dried up. She became hypertensive. Then she attempted to restart the business. But the rumour went round that she was suffering friend COVID-19.
This helped to worsen the situation. Faced with hunger and stark poverty and needing to survive, they sold off the family house and relocated to Ondo.
Her experience is just one among millions of Nigerians whose businesses collapsed as an aftershock of the pandemic.
According to statistics released by the Nigerian Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) Niferia has received a total of 213,000 cases from January 2020 to November 2021, while 2,973
deaths were recorded during the period.
Impacts
1. Deaths: Death in any family is heart-rending. But what made the deaths recorded during the height of the pandemic was that many of those that died were the bread winners of their families. This threw the families deeper into poverty as many of them are yet to survive.
According to the World Bank, forecast in January 202, Covid-19 crisis will result in an additional 10.9 million Nigerians entering poverty by 2022; a people already defined as living below the national poverty line of around $1 a day. “In Lagos State, high levels of urban poverty – most of the state’s more than 20 million residents live in slums or informal settlements – left people vulnerable to the economic impact of the pandemic.”
2 Collapsed businesses
Just like the akara-frying business of Mama akara, many small and medium scale businesses in Nigeria either suffered partial closure or total closure, including big-time corporations. A report stated: “Many micro and small businesses experienced a larger decline in businesses activity compared to medium and large firms—an unsurprising finding since most of the country’s micro and small businesses halted operations due to their inability to implement preventative health measures such as provision of on-site lodging for employees, and sanitizers and handwashing equipment for customers. These preventive measures have resulted in an increase in operating expenses for them.”
This was particularly for business that operated in the entertainment and hospitality sector. Hotels and night clubs were completely shut down.
3. Loss of Jobs
A recent report by the statistics office of the federal government said around 20% of workers in Nigeria lost their jobs as a result of COVID-1.
The National Bureau of Statistics and the United Nations Development Programme surveyed nearly 5,000 businesses in the formal and informal sectors in Nigeria.
In March 2021, the NBS said a third of Nigeria’s workers were out of a job in the fourth quarter of 2020, a situation worsened by the pandemic. Today however, over 10,000 jobs have been lost to the pandemic.
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