I want to tell you guys about the concept of Tradeoff and why we need to end this forced #COVID19Nigeria Isolation soon, rather than later. This is not a regular #EconomicWithIly and some of you will hate what I'm about to say. But here is goes.

First, I am not against the lockdown but I hate when people shut anyone down for opposing it. If you ask a health expert what we should do to reduce the spread of #Covid19, he will definitely tell you to shut the country down by encouraging social distancing.

That’s great advice, but a health expert is not an economist and cannot understand the adverse effects especially in a developing country like Nigeria. We have over 95 million poor in this country and even though I do not have the statistics to back this up,

I am sure millions of Nigerians do pay per day jobs. You know what this means? If they don’t work in a day, their families would starve.
I need us to take ourselves off this Twitter bubble for a second and think of these people.

If you have data to come online and drop your account number under Don Jazzy’s tweet, you are not in this category. There are people who do not have that privilege and our government needs to start thinking of them.

And when I say thinking of them, I’m not talking of the quite insulting “palliative” measures being taken or the audio money federal government claims to support them with.
Now let us move up to those of us who hold jobs in the private sector.

By now many of us must have started receiving suggestions from our employers. Pay cuts, pause of salaries or outright layoffs. Here is the thing! Most of these jobs will not be waiting for us when the pandemic is over (If it gets over).

Loss of income means for a while, demand for goods and services will plummet and this will force more businesses to pack up, and unemployment rate will skyrocket. Are the federal and state governments putting measures in place to deal with this?

What is their plan apart from taking pictures of hospital beds and putting it online to show they are ready for the pandemic? (They are not ready). This is not just a health crisis. It is a massive economic crisis that might devastate even more people than the virus itself.

Now let’s talk about the concept of Tradeoff. We are trading off working to stop the spread. Trading off our income and means of livelihood. Trading off our employment and businesses. I do not think this is a good tradeoff.

We need to start thinking of ways to create a balance really quickly! Ways we can go back to work and yet limit the spread, because the economic disaster that has already started befalling this country will be worse than the pandemic itself.

And this is why you need thinkers running a country. People that when faced with this dilemma, will not just opt for the easy and popular option but one that really works. I hope this pandemic teaches us that elections have consequences.

Here is the summary! The only way to stop the spread of this pandemic is if a vaccine is created. Even if we can miraculously reduce the cases in Nigeria to Zero, what happens then? We open up the economy. At some point we will open up the airports.

Who is to say we wouldn’t be back at this point any time soon? Does that mean we will continue to shut down our economy anytime we have cases? A vaccine would not be ready in many months and we cannot remain in isolation till then.

The government is not thinking of this. The federal, state or your reps. They can shut the country for a year and they will still survive as long as they are not infected. Not you and I. They should be on their toes, thinking of ways to get us back to work soon.

But that will require them to actually think and they might burst some brain cells in the process. That's the hard job. Shutting the country down is way easier.

End.