COVID-19 and the plight of daily paid workers

Niyi Akinnaso

There is a very large group of Nigerians, who live on daily wages. Think of traders, day labourers, and the large group of artisans, including carpenters, bricklayers, tilers, electricians, welders, mechanics, vulcanizers, “rewires” as well as taxi, kabukabu, okada, and tricycle drivers. These are among the daily paid workers across the country, who live daily on what they earn each day, and that’s only when they are lucky to be engaged.

Long before the advent of COVID-19, the national economy had taken a downturn and power supply, on which most of them depend for their work, has been inadequate. As a result, many artisans had been suffering from low patronage. This explains why Nigeria recently became the poverty capital of the world.

Today, the lockdown in most states in response to the Federal Government’s directives on COVID-19 has put virtually all these artisans out of work. To complicate their plight, they are not covered by the Federal Government’s palliatives or the individual states’ social protection programmes. At the end of the day, therefore, neither the Federal nor the state government’s COVID-19 financial or material assistance reaches them.

This discovery hit me hard recently with an increase in the number of artisans, asking me for financial assistance to see them through the lockdown period. This led me to ask several questions:

How many artisans and daily paid workers are in each state? I doubt if any state has reliable statistics. As a result, it is difficult for any state to plan any measure of intervention for them. Yet, these statistics are not all that difficult to collect. For one thing, most of them have unions or associations in each town or city. The Ministry of Planning and Budget could easily aggregate these data by working through the associations as well as ward and Local Government Chairpersons.

Why do these artisans need assistance now? First, many of them have families, like the elite. They pay have to feed their families and educate their children. Some even have the elderly to care for. In other words, they often have as much responsibility as the elite members of society, at least at the domestic level. If they can suspend expenditure in some areas, feeding cannot be one of them. They and their family members must eat.

Second, neglecting them is a major security risk. The likelihood is very high that some of them might join area boys and other jobless individuals on risky, if not criminal, activities, such as the ones being witnessed in Lagos and Ogun states recently. To be sure, many of them are honest, hardworking people, some of them even deeply religious. Nevertheless, hunger is a passport to temptation, and it must be avoided.

What can be done? At the Presidential Task Force briefing on COVID-19 yesterday, Tuesday, April 14, 2020, the Minister of Interior, Rauf Aregbesola, made a suggestion, which, unknown to him, has been my guiding philosophy, more so in the last two weeks. He suggested basically that those who have should share with those who don’t in these trying times. Among those in need in these trying times are those wage earners, who are cut off from their means of livelihood by the lockdown, curfews, and other restrictions.

The above notwithstanding, however, it is important also to stress the need for public education about the COVID-19 pandemic. It is dangerous to assume that those who congregate in markets and roam the streets, without wearing masks or maintaining the required physical distance from others, understand the danger posed by the deadly coronavirus.

The elite may think that they are safe now, by observing the necessary restrictions and the attendant hygiene measures. What they forget is that mechanics, electricians, carpenters, and other artisans, who may work for them in the near future, may be the ones to infect them, when community spread of the virus kicks in on a wide scale. That’s why they need to educate the artisans in their network, keep them off the street, and assist them the best way they can during the lockdown.

Such assistance should not be limited to money and food. They also need the equipment to defend themselves against the coronavirus infection, such as masks, sanitizers, and hand-washing soaps. These are things many of them cannot afford to purchase at this time.

Equally important is the role of state governments in public education and assistance. It is not enough for the government to announce tough measures. It is even more important to educate the public as to why those measures are being taken.

The concept of “the vulnerable” being used in distributing palliatives needs to be widened to include artisans and other daily wage earners. These are people whose vulnerability could be temporary but nonetheless need state assistance to weather the storm of the lockdown. Otherwise, they may become ardent critics of the government and remain so through the next round of elections. State governments with formidable opposition should be very careful in handling this group of citizens as their criticisms may amplify existing negative narratives.

In order to make public education meaningful, federal and state governments should also be transparent. For example, the Federal Government has opened itself to unnecessary criticism by masking recipients of the palliatives by a nebulous register. Apparently, each state has this register, but the citizens do not know how it was compiled. The insinuation, therefore, is that non-party members are excluded.

Finally, as transparent as the Federal Government has been on COVID-19 infections, thanks to the invaluable work of the Presidential Task Force, headed by the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Boss Mustapha, the secrecy surrounding the treatment status of the President’s Chief of Staff, Abba Kyari, is unsettling. It took days before there was clarity on his test result. Since he has opted for private treatment, we have heard nothing about his status.

True, he made it clear that he was going to get treated on his own private funds. But that does not remove his public status as the Chief of Staff to the President. I just hope he knows that there are those who wish him well and would, therefore, be glad to know that he is making progress.