The governors of the 36 states of the Federation of Nigeria have emphasized the need to consider local manufacturing of a COVID-19 vaccine despite the current arrangement with it’s global partners on the vaccine’s availability. Chairman of the Nigeria Governors Forum and governor of Ekiti State, Dr Kayode Fayemi, made the statement on January 8th after a meeting at the Presidential Villa with President Muhammadu Buhari. Fayemi claimed the meeting with the president was to review a number of issues that were of interest to him and other governors, specifically security, economy, vaccine’s management and the general outlook for 2021. Fayemi said on live television: “Absolutely. We too will like to demonstrate to our citizens that we believe the vaccines would work”.
It’s interesting to see an African nation push for this vaccine to be produced locally, when a lot of “first world” nations have globalized to spread the vaccine more widely through large corporations like Pfizer. Nigeria taking matters into its own hands and experimenting with manufacturing their own vaccine could result poorly. However, I’m willing to bet that the situation in Nigeria with both the coronavirus and malaria is dire and Nigeria cannot juggle both pandemics at the same time, which forces the hand of the Nigerian governors with no other choice than to start experimenting with their own vaccine rather than wait for help from larger corporations and countries.
In class, we have been discussing geopolitics and how a countries location and their access to resources can influence their standing in the global theatre. Nigeria has very rarely been front and center for anything warranting attention from the bigger countries. This might be due to Nigeria failing to grab the attention of nations like the United States and Russia without promises of anything of value to them. Nigeria is, unfortunately, forgettable. This probably puts Nigeria closer to the bottom of the list in distribution of the vaccine, leaving the Nigerian government to work toward their own manufacturing of the vaccine.