Following the confirmation of Nigeria’s first case of Coronavirus (COVID-19) on Friday, former vice president, Atiku Abubakar, has asked President Muhammadu Buhari to take decisive actions to curtail further spread of the disease.
The ministry of health had announced that an Italian working in Nigeria had tested positive to the virus.
The Italian had returned from Milan, Italy, to Nigeria through the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos, on February 25.
Atiku, in a statement posted on his Facebook page on Friday, offered what he called his “patriotic counsel” to the Buhari administration on how to tackle COVID-19 in the country.
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He said, “Nigeria needs firm and decisive actions to prevent an escalation of the scourge. Recently, we closed our borders as an act against economic sabotage. Perhaps now is the time to temporarily halt flights to and from any nation with a prevalence of this scourge. It is more important to secure human lives than to secure an economy. We also need to invest in early detection facilities at our airports.
“We must call upon our experience with the Wild Ebola Virus, of which we were the first nation in the world to defeat that scourge in 2014. How did Nigeria do it? We achieved it by showing unprecedented unity. The federal government of the day worked closely with the Lagos and Rivers state governments. There was complete unity, solidarity and oneness of purpose, which created the atmosphere that defeated that deadly infestation,” he said.
The former vice president urged Nigerians to resist the temptation to start pointing fingers and looking for who to blame, saying: “If fingers must be pointed, it must be to solutions.”
He added “But above all, Nigeria must not panic. Whether at government or individual levels. We have defeated Ebola before, and we can defeat this present predicament.
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“This crisis is an opportunity to show that we are first and foremost Nigerians and that we have no other country but our dear fatherland, which we must work together to keep healthy and secure.”
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