Covid-19 and the Social Sciences

Nigeria confirmed its first case of Covid-19 on February 27, 2020, when an Italian citizen on a business trip from Milan who had arrived in Lagos on February 25 tested positive for the virus. By March 22, when governments at both the federal and state levels began to intensify measures to contain the contagion, about twenty-seven cases were already confirmed. There were widespread concerns that the fragile public health-care system of Africa’s most populous country, with a population of 200 million people, would be unable to cope with a rapidly spreading pandemic. It would require quick action to prevent a large number of people from being infected and provide treatment to existing Covid-19 patients.

Activists, journalists, and the United Nations (UN) have drawn attention to a so-called shadow pandemic, an allusion to rising global levels of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) against women and girls, as a result of Covid-19 and state responses to it. Reports by global media highlight the situation in Europe, but Africa is not exempt. Liberia, Nigeria, Kenya, Côte d’Ivoire, and Uganda, like China, France, and Spain, are among the countries that have reported surges in violence against women and girls (VAWG) since the pandemic began. Guided by the question “what don’t we know about how pandemics affect SGBV?” this article shares insights into VAWG in several African countries and explores some possible solutions.

The challenge of responding to the Covid-19 pandemic is immense for poor countries like Eritrea. Eritrea has always depended on its people in responding to crises situations. This time, Eritreans are being effectively mobilized to confront the Covid-19 pandemic. On March 21, 2020, Eritrea’s information minister, Yemane Gebremeskel, confirmed the news that an Eritrean who had returned from Norway had become the country’s first case of Covid-19. Eritrea announced and implemented a twenty-one-day nationwide lockdown beginning April 2. This was in addition to previously announced measures including the closure of airports, seaports, and land borders.

Amid the ongoing Covid-19 carnage, there are fears that Africa will be blown apart by the virus. World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus issued a chilling warning to African countries: “The best advice for Africa is to prepare for the worst.” It was not an idle warning. Africa has been the stage for pandemics before. Besides, as two French doctors unconsciously expressed on television, sub-Saharan Africa is occasionally where ethical boundaries are pushed when developing vaccines. Meanwhile, many global media outlets are foretelling another African disaster.

Covid-19 has not only overstretched the existing boundaries of scientific inquiry, it has made us realize that all knowledge is incomplete. As Francis Nyamnjoh aptly notes, “incompleteness is the normal order of things, and that conviviality invites us to celebrate and preserve incompleteness and mitigate the delusions of grandeur that come with ambitions and claims of [knowledge] completeness.”

Covid-19 has affected all forms of social and economic activity in and around the world. In response to the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus, governments have been forced to implement the global standard measures to curb the contagion. These measures include social distancing, quarantine, partial or total lockdown, and other restrictive measures. However, differences in context are often ignored in applying these measures, when there ought to be some modification of certain measures in some places.