Is globalization to be blamed for the Advent of Covid19? https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1809-7958

Wuhan China and the eventual transmogrification of this global health crisis from a regional health crisis into a full-blown global health pandemic can be rightly attributed to the flow of humans, goods and services within states, regions and at the international level.

Judging from the above, economic globalization, which entails international trade — movement of goods and services, aided the rapid spread of the virus across the globe.

The world experienced a global public policies geared towards reducing the infection rate through lockdown policies and social distance. These global public policies against the further spread of COVID-19 unleashed untold hardship on many households around the world.

Foremost, the global economy ran into multiple recessions and experienced a life support situation. This is because many economic activities came to a standstill. Business activities were halted, and many schools and other social institutions came to a standstill.

The above scenario pave way for high rate of unemployment, inflation, worsening standard of living among most Sub-Sahara African countries. A case in point is Nigeria, a country that demanded her citizens to go into lockdown without a commensurate provision for their basic needs. Thus, most families that got their daily bread from the informal sector received some mighty shocks of starvation and health breakdowns that are related to hunger.

The ENDSARS protest could reveal the predatory political behaviour of Nigerian leaders. The protesters could locate palliatives hidden in some strategic warehouses across the Nigerian States. Likewise, at the grassroot level, most of the palliatives were hijacked by the Local Government chairpersons, king’s and some chiefs.

The second aspect of the COVID-19 global pandemic lies in the shutting down of schools. This gave a devastating blow to most low-income and developing countries who are yet to catch up in using technology in teaching and learning, as well as incorporating and sustainably maintaining the blended learning format. Hence, public primary, secondary and higher education sub sectors suffered lots of drawbacks to use technology and blended learning approach to enhance the learning never end programme during the lockdown period.

We should note that the Nigerian government used the television, radio and the Digital Nigerian Application in order to achieve the learning never end programme during the COVID-19 lockdown period. However, these approaches experienced some flops. First, many rural school children could not access these programmes effectively since the time for the programmes mostly in the morning is likely to coincide with their farming season. Second, most of them may not have access to an Android phone, electricity and subsidized data subscription in order to access the Digital Nigeria application.

these programmes effectively flopped,sincersinceefrasinceceefrasiceersinmeflopped,sincersinceefrasinceceefrasinceersinmeforrsinmer programmes mostly in thrning is likely to coincide with their farming season. Second, most of them may not have access to an Android phone, electricity and subsidized data subscription in order to access the Digital Nigeria application.

Conclusively, globalization has indeed changed the world in terms of science and technology. The pains and misery that the COVID-19 global pandemic unleashed in the global economy, and in the lives of individuals around the world, has wiped to a larger extent the gains recorded so far since the 2008 financial crisis.

Globalization should be highly regulated and properly guided in order to avoid such a history of pandemic and global lockdowns from occurring again. What if there was no hope at defeating the pandemic through the discovery of vaccines? Would this be the way life on Earth would have ended?

The world should come together and rethink. Ideologies are man made and should not be allowed to put our lives in constant dangers.