Tajudeen Kareem
As diplomats, scientists, policymakers and health officials gathered in Abuja last week for a high-level symposium, Nigeria delivered a message shaped by hard experience: the next pandemic is not a remote threat but a looming certainty.
After years of battling Ebola, COVID 19, Lassa fever and Mpox, the country is trying to move from emergency reaction to deliberate preparation. The goal is no longer simply to survive the next outbreak, but to build systems strong enough to detect threats early, contain them quickly and protect lives, livelihoods and public confidence.
At the symposium, titled “Lessons on Pandemic Preparedness and Response: Insights from China and Nigeria,” Coordinating Minister of Health and Social Welfare, Muhammad Ali Pate submitted that pandemics must be treated as far more than medical events. They are shocks that can reorder economies, strain security systems and deepen inequality. In his view, outbreaks begin quietly, expand into epidemics and, when unchecked, become crises that can alter the course of societies. The scars of COVID 19 still make that warning tangible. Nigeria, like many countries, saw how a health emergency could spill into commerce, governance, education and everyday survival.
Pate used stark numbers to underline the stakes. He noted that COVID 19 contributed to a 5.5 per cent contraction in global GDP and wiped out nearly 15 trillion dollars in economic value. Even Nigeria’s successful containment of Ebola in 2014 carried a cost, as fear slowed business activity and disrupted social life. For him, the conclusion is unavoidable: health security is inseparable from economic stability, social cohesion and national resilience.
Indeed, participants agreed that public health can no longer be confined to hospitals, laboratories or emergency rooms. It must be treated as core statecraft, as essential to national survival as infrastructure, food security and defence.
That argument is shaping a new doctrine of preparedness. Nigeria says it wants to invest before emergencies erupt, not scramble after infection has already spread. Pate warned that once an outbreak is underway, delayed investment almost always comes too late. The answer, he argued, is sustained spending on primary healthcare, disease surveillance, diagnostics, skilled health workers, research institutions and domestic manufacturing of vaccines, therapeutics and medical supplies. The emphasis is on resilience built in ordinary times. Preparedness, in this framing, is not an ad hoc response plan but a permanent national capability rooted in everyday systems that communities can trust and use.
Public Health and Governance
This shift also aligns with President Bola Tinubu’s wider reform agenda, which increasingly links public health to governance, economic value chains and sovereign responsibility. Managers in the health sector are quite explicit that the country cannot depend indefinitely on external donors to finance critical health functions.
When he visited China last year, Pate was emphatic that Nigeria is seeking to reduce reliance on foreign health funding and increase domestic investment by 2030. He acknowledged the gains delivered by three decades of international assistance yet argued that COVID 19 exposed how dangerous overdependence can be when global crises interrupt supply, funding and access.
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His point was blunt: no country can outsource the treatment of major diseases or the delivery of its health system to taxpayers abroad. National governments, he said, must carry the primary responsibility for health and equity. Yet Nigeria’s push for ownership is not a retreat from cooperation. Instead, officials describe it as a call for partnerships that strengthen local systems rather than deepen dependency. That distinction is helping define Nigeria’s growing relationship with China, which is emerging as one of the country’s most visible health security partners.
At the Abuja symposium, Chinese Ambassador Yu Dunhai reaffirmed Beijing’s willingness to support Nigeria and other developing countries facing increasingly complex infectious disease threats. As pathogens mutate faster and cross border transmission becomes more frequent, he said, poorer nations face sharper difficulties accessing vaccines, medicines and essential public health resources, especially as international health financing comes under pressure.
The elevation of Nigeria China relations to a comprehensive strategic partnership in 2024, he added, has opened more room for collaboration in health, science and innovation.
Chinese experts at the symposium presented that partnership as a platform for technical exchange, scientific cooperation and stronger coordination through multilateral institutions. George Fu Gao, former head of China CDC, described health as central to the 2024 Forum on China Africa Cooperation agenda. Under a Partnership Action for Health framework, China plans to establish hospital alliances and joint medical centres across Africa, deploy 2,000 medical personnel and support programmes focused on health infrastructure and malaria treatment.
Gao also pointed to China’s previous assistance during the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone, where teams helped set up laboratories, train personnel and reinforce emergency response systems. For Nigeria, such examples matter because they show what collaboration can look like when it is tied to capacity building rather than temporary crisis management.
For Nigeria, the attraction of the partnership lies in concrete gains. Pate expects cooperation with China to support training for Nigerian health workers in microbiology and genomics, expand laboratory capacity and encourage innovation against diseases such as Lassa fever and Mpox. Specifically, Nigeria expects technology transfer, genome sequencing and antibody development as areas where collaboration could protect communities at home while also strengthening global health security. The Minister said partnerships are not mere transactions. They are relationships built on respect, solidarity and the recognition that a weak link in one country can endanger every other country in an interconnected world.
Surveillance and data sharing
One of the clearest themes in Abuja was the importance of surveillance and data sharing. Gao argued that information must move as fast as pathogens do. If countries do not share data, he warned, viruses will cross borders anyway and make secrecy futile. For Nigeria, that message resonates with experience. The country’s responses to Ebola, COVID 19 and Mpox have shown that speed, coordination and public trust often determine whether an outbreak is contained or allowed to escalate. The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention has become a crucial node in that system, coordinating surveillance, laboratory testing, emergency operations and public communication during periods of health threat.
But the symposium made clear that technical systems alone will not save lives. Again and again, speakers returned to a harder truth: even the best interventions fail when communities do not trust them.
In a landscape crowded by misinformation, conspiracy theories and vaccine hesitancy, public confidence has become a frontline defence. Liukui Wang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences argued that pandemics are social crises as much as scientific ones. Policies designed in laboratories and boardrooms only work when people believe them, understand them and are prepared to act on them. In Nigeria, where religious groups, markets and digital networks shape opinion, trust must be built through relationships.
The Director General, Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr Jide Idris said trust is sustained not only by messaging but by routine service delivery. If parents arrive for immunisation and find vaccines unavailable or care poor, cooperation becomes far harder to secure during an emergency. Preparedness therefore begins with credibility in everyday healthcare.
The same logic extends beyond hospitals. Agriculture Minister Abubakar Kyari argued that pandemic risk is linked to poverty, urbanisation, food systems and environmental change. Disease threats emerge from interactions between people, animals and ecosystems, which is why the One Health approach is gaining ground as Nigeria pushes for closer coordination across health, agriculture, livestock and environment sectors.
The practical side of that vision was visible in Edo State. After the symposium, Pate visited Irrua Specialist Teaching Hospital and praised its evolution into a centre of excellence in healthcare delivery and disease control. He also commissioned the IVEPCR Clinical Vaccine Trial complex and the Clinical Trial Therapeutic building among other infrastructural projects even as he described the hospital as a national asset with growing international recognition for managing viral and emerging diseases.
That endorsement signalled more than approval for a single institution. It suggested that Nigeria’s resilience will depend on strong regional anchors outside Abuja: hospitals embedded in communities, linked to surveillance networks and able to serve as hubs for research, training and outbreak management.
Nearly 79,000 health workers have been retrained in two and a half years, a reminder that preparedness needs people as much as plans. Nigeria’s emerging doctrine is simple: invest early, build locally, partner globally and earn trust daily. If sustained, it could turn warning into readiness for everyone.
*Kareem was a frontline media manager of Covid-19.
