This is a guest blog post by Anthony Carroll. Anthony is founding director of Acorus Capital, a private equity fund investing in Africa, and a vice president of Manchester Trade Limited, an internati…

On the same day that President Buhari spoke, his government ignored a court ruling ordering the release on bail of Mr. Omoyele Sowore, the founder of Sahara Reporters, a New York-based online news website that has reportedly extensively on government corruption in Nigeria. In fact, several Nigerian journalists and activists are unlawfully held in detention by the Nigerian government for reporting on widespread corruption and human rights violations. 

Nigeria’s criminal justice system is in urgent need of reform. Prisons are overcrowded, holding 73,314 people despite having capacity for only 50,153. Of those held, an estimated 70 percent are awaiting trial and have not yet been convicted of a crime; reports find that some people have been awaiting trial for as long as thirteen years. The chronic underfunding of the justice system exacerbates overcrowding and pre-trial detention.

As the COVID-19 outbreak begins to spread in earnest in Africa, we can expect so-called jihadi groups on the continent to try to take advantage of the crisis to unleash violence and recruit members. We are already seeing indications that this has started happening. Governments, development workers, and aid agencies need to be made aware of this threat and take steps to deny these brutal militias more room to operate.

The “super camp” strategy is driven chiefly by the military’s apparent inability to defend itself against constant ISWA raids on poorly constructed military barracks in rural areas. Under the new strategy, military personnel will be based in a few, well-constructed “super camps,” which ISWA presumably cannot overrun. While the military may have reduced the potential for casualties and theft of military materiel, it has also reduced its ability to combat ISWA in rural areas. This strategy appears to also be the most recent formulation of the military’s “fortress strategy,” which seemingly was never implemented after its initial 2017 announcement.

Currently, African healthcare predominantly relies on transcription and transport of physical paper from point A to point B. Paper orders can often travel hundreds of kilometers by motorcycle from clinics to a centralized diagnostic lab. The pandemic’s speed in reaching and spreading in Africa currently lags behind that of the developed world. As of March 20, 254,653 COVID-19 cases have been confirmed in 183 countries. Africa has reported a total of 745 COVID-19 cases from 34 countries, or 0.3 percent of global infections. The other 20 African nations have not yet officially declared any cases.