The General Superintendent, Holy Spirit Mission (aka Happy Family Centre), Egbeda, Lagos, Bishop Charles Ighele has urged President Muhammadu Buhari to emulate Madagascar, which recently came up with a local solution to fight the Coronavirus pandemic. He said the President should not only depend on the conventional way of fighting the virus but should also look inward, with a view to initiating African solution to the disease.

The Bishop, who spoke in Lagos on finding a solution to COVID-19 in Nigeria, said while it is imperative to respect and give kudos to World Health Organisation (WHO), as a globally recognised body on disease prevention and cure, it would not be out of place for the Nigerian government to task local doctors to partner with WHO to develop an acceptable solution to the challenge.

He observed that though social distancing has played its role, it is not enough. He said the government should not rely totally on copying and pasting of Western solution. Rather, it should embark on the aggressive campaign at the local level.

He said: “We cannot compare our social life with the United States or Europe. They are more advanced than us in virtually everything. If you look at building construction in Nigeria and the clustering challenges, we should have had more fatalities than the figure we have today. Moving forward, my thinking is that we should adopt an effective local solution to this pandemic. We must come up with an African solution and Nigeria must proffer solution to it.

“Nigerian leaders should dig deep to find an acceptable local remedy, by gathering our experts together in their various medical fields related to the pandemic and let them look into it clinically and come up with a homegrown solution.”

Ighele argued that since India could ban the export of Chloroquine to other countries, as one of the measures to contain the virus in their country, nothing stops Nigeria from also being innovative in this regard.