We do not expect the Muhammadu Buhari administration to be proactive or direct in joining the growing number of countries and interest groups worldwide calling for some recompense from the People’s Republic of China, PRC, over the losses incurred as the Coronavirus pandemic rages.
The reason is this: Buhari’s government has borrowed a lot of money from China and still intends to borrow much more. The best it can do is to tacitly hope that the legal challenges being mounted by private Nigerian citizens will yield “something”.
Countries like the USA and Germany, including some states and private individuals, are laying out their “battle plans”. At least four class-action lawsuits worth trillions of dollars have been filed by American lawyers against China over the devastation of COVID-19 on American lives and economy. Here in Nigeria, a lawyer, Professor Epiphany Azinge, has filed a $200bn (N77trn) suit against the PRC, followed by Oby Ezekwesili’s recent opinion article first published in the Washington Post titled: “China Must Pay Africa For Not Being Transparent About The Coronavirus”.
The Chinese Embassy in Nigeria through its Press Secretary, Sun Saixiong, pooh-poohed these claims, retorting that no one ever asked the USA to pay for the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic. China believes that the pandemic requires a united front to defeat it, rather than recriminations.
The PRC must understand the basis for these demands. It is not about China being the birthplace of the new Coronavirus. Far from it. Pandemics have always originated in one part of the world and spread to the others. It is a natural order of things and, therefore, should not attract punitive measures or stigmatisation to the countries where they originate.
However, under international law and conventions, all nations are duty-bound to timeously alert the rest of the world of an outbreak of potential pandemic proportions. Nobody could accuse the USA of hiding information about the H1N1 flu. But in the Coronavirus case, evidences abound that China actively suppressed information about the Wuhan outbreak and even silenced whistleblowers.
The case of Dr. Li Wenliang, who first warned about the danger of the virus on December 30, 2019 and was publicly scolded only to contract the disease and die, is notorious. This official concealment of a dangerous infectious disease has now led to the infection of about four million people, killed more than 250,000 so far and brought the world’s economy to its knees. It cannot be overlooked.
This outbreak must be investigated to ascertain the veracity of the conspiracy theories surrounding it.
If China is found culpable it must pay heavy penalties or be subjected to comprehensive international isolation and sanctions to serve as a future deterrent.
