By Ishaya Ibrahim, News Editor
A number of Kaduna State residents are not convinced that their governor, Nasir el-rufai, has tested positive for the COVID-19.
TheNiche conducted a phone survey on the Governor’s Coronavirus status in the state, and all the sampled respondents returned the same verdict – he is negative.
Why do they think so? The National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) said so far, 80 percent of the infections are imported. The remaining 20 per cent of the cases got infected by having close contacts with those who imported the virus into the country.
That means that Nigeria has not entered the community transmission stage.
When the Governor announced that he was diagnosed with the Coronavirus disease, Kaduna had not made the list of the states with the infection. He was therefore the first person in the state to get infected, meaning he is the index case in the state.
Curiously, El-rufai has no recent travel history to any of the high-risk countries. He was not also in the meeting of the Nigeria Governors Forum penultimate week, where Bala Mohammed was seen shaking hands with other governors.
His wife has also reported to be COVID-19 negative. How then did he get the infected?
For many of the Kaduna residents TheNiche spoke with, they think their governor declared himself positive so that the state will not be left out in the sharing of the funds for the COVID-19 fight.
Billions of Naira have come in through donations from high net worth individuals and organizations to combat the spread of the infection. The World Bank has also pledged huge donations for Nigeria and other developing countries to combat the spread.
The federal government also voted a huge amount of money to fight the virus across the country.
Lagos State, the epicentre of the Coronavirus in Nigeria, has already got N10 billion from the federal government to help fight the disease.
For the residents of Kaduna TheNiche interviewed, El-rufai may be positioning the state as a potential beneficiary of the funds.
But after the governor announced his status, the NCDC has said that Kaduna has three cases.
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