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From Juliana Taiwo-Obalonye, Abuja
Federal Government on Thursday inaugurated a Presidential Task Force on Ebola Virus Disease Preparedness, pledging a proactive, nationwide strategy to keep Nigeria free of the disease and avoid the confusion of past outbreaks.
The inauguration follows renewed vigilance across Africa after fresh Ebola concerns in some countries, prompting regional health agencies and governments to ramp up readiness.
Chief of Staff to the President, Femi Gbajabiamila, who inaugurated the task force at the State House, said the government was prioritising prevention over reaction and that “Nigeria must not be caught off guard.” He added: “Right now, there’s no case reported, and that’s good news. All hands have to be on deck to make sure the measures we are taking are preventive and not curative.”
Gbajabiamila said the task force has formed subcommittees to manage surveillance, border control, immigration, and emergency response. “We don’t want to be in the situation we were last time, where we had a carrier in the country and we’re all running helter-skelter,” he said, describing the move as a lesson learned from the 2014 outbreak.
The Chief of Staff emphasised cooperation with states that host international airports, noting governors and state representatives from Lagos, Rivers, Enugu and the Federal Capital Territory joined the meeting. “This collaboration is essential to preventing the virus from entering the country,” he said.
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Highlighting the risk posed by informal migration routes, Gbajabiamila said the government is also focusing on land borders. “Normally when people talk about emergency preparedness and cross-border diseases such as this, they think about airports. But now we’re covering not just the airports; we’re putting a lot of emphasis on land borders,” he said. “We have a lot of cross-migration through the land borders, and the Border Control Development Agency is involved, immigration is involved, and a lot of the border communities are involved.”
Director-General of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (NCDC), Jide Idris, confirmed that there are currently no recorded cases of Ebola in Nigeria but warned against complacency. “We don’t have any Ebola case here now, but we need to be prepared,” he told reporters. “However, just in case one slips in, we want to be prepared nationally to identify and deal with the case.”
Idris said surveillance and emergency response systems at major points of entry, especially airports, have been strengthened and adapted to the Ebola threat. “The preparedness framework brings together multiple government institutions — health, interior, education — as well as immigration, border control agencies and state governments,” he explained. “The bottom line is that the objective is that we do not allow Ebola to come in. If it does come in, we are prepared to rapidly identify and manage the case nationally.”
He added that states had been mobilised to concentrate on surveillance, early detection, rapid response and public health coordination, and stressed that a clear command-and-control structure and teamwork were central to the plan.
