The lockdown induced by Covid-19 is not only about fears and frustration actually, but it also inspired many to engage in widespread emotional experiments behind closed doors. Now here is the health crisis that will follow when all the secret deeds boomerang months later
While the Covid-19 lockdown bears down on economic hustles, and Nigerians, alongside other third-world countries, huddled up at home in a 40-day forced hibernation, the United Nations and other reproductive health advocacy groups had a worry: contraceptives were in short supply, and sexual violence, unwanted pregnancies, unsafe abortion, and sexually transmitted diseases (STD) are certain to trigger.
“A shortage of condoms, or any contraceptive, could lead to an increase in unintended pregnancies, with potentially devastating health and social consequences for adolescent girls, women and their partners and families,” said a United Nations Population Fund spokesperson early in April.
That’s what Mr. Adewale Adeduntan, Social Mobilization Manager at ActionAid Nigeria, would describe as a funny dimension of development and humanitarian interventions. “You are solving one problem to inadvertently create another one.
“Never mind though, the newborns being conceived now will make up for the data gap of those being killed by COVID-19,” Adeduntan explained.
It’s okay for the global bodies and others like Adeduntan to get the jitters over this—for the next nine months.
Experience and history, however, present a reality far removed from the hunch about baby booms, unwanted pregnancies, and deaths from abortion.
Most of the world was on lockdown when the Spanish Flu broke out in 1918, and killed between 50 million and 100 million, out of the 500 million infected people across the world.
Nigeria lost about 500,000 citizens in six months then, according to Igbo historian Don C. Ohadike.
By 1920, other parts of the world were experiencing baby booms. But as stated by the Nigeria Handbook, a colonial document, Nigeria’s population stagnated at about 18 million, the same figure two years before.
The static population requires no rocket science to understand: fight-or-flight response is over-riding during the crisis. All the huddling and lockdowns created little sparks for baby-making.
According to the International Institute of Family Studies, during pandemics, including the historical Spanish Flu, death and birth rates are closely related.
“Events that cause a large increase in deaths tend to cause a large decrease in births nine months later,” Lyman Stone wrote in an article.
The researcher then cited figures from influenza outbreaks in 1889, 1918, France since 1950, and the U.S. since 2003.
Early April, Nigeria eased into staggered lockdowns. It joined the rest of the world sickened by Covid-19. Every nation groping and stumbling as they work social distance and lockdown to contain the spread of the virus that has killed over 300,000 people out of more than three million infected between last December and May 2020.
But the opportunity for cozying up the Covid-19 lockdown presents people is worth a once-over.
While businesses and other outdoor activities ground to a halt, the sex industry just picked up. High demands for condoms, sex gears, and dating apps by couples living together and those separated roused the industry and reproductive health watchers to attention.
UK Meds, an online pharmacy, witnessed a spike in Viagra sales and a 23 percent increase in orders of the morning-after pill. A Swedish luxury sex toy brand, Lelo, saw sales increase by 40 percent.
Ann Summers, another sex toy and lingerie retailer, recorded a 27 percent increase compared to this time last year. Condom sales have doubled in the space of just a week.
Humans Are Creatures Of Habits
Back in the early 2000s, a power outage in Columbia triggered something of this nature—sex binges like this, resulting in a light bob in birth rates. Nothing much.
Research after research has confirmed this pattern: population hardly explodes in crises, and a sweaty rutting season comes only when lockdown permits.
But there are exceptions.
Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Spain didn’t meddle in the 1914 World War I which triggered and spread the Spanish Flu across the world. So Norway and others, going by history, tried to replenish the over one million people it lost to the flu by having more babies.
Moreover, the flu killed mostly young people of marriage age. When it was over by 1920, fertility naturally spiked—just as it did in other parts of Europe and America where post-war economies prospered. Starting a family, the reason for the booming, became easy.
In the on-going Covid-19 pandemic, however, the Nigerian experience may run counter to this pattern. That is: the UN fear may actually come real; fertility may increase; gender-based violence may increase; unwanted pregnancies and unsafe abortion death may spike, and HIV/AIDS may break out, too.
What worries Ene Obi, however, is “the Federal government’s response strategy’, which according to the Country Director at ActionAid Nigeria, ‘did not capture a well-defined service provision for survivors.”
It is Nigeria, the most populated nation in Africa, whose health care system ranks 142nd out of 195 countries, according to a 2018 global health study in the medical journal Lancet. So not much is expected from its sexual and reproductive health care delivery.
No fewer than 512 out of 100,000 expectant mothers died in the course of childbirths in Nigeria, as the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) 2018 put it. Pregnancy-related maternal death is even more: 556 out of every 100,000.
Their journey to death mostly begins from unsafe sexual practices—from poverty-induced prostitution to lack of control over sexual relations and child spacing—and progresses to unwanted pregnancies and unsafe abortions.
The last two have become threats even in peace time.
The Global Family Planning Reports said, Nigeria recorded 1.3 million unplanned pregnancies in 2018, and 2.7 million abortions same year, Suzanne Bell, a public health expert said.
There was no nation-wide emergency then.
In the DHS study, for instance, only 28 percent of women age 15-19 can ask their husbands to use a condom. For older women, 37 percent to 45 percent have such control.
Generally, contraceptives still sound like a dirty word in Nigeria. The highest contraceptive prevalence (condoms, injection, pills, others) among women age 15 to 49 stood at 28 percent in 2018, according to a World Bank development indices report.
For the women to now insist or choose how safe their sexual relations should mostly end up in gender-based violence and sexual abuse. And such violence is not only likely but can also get worse, during a crisis.
The Women at Risk International Foundation (WARIF), an NGO focused on reducing the prevalence of gender-based violence in Nigeria, said it observed 64 percent uptick in domestic violence against women during the initial 14-day lockdown in Lagos, Ogun, and Abuja.
Certainly, there will be a chain of sexual and reproductive health problems the Covid-19 pandemic tows along. No question about that—for Nigeria in particular.
It’s only a matter of months before the fallouts hit.
How prepared the nation is for this collateral damage appears the right question to worry about.
And, matter-of-factly, Nigeria wasn’t prepared. Most of the countries worst hit in the pandemic weren’t, either. The only difference lies in the resilience of their health systems. And that’s something missing in Nigeria’s.
There’s little shock a health system can absorb when it runs on a declining budget year in year out. Such a system, in times like this, will practically do nothing when a pandemic throws up an unexpected problem like reproductive health.
The African Union, during the Abuja Declaration in 2001, mandated its member countries to devote 15 percent of their budget to the health sector. But Nigeria’s health vote, mostly around 4 percent of the national budget, is way below the benchmark.
And it’s been declining: from 5.9 percent in 2012, to 4.23 percent and 4.16 percent in 2016 and 2017 respectively, and 3.9 percent in 2018, and 4.14 percent in 2020.
Whatever these amounts are, they left little for reproductive healthcare—even in time of relative peace. Most of the efforts in that aspect of Nigeria’s health system are taken care of by donors.
For the lower-middle-income Country that Nigeria is, handouts from Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, UKAID, USIDF, and other Overseas Development Aid have been accounting for 3 percent of its health budget.
These include spending on reproductive and sexual health services.
But Covid-19 is rattling the whole world now. Every nation to itself. Germany, China, the EU, and others are still mindful of Nigeria by sparing millions of dollars for it to fight the pandemic.
To manage the backwash that lockdown and restrictions bring about should, however, be Nigeria’s headache.
Forty days at home seems a whale of a time for Nigerians to get frisky. Nine months could fly by like a few seconds when the consequences—baby booms, deaths from abortions and domestic violence, STDs, others—flood in.
This report was facilitated by the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism (WSCIJ) under its COVID-19 Reality Check project.
