Health

Nigeria Will Pay Ebola Contacts N100,000 Weekly to Ensure Quarantine Compliance

By Our Reporters

The Federal Government announced that it will pay each contact of Nigeria’s confirmed Ebola case N100,000 per week to secure their compliance with quarantine directives. The payment was explained by the Minister of Health and Coordinating Minister of Social Welfare, Prof. Ali Pate, to State House correspondents after Wednesday’s Federal Executive Council meeting in Abuja. He said the incentive is intended to remove the economic disincentive that might otherwise push contacts to evade isolation and potentially trigger community transmission. "If they evade quarantine, they go to market. They can transmit it to innocent people out there. So it’s so vital that we get their compliance," Pate said. He added that many contacts, such as a person who may have driven someone from one place to another, have a livelihood and a family, and asking them to stay in quarantine can be difficult. The minister described the single confirmed case as a significant wake‑up call and stressed that the government’s overriding objective was containment before the virus could reach the general population. He said the purpose of the measures is to ensure that the primary contacts – those the patient met after becoming symptomatic, at the clinic, in the hospital – are identified and quarantined. Pate warned that the financial incentive strategy, while currently viable, would become unworkable if the outbreak were to escalated to community transmission, a scenario he said the government was determined to prevent. "By no means will it be applicable if we have the unfortunate situation of community transmission. This is so that we have the maximum defence," he said. He contrasted the FG’s containment strategy with the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where thousands of cases and widespread transmission had made targeted quarantine financially and logistically impractical. He argued that in DRC, where there are thousands of cases and transmission in many places, contacts would simply be advised to remain at home, whereas in Nigeria the government has been extremely prudent. He added that keeping contacts under close monitoring also served an early‑detection purpose so that, should any of them test positive, the FG could quickly map and isolate their own secondary contacts before a wider chain of transmission could form. "If one of them is discovered to have contracted the virus, then because they are at hand, we can quickly circumscribe their own contacts so that it doesn’t spread," he said.