Chidi Matthew Nwachukwu writes on the improved use of communication tools due to the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions.
The Covid-19 pandemic has unarguably proved to be a global catastrophe of unprecedented severity.
Although there had been lots of fears, anxieties and entropy woven with the pandemic, the other side of the pandemic story is certainly nothing like the first side that is often discussed, and that other side is the angle of the technological revolution that has come with the pandemic.
Since the pandemic forced everyone to remain indoors, there erupted a more intense need for technology (especially the smart type that enables people to keep tab with one another and with their environment), since humans by their gregarious nature, must stay interconnected.
While there is a plethora of sad tales about the Covid-19 pandemic which broke out in November of 2019, there are yet many great innovations that have sprung up following the outbreak of the disease. There are in fact innumerable positive changes that took root only because a pandemic such as Covid-19 broke out.
The use of technology, for instance, has become indispensable and more pronounced in recent times than in the past, because people have to meet somehow and interact, share ideas and sustain communication without necessarily seeing physically. Adjustments have had to be made to ensure that the normal course of life is sustained, and technology is at the centre of these adjustments because of the very crucial role it plays.
In Nigeria, a lot of technological innovations have been sparked up because of the pandemic. Prior to this time, people used to meet in both large and small numbers to interact, but at present, such large gatherings are no longer possible because of the social distancing order that the federal and state governments have enforced.
One of the provisions of the social distancing order is that people should not meet in a group of more than 50 persons, so as to reduce the risk of community infection. Nigeria is a populous country, making it very prone to the quick spread of the pandemic. In Nigeria, it is commonplace to see a very large gathering of people at different locations. In the market, people are present in large numbers. At the shopping malls, people are often gathered.
At worship centres, people are densely congregated. Even at workplaces, there are clusters of people. This is the reason the federal government of Nigeria ordered a lockdown, stopping all forms of human gatherings until a time when the pandemic may have reduced enough to allow such gatherings again.
Now, in order to stay in touch with one another, people had to resort to technology. As people stayed at home during the lockdown period, they found ways to ease boredom and stay connected with their family and friends, and business partners.
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They used their phones, tablets, laptops and other devices that could access the internet to keep tab with happenings around them and in the life of their loved ones. Video calls were conducted, including conference calls such as the ones possible with the Zoom, Skype, Facebook and Whatsapp applications.
People who had urgent business concerns to discuss with their business partners and colleagues simply logged on to their mobile phone applications and had fruitful deliberations and interactions, while those who had other important discussions to share also employed the use of mobile technology to make it possible.
Now, it is important to note that Nigeria is a very religious country where people take their religious practice very seriously, and as the lockdown lasted, religious organizations employed technology in keeping in touch with their members. Pastors resorted to social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp and Telegram to reach out to their members.
They organized Sunday and midweek services on the social media platforms to ensure that their members are not left spiritually unfed. Members of the Islamic religion also used the same platforms to organize meetings where they shared their concerns and rendered assistance to one another. In addition to the use of social media for church services, the use of televisions and radios are also being employed by churches and mosques for reaching out to their members. Live religious telecasts and broadcasts are being aired across the world to reach out to a large number of people. These are all very essential applications of technology during this time of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Then, the other areas where technology has helped in connecting people are the areas of work and school. Many employers of labour, including the government, had to ask their staff to stay at home and work to ensure their safety. Working from home is not possible without technology. Workers in the same department had to carry out their common and individual assignments through the use of technology.
They sent out emails, shared text messages, made audio and video calls and made use of all other available mediums to interact and get their works done. And on the side of education, primary, secondary and tertiary educational institutions have devised means of delivering lectures and handing out assignments and study materials through the use of technology. Many private-owned primary and secondary schools in Nigeria apply the use of Whatsapp in teaching their students. The tertiary institutions have also followed suit.
And as people love to catch fun by going to clubs, cinemas, parties, joints and hang-outs, there are now technological means to deriving all the fun that they cannot go out to have in this period of lockdown. Outdoor clubbing activities have now been replaced by the virtual clubbing which is possible only through smart technology.
The African Magic Turn Up Friday Night Show (airing on GOTV and DSTV on Friday Nights at 9:30) is a typical example of virtual clubbing where a disc jockey (DJ) and the host of the show entertain viewers by playing and dancing to good dancehall music. The viewers at home participate by doing live videos of themselves dancing to the same songs which they share on the Twitter handle of the host and are aired for all the other participants to see.
This sort of virtual clubbing was necessitated by the Covid-19 lockdown which prevented people from going out for clubbing activities on Friday nights. And for the cinemas, technology has made it possible for people to stay at home and watch their favourite movies through high-powered technological innovations such as the NETFLIX Series that shows all the latest Hollywood blockbuster movies.
By subscribing to NETFLIX, viewers gain access to all the movies they wish to enjoy. Let me also quickly add that with the advent of Smart Televisions which allow direct access to online movies (that is, the use of the internet to watch movies online), it is now possible to subscribe for the NETFLIX Series and watch them on bold screens at home. These are all technological windows that are open to people to enable them to ease boredom during this pandemic period.
Then there is the virtual partying that has become commonplace in Nigeria. People can no longer come together in large numbers to the party, so they devised the virtual partying to substitute for the real thing. During virtual partying, the celebrant starts a live video and shows his friends and followers on social media the happenings at the venue of his party which usually has very few people in attendance, and the friends and followers would drop their comments and reactions to the party. That’s all technology.
Through technology, it is also possible to order for one’s favourite delicacies and have them delivered pronto. The pandemic, as I said earlier, precipitated a lot of technological revolutions. The lockdown in Nigeria, for instance, restricted movements and made it difficult for people to visit the markets and shopping malls. Some people saw this problem as a means to an end and started to take food orders from people, which they deliver as expected.
The procedure for ordering for food online is not difficult. JUMIA Foods, for instance, has a mobile application through which interested customers can order for food and have it delivered to them. That way, people do not have to worry too much about eating the kind of quality meals that they are used to. In fact, with JUMIA Foods and other food vending outfits around, any kind of food (including raw foodstuffs) can be delivered to anyone anywhere.
There is also the viewing of live football matches through phones and televisions which increased greatly during the lockdown. Before now, people never thought that it was possible to stay at home and watch live matches that were been played in their countries since the fun was to crowd up in the stadium and have a first-hand view of the games being played. But the narrative has changed with the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic.
And going forward, I will say that technology has also penetrated Nigeria’s government circles to the extent that there are currently deliberations going on at the National Assembly on whether or not to adopt virtual court proceedings for Nigerian courts. A High Court judge in the Lagos State of Nigeria recently delivered a verdict on a murder case through a virtual platform.
This was because the Chief Justice of Nigeria, Honourable Justice Ibrahim Tanko Mohammed, had extended the halting of judicial activities in Nigeria following the first phase of the lockdown earlier declared by the federal government. There is no gainsaying that the technological revolution that is about to storm the Nigerian judicial system wouldn’t have been possible if the Covid-19 pandemic had not forced actors in the government circles to consider other available options to conducting court proceedings.
Court proceedings in Nigeria have always been very cumbersome and exhausting, making it difficult to get prompt judgments from the courts; but with the technological revolution that has found its way into Nigeria, all thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, there is soon to be a paradigm shift in Nigeria’s state of affairs. Many lawyers have argued that the courts in Nigeria will do better if the analogue method of conducting court proceedings are substituted with the technologically-enhanced digital methods.
And still, in the light of the technological innovations that have stemmed from the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, the federal government of Nigeria recently adopted the virtual method of meeting for the Federal Executive Council (FEC). The penultimate and last FEC meetings were held virtually with the President, Muhammadu Buhari, chairing them. The President did not consider it safe for him to meet physically with his ministers and heads of parastatals. These are innovations that were spurred by the Covid-19 pandemic.
In conclusion, it will suffice to say that the Covid-19 pandemic may have adversely affected the human population and wrecked unquantifiable damage to the human community, but it didn’t do so without also precipitating some adequacies that have now become very beneficial to humanity. The technological advancements and increased application of technology that have commendably become the order of the day, cannot be said to have been possible without the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Technology is the surest way to global advancement, and the role it has played in globalization cannot be over-emphasized. History has it that humanity has had to contend with legions of pandemics and epidemics through the course of time, and these cataclysmic occurrences did not leave the world the same way they met it.
Pandemics have been known to cause massive deaths and destructions, and each time a pandemic breaks out and eases away, there is temporary destabilization of the human ecosystem and an attendant alteration of history. It, therefore, becomes convenient to describe the time in terms of the advent and disappearance of a pandemic. Like in the case of Covid-19, people will find it very convenient to say ‘The Pre-COVID-19 era’ when talking about the era before the outbreak of Covid-19, and ‘The Post-COVID-19 era’ when talking about the era after the Covid-19 pandemic.
We may choose not to attach any technological revolution to the eras preceding the current era when diverse pandemics threatened human existence, and not be wrong for doing so since the technologies that sprung up at those times couldn’t have benefitted humanity in the manner that the contemporary technologies are serving the human race.
The technologies that subsist in contemporary times are smart, flexible, very accessible and solution-driven, and although they were being applied in the Pre-COVID-19 era, their application during this pandemic period has become intense and result-producing. It is heartening to sometimes imagine that many more technological innovations will be necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic so that even when the pandemic has gone away, there would a lot of adequacies to attribute to it.