Microcredit is a financial service whose importance is often understated. When lack of access to microcredit is exacerbated by a public health emergency such as the COVID-19 pandemic, its real significance as an essential service in poverty alleviation becomes more apparent. The outbreak and spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has led to dramatic transformations of every sector of the Nigerian society including microcredit delivery system, where formal and informal actors co-exist often in an uneasy relationship. Unfortunately, strategies for inclusive microcredit delivery before and during the COVID-19 pandemic are lacking in Nigeria, fuelling the further exclusion of informal sector in microcredit governance and policy process in Nigeria. The paper reviews the state of the COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria and identifies policy gaps in microcredit delivery and governance mechanism. The study also highlights the linkages between COVID-19 and microcredit in poverty alleviation with a view to catalysing increased and inclusive access to microcredit and sustainability policy in Nigeria. It is argued that acknowledging the role of microcredit in informal economy and poverty alleviation is the critical first step towards framing a sustainable microcredit policy in which primary stakeholders are involved.

Hesitantly, but finally, Nigeria joined the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) with the Nigerian President, Mohammadu Buhari, signing the protocol at the African Union Summit in Niamey on July 7, 2019 based on perceived benefits. This study interrogated the purported benefits for Nigeria using standard trade costs between Nigeria and peer countries in Africa. Using a content analytical framework on a dataset by World Development Indicators and World Integrated Trade Solutions, the study found that average tariff rate in Nigeria is very high when compared to that of her major trading rivals in Africa like Ghana, Egypt and South Africa. Furthermore, the study found Nigeria in a comparative disadvantaged position on the ease of doing business in the same setting. Also, Nigeria’s major export commodity is crude oil and lubricants which has little or no market in the continent. Besides, trade-related infrastructure, especially roads and maritime corridors, in Nigeria is poor even by African standards. With these structural problems, ipso facto, Nigeria may not benefit maximally and comparatively in the enlarged continental market envisioned by the AfCFTA agreement. The study therefore, recommended that Nigerian government should continue to maintain the present cautious approach and refrain from making further commitments on the AfCFTA deal. In the meantime, the country should embark on massive infrastructural and trade-related development, improve the ease of doing business and diversify the economy in order to be in vintage position to exploit the potential opportunities offered by the AfCFTA in the medium-to-long term horizon.

Nigeria currently imports foods for domestic consumption of her citizens. This is puzzling because a greater percentage of her population is engaged in agriculture. This is despite the apparent neglect of agriculture since crude oil was discovered in commercial quantities in the early 1970s. Before the discovery of oil in exportable quantities, the country depended largely for her foreign exchange earnings on agricultural exports and the various regions in the country were quite active in agricultural production. The Northern region was noted for the groundnut pyramids that dotted the various parts of the region; the Western region for cocoa and the Eastern region were renowned for palm plantations. This success story was not sustained with the discovery of oil, as agriculture was abandoned and neglected by successive governments in the country. However, the decline in crude oil revenue since 2014 has once again exposed the vulnerability of Nigeria"s dependence on crude oil as a major earner of foreign exchange. Consequently, Nigeria is finding it difficult to pay for its food import bills and there is hunger in the land. Using exploratory technique with anecdotal evidence, this study highlighted the dangers of relegating agriculture in Nigeria and placed analytical spotlight on agricultural transformation as a solution for reversing the country"s food import dependency.

In December 2019, news broke out that a novel coronavirus has hit the city of Wuhan, China. It was reported that the SARS-CoV2 virus is responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic. The coronavirus pandemic has impacted severely on the country. As expected, the pandemic has worsened the fate of the poor and most vulnerable households in Nigeria. To cushion the impact, the federal government of Nigeria (FGN) has instituted various palliative measures including cash grants of N5,000 (US$14) monthly to approximately 1 million vulnerable households. However, a review of these measures shows that they are grossly inadequate and incapable of any meaningful impact on the suffering of the masses. The government is clearly hamstrung in this regard due to huge shortfalls in revenue as a result of the pandemic. To this end, the study reviewed the contributory pension scheme in Nigeria and recommended that government should leverage on the pension fund which is currently in excess of ₦7 trillion. The study argued that government should amend the extant regulatory framework for recovery of pension contribution to enable the contributors to access up to 30% of their contributions to help cushion the effect of the coronavirus pandemic. These withdrawals will be restored through increased accretion to the funds by government and private sector employers when normalcy returns to the country. This will help to alleviate the sufferings of over 9 million Nigerians who are currently enrolled on the pension scheme.

The study examined anew the empirical question of whether financial liberalization induces poverty alleviation. There is a theoretical expectation that liberalizing the financial market will lead to greater savings mobilization, greater access to credit facilities and poverty alleviation. Using a time-series data spanning 38 years (1980-2018), the study analyzed the effect of financial liberalization on credit availability to the private sector, the manufacturing sector especially the small & medium enterprises and the agricultural sector in Nigeria. The Bounds testing approach to co-integration employed within the framework of Autoregressive Distributed Lag model (ARDL) was used to generate the coefficients. The coefficient of financial liberalization-though positive in all the parameter estimates, it is not significant. This lead us to the conclusion that despite the advantages of financial liberalization, its benefits is yet to bring about significant positive increases or changes in the volume of credit to the private sector and in poverty alleviation. Inferring upon this, we deduced that the continued liberalization of the financial system though indicating a positive long run impact on financial widening (or financial deepening as the case may be), its manifestation on quantum of credit to the private sector and on poverty alleviation is yet to be realized in Nigeria. The study recommended, amongst others, that government should re-think and re-tool the process in ways that will generate stability in the financial system and unleash the potentials of the process to generate greater savings and ultimately greater investment in the real sectors of the economy.