The Kogi State Government’s COVID-19 risk assessment web and mobile application has stopped working
The Kogi State Government last year spent N90 million on software that the developers now offer for only N300,000. The software, approved by a COVID-19 sceptic, Governor Yahaya Bello, was for tracking coronavirus cases in the state. However, the software is no longer functioning as the developers said they had a contract to host it for only one year.
At a time Nigeria had just recorded over 6,000 cases of COVID-19, the Kogi State Government announced it had developed a software, which is basically for risk assessment.
The state government said the software, which comes in a mobile application and website, was one of its measures to curb the spread of COVID-19 in Kogi.
The software uses the checklist of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) for suspected and high-risk cases to evaluate users.
Financial records obtained by PREMIUM TIMES revealed that the state government procured the software at a cost of N90,720,000.
But checks by our reporter showed that the same software now costs only N300,000 from the same company that developed it for the state government.
An official of the state also admitted that the government actually spent less than a million naira for the project and could not defend the N90.7 million announced expenditure; an indication the declared price was excessively inflated.
Kogi and COVID-19
As of March 2020, when Nigeria had about 6,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, Kogi and Cross River were the only two states in the country with a zero-case status.
The NCDC had raised an alarm then that the two states were not conducting tests for the virus. For instance, in Kogi, officials deployed by the federal health agency were denied cooperation and controversially sent back.
Asked why Kogi was not conducting tests, Governor Bello, during an interview on Channels TV, said the state had developed a special app to track possible cases of coronavirus infection.
Premium Times
