The hijacked #EndSARS protests against police brutality across the nation seems to be over but the dust raised is still in the horizon, as several companies and individuals are still nursing the losses that the protests caused them.
In reactive and panic driven measures to contain the ensuing menace, several governors declared 24 hours curfew to stem the tide of destruction and restrict movement, as well as the activities of the hoodlums. Rather than achieving the intended purpose, the directives fuelled and escalated the protests the more in some states with more casualties and losses.
The protests lasted for three weeks or thereabout but the losses to the government, businesses, and individuals are quite humongous with several lives lost across the country.
Unfortunately not many, government inclusive, saw this coming. It started as a child’s play until it continued to gather momentum daily and reached the inevitable crescendo with the alleged shooting of the protesters at the Lekki tollgate Lagos.
There are strong opinions that the risks resulting to the huge losses would have been adequately mitigated if the federal government had taken the threats to protest seriously from day one and proactively dialogue with the leaders on what can be done to suspend the protests nationwide.
To a large extent, the #EndSARS protests could be tagged as a high impact, low probability event. From the benefits of hindsight, the government and businesses were ill prepared to handle this kind of occurrences, which is enough to bring the economy to zero level with the unprecedented wanton destruction of lives and properties. It’s a hard lesson for us all and we learnt in a hard way indeed.
Many governments, businesses, and individuals did not quite appreciate the relevance of insurance policies that could indemnify them against several unforeseen occurrences of this nature. The apathy towards the insurance industry is made more evident with the appallingly poor insurance culture of most governments, businesses, and individuals and their lukewarmness in properly insuring their assets to mitigate risks should they occur. The truth is a lot of people do not believe in the insurance companies, no matter how big they are and their capacity to pay claims as and when due.
What you should know
It is quite difficult to quantify the value of the actual losses suffered during the #EndSARS protests especially as lives were involved.
However, the huge losses would have been sufficiently mitigated by insuring against such events with any of the reputable insurance companies in Nigeria.
One of the emerging issues that came to the fore is that most of the assets, especially those owned by governments may not have been sufficiently insured and some are feared not to have even been insured in the first place.
For the purpose paying premium to the insurance companies, many prefer cutting corners by under insuring their assets than fully declaring the value of their assets, with boomerang effects should the risks crystallize in future.