AN ANALYSIS OF IMPEDIMENTS TO EFFECTIVE COMPLIANCE WITH COVID-19 SAFETY MEASURES IN LECTURE HALLS IN NNAMDI AZIKIWE UNIVERSITY, AWKA, NIGERIA (original) (raw)

As schools reopened in Nigeria, following the ease of national lockdown necessitated by the outbreak of COVID-19, the need to contain the spread of the virus in and around school communities became hotlisted. Nnamdi Azikiwe University (NAU), Awka, did not consider herself immune to attack by the dreaded pandemic, and so set up a response committee which came out with clearly spelt-out control measures to be complied with by both staff and students. However, it is one thing to come up with a resounding policy and another and more pivotal to enforce an unflinching compliance of the policy. Literature revealed a high level of noncompliance with the policy in lecture halls/theatres. It was equally the researchers' observation that this safety policy did not enjoy unalloyed compliance and therefore, they considered it necessary to find out the reasons for this noncompliance to put the university management and government at a vantage point to handle the fresh cases being reported and any eventual new wave of the pandemic. This study, therefore, sought to explore the factors which militated against total compliance with Covid-19 pandemic safety measures in Nigerian schools and specifically the universities, from the perspectives of the lecturers of NAU, Awka. The present study adopted the interpretive descriptive qualitative design to examine the factors. Interviews were employed in the data generation process. The population and sample was all the 21 lecturers in the Department of Educational Foundations who teach faculty-wide courses. Using thematic content analysis of the descriptions, the findings reviewed that, factors such as overcrowded lecture halls, insufficient funds, students' delusion of the nonexistence of the disease and lack of interest, space limitations, dilapidated infrastructure, the limited public address system, dearth of office accommodations for lecturers, bad covid-19 safety compliant role modeling and lackadaisical attitude of lecturers were impediments to effective compliance with Covid-19 safety measures. These factors were categorized as school, lecturer and student-related factors.