The WHO declared the Ebola outbreak in DRC and Uganda a global health emergency on Sunday. Nigeria has no confirmed cases. The NCDC has activated its preparedness framework. Those two sentences have a history together.

A 59-year-old man in northeastern DRC developed symptoms on April 24. He died three days later. By the time health authorities were alerted, on May 5 via social media, fifty people had already died. The virus had spread before the world knew what it was.

The outbreak has now reached Kampala. A confirmed case appeared in Kinshasa, 1,000 kilometres from the epicentre. By Saturday, there were 336 suspected cases and 88 deaths. The WHO declared it a public health emergency of international concern.

This particular strain matters. It's Bundibugyo. Not the Zaire strain that most Ebola vaccines were built around. Bundibugyo has no approved vaccine, no approved treatment. Containment depends entirely on old tools. Surveillance. Isolation. Contact tracing. Safe burials. All the things that require a functioning public health system to execute.

The NCDC activated its preparedness framework and said Nigeria has no confirmed cases. Officials advised hand hygiene and avoiding contact with bodily fluids. No travel advisories. No port closures. Standard protocol.

Nigeria has done this before and done it well. In 2014, Nigeria stopped Ebola from becoming an outbreak. A single infected traveller arrived in Lagos. The country had nineteen cases and eight deaths. By October 2014, WHO declared Nigeria Ebola-free. Public health analysts still cite it as one of the best rapid-response performances in the world.

But the 2014 response worked because of a specific team, specific funding, and a disease surveillance system that happened to be in place partly due to polio eradication infrastructure. The NCDC was formalised as an agency in 2017, three years after that response. Its budget has been contested in almost every subsequent cycle. The infrastructure that existed in 2014 was good. The question is what has been built since, and whether the same urgency exists without an actual case in front of it.

The US has already suspended entry for anyone who has been in DRC, Uganda, or South Sudan in the past 21 days. That restriction applies regardless of nationality. If you have a Nigerian passport and you've transited through Kampala recently, you are in a complicated position at a US port of entry right now.

The question Nigeria can't quite answer is this. What the NCDC activated on Sunday is a framework. What it runs on, in practice, is money and personnel. The framework says the right things. The budget tells a different story. Nigeria doesn't need to be unlucky for the gap between those two to matter. It just needs one case to arrive at the wrong airport on the wrong shift.