Baskadia

Abstract

After its first confirmed case, Nigeria's federal and state governments implemented lockdown policies across most cities and states. This included closing all borders and many businesses. Nigeria also faced declining remittances and export demand caused by the global recession. This study examined the implications of COVID-19 pandemic that has caused a recent change in the remote external environment of Nigerian business. This was carried out under the economic, political, social, technology and legal dimensions. The aim is to identify the impacts of COVID-19 on the Nigerian external business environment and offer relevant recommendations to the identified challenges. Adopting secondary source of data, the findings indicate that business enterprises with networked structure, as opposed to hierarchical types, became better and more economically, politically, socially, technologically and legally sustainable. This study recommends that to improve Nigeria’s economy the government should increase and improve infrastructural facilities especially power generation capacity and road network to ensure that products are regularly supplied to every nook and cranny of the country. The government should ensure policy stability and continuity. Also, the government should improve on security and good governance while assuring the prospective investors of protection of lives and properties by putting adequate security in place. The use of ICT should also be made attractive in Nigeria through government policy support and financial aids. This will help in catching up with the rest of the advanced countries in mitigating the effects of the COVID-19 global pandemic. Finally, Nigerian government should regulate and abolish legal bottlenecks that discourage business development in Nigeria through tariffs, heavy taxes, rigorous business registration processes and other trade barriers. This is necessary to make the external business terrain stable and achieve business growth and development.

Keywords: Business, Environment, Business Environment, Change, External, COVID-19, Nigeria.

Introduction

Business activities do not exist in a vacuum. They require quality and healthy environment to survive and thrive. Quality and healthy environment for business survival and growth are manifested in forms of good security condition, political stability, good governance, availability of welfare /infrastructural facilities involving good road network, stable power supply, water system, among similar others.

Changes occur in the political, economic, socio-cultural, physical, technological and international environments. Among these changes include insecurity such as the recent banditry and kidnapping issues, Boko Haram insurgency, IPOB/Biafra regional agitations etc, recession and inflation, pandemic such as Covid-19 among others. Since Nigerian organizations operate within these environmental contexts, any change that occurs in one dimension of these environments will affect their operations in multiple ways. For example, a political decision can influence both the economic, social, technological and international actions in the society. The effects of these influences often cause nations to come up with policies and strategies...