**1. Introduction**

The COVID-19 pandemic has shrunk the entire globe, wreaking havoc on both local and international economies, instilling distrust among states, halting international travel and hampering socio-cultural connections and human relationships. Every government is currently faced with difficult decisions about what limits to apply and when to lift them, where money will be spent and how it will be raised and what national concerns can be constrained to promote international collaboration [1].

As a result, governments around the world have made collective promises to address public health concerns and governance flaws. The majority of countries throughout the world have taken appropriate steps to counteract the COVID -19 pandemic. On the fiscal front, exceptional tax and spending measures were enacted to save lives, assist individuals and businesses, and pave the way for economic recovery. As a result of the resurgence of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a total worldwide emergency, and governments all over the world, including the Nigerian government, are working to control their citizens and economies in order to minimize the virus's impact.

Following the discovery and confirmation of the virus's spike in Nigeria, the federal government of Nigeria introduced and implemented a number of measures to slow the virus's spread, including the use of face masks, social distancing, restitution of interstate travel, border closures, lockdowns and the distribution of palliatives to the most affected or vulnerable people. The federal government adopted numerous palliatives to treat the economic, health and psychological repercussions of the pandemic and the lockdown once again in an effort to mitigate the negative effects of the epidemic and the lockdown. Such as a three-month repayment moratorium for all government-funded loans, which includes the Government Enterprise and Empowerment Program (GEEP) initiatives and other schemes such as COVID-19 loans for market women, farmers loans and survival funds, among others, all of which are supervised by the central bank and the bank of industry [2]. The GEEP loans were to enable individual to access a loan of N100,000 to N500,000 with just 5% loan charges.

In addition, due to the lockdown, federal government under the ministry of humanitarian and disaster management and social development on 1st April, 2020, announced the provision of food items to vulnerable Nigerians across the 36 states of the federation, and it was officially reported that over 50 billion naira was spent to share food items to most affected people [3]. Also, the CBN gave stimulus packages to different sectors of economy affected by the pandemic. The package was 50 billion Naira credit facilities to support households as well as Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). The focus of the paper is the aspect of palliatives and economic stimulus in Nigeria.

However, corruption drains resources away from priorities like public health, social protection and other essential services [1]. It was argued that COVID-19 pandemic has led to big government and fiscal splurges globally, and where there is big government and dramatic expansion of public spending, corruption or misuse of public funds is not further away [4]. In Nigeria for example, there is absolutely no credible evidence of where this money is going; no evidence that the vast majority of poor Nigerians who were locked down at home benefited from the money.

Surprisingly, the government claimed that it had distributed N100 billion to conditional cash transfer recipients in just 1 week. But how many of the ostensibly N20,000 social palliatives were actually given out? COVID-19 was funded largely by corporate donations from businesspeople and philanthropists around the world. In Nigeria, prominent private-sector donors, under the auspices of the Coalition against COVID-19, CA-COVID, have donated N31.5 billion (see Appendix A for more details). These conflicting issues have been exacerbated by the country's subsequent economic and political weight in responding to the pandemic. The ramifications of corruption on COVID-19 global governments' responses are examined in this article, with a focus on Nigeria.
