If Ebola landed in Nigeria tomorrow, would we cope? The country's top disease control boss says we're barely past halfway ready.

Let's be blunt. Nigeria isn't fully braced for another Ebola scare, and the NCDC is saying it out loud.

Speaking to the media on Monday, Dr Jide Idris, Director-General of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, revealed that the country's latest readiness score sits at about 59%. That's an improvement, but nowhere near bulletproof.

"You can't be 100% prepared, but the essence is that we keep preparing because things change," he told cbinewstv, citing the interview.

So where are the holes? The big one is our points of entry. The Federal Ministry of Health has just rolled out fresh protocols for agencies controlling international arrivals, especially at airports, and states with international airports have been flagged as high risk. That's the air side sorted, sort of.

The trickier problem, Idris said, is our porous land borders.

"Not everybody comes in by air. You have people migrating by road and that kind of thing. These are the scares," he explained. Controlling foot and road traffic is much harder to police, and that's where the virus could slip through.

Nigeria is leaning heavily on the hard lessons from 2014. Back then, with help from the WHO and the US CDC, we learned the basics that still work: detect fast, isolate immediately, trace every contact, and confirm with rapid laboratory diagnosis.

"Once you can prevent that contact, I think we are reasonably okay. And preventing that contact means you need to protect yourself, you need to protect the healthcare workers, and you need to put in place facilities for sanitisation," Idris said.

Right now, teams are out across the states checking the real-world stuff: do isolation centres actually work, are public health emergency operation centres functional, what stockpiles are on the shelf? The NCDC says it's also expanding lab capacity, training staff, supplying reagents and PPE, and drilling everyone on standard operating procedures.

"To be frank, we are not 100% ready, but we are improving our readiness," Idris admitted.

And Ebola isn't the only fire we're fighting. Nigeria is currently juggling seven to eight outbreaks at once, including cholera, which is still killing people, and Lassa fever, which is seasonal but stubborn.

On Lassa, Idris pointed to local culture and health-seeking behaviours. In parts of Ondo State and elsewhere, the rats that carry the virus are still seen as a delicacy, and bushmeat remains popular.

"There's no amount of approach to tell them like, 'Don't do this, you are going to kill yourself,' that works," he said.

His final push was to the states. Everyone looks to Abuja, but outbreak response lives or dies locally.

"The State Governments need to take leadership of this," he stressed.

Bottom line from cbinewstv's reporting: we're better than 2014, we're working on labs, borders and training, but at 59% ready, there's still a lot of preparing left to do.

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