Right from the pre-historic period to the present, the issue of pandemic as a form of global turbulence had always occurred and reoccurred in diverse forms and in different places just like a recurring decimal and had taken its toll on humans by claiming unimaginable number of lives across the world. Most of these incidences, had really threatened human existence and had shaken, even the most technologically advanced nations of the world to its very foundation. It is therefore against this background that this paper carries out a historical analysis of COVID-19 and its socio-economic effects on Africa, though with particular reference to the Nigerian people. The paper went further to interrogate the place of alternative medicine as a way of building resilience and recovery from the menace. The research methodology employed in the analysis of data obtained is historical and descriptive. The research work obtained its data mostly from secondary sources made up of books, journal articles, newspaper reports, government publications personal observations, and relevant materials from the internet. The paper finds out that COVID-19 did impacted negatively on the socio-economic life of the Africans, and that if we must fully recover, we must re-visit and embrace alternative medicine and give it a pride of place in our health policy formulation.