COVID-19 Nigeria by Mories Atoki & Georgios Radoglou

Ever before COVID-19 hit West Africa, Nigeria’s health sector was already facing huge challenges – the country is one of
the biggest contributors to Africa’s disease burden and the more astute have traced this to years of wrong spending priorities
and a cultivated leaders’ attitude of “Dirt can’t kill African man”. Some say financial mismanagement of allocated funds for
the health sector paired with unbridled corruption and incompetence further exacerbate the pursuit of those wrong priorities.
Amidst the Global COVID-19 pandemic, the Federal Government even decided to cut the health budget from N44.4bn to
25.5bn whilst allocating N27bn to the renovation of the Nigerian National Assembly building complex (source: Daily Post
03.06.2020).
Currently being the poverty capital of the world with over 95mn citizens amongst the poorest, unseating India of this dubious
recognition in 2019, Nigeria’s government seem to be at odds on how to tackle the country’s poor health narratives as
political and traditional office holders’ responsive discordant expressions became more audible in light of the uncoordinated
efforts to tackle the pandemic.
It could be time consuming to trace the issues but in order to provide the necessary perspectives, it is essential for one to
understand that Nigeria, at its best of times, has only committed 4.5% of its national budget to health, which is less than a
third of the Abuja Declaration of 2001which committed to 15% of the Annual National Budget. Worse still, after subsequent
A public healthcare facility in Nigeria
years of low budget implementation, it is fair to say that less than this 4.5% gets spent wisely at any given time and even
worse, a substantial portion of the released funds end up being misappropriated. Corruption thus significantly undermines
efforts to achieve UN Sustainable Development Goal 3, which is to “ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at
all ages”.
“Extremely poor. The medical facilities are
poor. We operate a predatory, neocolonial
capitalist system, which is founded on
fraud and exploitation, and therefore, you
are bound to have corruption…”
- Falz in his ‘This Is Nigeria’ song released
in May 2018
As if that was not already enough, the COVID-
19 crisis met Nigeria with depleted financial
reserves in addition to a sudden collapse of Oil
prices, cutting the inflow of revenues for the FG
financial apparatus by almost 90%.
Nigeria's 2020 budget breakdown