A data comparison circulating widely in Nigeria's public discourse this week contains a figure so stark it has provoked immediate questions about the structural failure of federal health financing: former Anambra governor and 2023 Labour Party presidential candidate Peter Obi disbursed approximately ₦250 million in personal funds to healthcare facilities across Nigeria in 2025 — while the Tinubu administration released just ₦36 million in federal capital expenditure funds for the entire country's health sector over the same period.
The ratio — roughly seven to one in favour of a private citizen — has been drawn from Obi's own public documentation of disbursements and from Nigeria's federal budget execution data compiled by the Budget Office of the Federation. The underlying budget figures are consistent with a pattern of severe and documented capital release delays that has characterised Nigeria's health sector financing across multiple administrations. A Reddit video post citing both figures has been widely shared and has attracted substantial engagement across Nigerian social media platforms.
The Abuja Declaration: a 25-year broken promise
The comparison cannot be understood without its continental context. In April 2001, African heads of government gathered in Abuja and signed a declaration pledging that each signatory nation would allocate at least 15% of its annual national budget to the health sector. The commitment, known as the Abuja Declaration, was a direct response to the HIV/AIDS crisis and the collapse of public health infrastructure across the continent. Twenty-five years later, Nigeria has never met it.
Nigeria's federal health budget as a share of total government expenditure has historically ranged between 4% and 6%. In the 2025 appropriations framework, health received approximately 5.3% of total federal spending — a figure that places Nigeria in the bottom tier of African nations on this metric, behind Ghana, Rwanda, and Ethiopia, all of which have made measurable progress toward the Abuja benchmark. Rwanda, most remarkably, has consistently allocated above 20% of its budget to health since 2010 — a policy choice credited with dramatic reductions in maternal and child mortality and with transforming the country into a regional model for healthcare delivery.
What the capex release figure means in practice
The ₦36 million federal capex release figure refers specifically to capital expenditure releases — the funds that flow to infrastructure, equipment, and facility development within the health sector. Capital releases have historically been among the most delayed and underfunded categories in Nigeria's budget execution profile. The International Budget Partnership's Open Budget Survey has consistently rated Nigeria poorly on budget execution transparency, and health capital spending is among the most opaque line items.
In practical terms, a ₦36 million capital release for a nation of more than 220 million people translates to less than one naira per citizen. Civil society health advocates describe this figure as not merely insufficient but as functionally symbolic. Nigeria's health infrastructure deficit requires sustained capital investment in the hundreds of billions of naira annually simply to maintain existing facilities at minimally acceptable standards, let alone to expand access to the country's young and rapidly growing population.
The story is federal underfunding, not individual virtue
This article accepts the editorial framing explicitly: this is not a story about Peter Obi's generosity or a campaign advertisement for his political ambitions. Obi's personal disbursements — however commendable as individual philanthropy — are structurally irrelevant to the scale of Nigeria's health financing problem. The federal government's annual health budget, even when fully released, would need to increase by a factor of approximately five to meet the Abuja Declaration's 15% benchmark. No private actor, however wealthy, can substitute for that state commitment.
The reason the comparison matters is precisely what it reveals about government performance, not the private citizen's character. When an individual's charitable healthcare giving exceeds the federal government's capital disbursements by a factor of seven, it is diagnostic of a specific kind of governance failure: not incompetence, but prioritisation. The 2025 federal budget allocated more to debt servicing than to health, education, and agriculture combined — a fiscal architecture that reflects choices, not constraints.
The burden falls hardest in the north
The consequences of federal health underfunding are distributed unequally across Nigeria's federal structure. States in the northwest and northeast, which have the weakest internally generated revenue and the greatest dependence on federal allocations, carry the highest burden of preventable mortality. Maternal mortality in Kebbi State is estimated at more than 1,200 per 100,000 live births — a figure comparable to the most fragile health systems in sub-Saharan Africa. Lagos and Anambra, with stronger state-level health spending, show markedly better outcomes — further evidence that governance and resource allocation, not geography or culture, determine health outcomes.
The pattern is longstanding and bipartisan. Successive Nigerian administrations — across the PDP and APC eras — have signed the Abuja Declaration's commitment and failed to implement it. The 2025 figures are the latest data point in a decades-long failure of the Nigerian state to honour a promise made to its own citizens in its own capital.
In Nigeria, as across Africa's giants, challenges are real but entrepreneurial energy and cultural creativity drive progress. In healthcare, however, no amount of entrepreneurial energy can build the primary care infrastructure that 220 million Nigerians require. That requires a government that treats health as a constitutional priority. The ₦36 million capital release figure, against a citizen's ₦250 million in personal contributions, suggests that day has not yet arrived.
