Bizarre – Nigeria to spend N10,000 N66,000 on health, Debt Servicing Per Citizen In 2026
Singer and vocal coach, Ifunanya Nwangene, did not die on a lonely floor at home; she died after Nigeria’s health system failed to match a snake’s venom with the most basic antidote it should have had on hand.
Her story, from her Abuja bedroom to a federal hospital bed, has again exposed how underfunded facilities, scarce antivenom, and confused official responses are costing young Nigerians their lives in preventable circumstances.
Ifunanya, a 26‑year‑old former contestant on The Voice Nigeria, was asleep in her Abuja home when a snake bit her, jolting her awake in pain.
Friends told international media that she rushed first to a nearby clinic, only to be told that there was no antivenom available for snake bites, forcing a referral when every minute mattered.
By the time she arrived at Federal Medical Centre (FMC) Jabi, she was struggling to breathe, could barely speak, and was communicating only through hand gestures as doctors battled to stabilise her.
Eyewitnesses and close friends insist that the hospital only had one of two needed antivenoms and that a desperate search for the second ended in tragedy.
According to music director Sam C. Ezugwu, the hospital told him it had only one of the required antivenoms; he left in a frantic drive to source the missing vial but returned to meet news of her death.
In a statement, however, FMC Jabi denied any shortage, insisting its staff gave “immediate and appropriate” care, including resuscitation, intravenous fluids, intranasal oxygen and administration of polyvalent snake antivenom, and blaming her death on the severity of complications.
Beyond the contradictory narratives lies a more troubling constant: in Nigeria, access to something as basic as antivenom is still a matter of luck and geography.
Public health advocates have long warned that many clinics and even hospitals outside major urban centres either lack antivenom completely or stock it in quantities too small for the scale of snakebite risks in rural and peri‑urban communities.
In a country where millions live near farmlands, bushes and flood‑prone areas where snakes thrive, this patchy access means that a night‑time bite, as in Ifunanya’s case, can easily become a death sentence.
The Federal Government has proposed about ₦2.48 trillion for health in the 2026 budget, out of a total envelope of roughly ₦58 trillion, amounting to just around 4–4.2 per cent of planned federal spending.
This figure falls far below the 15 per cent target Nigeria signed up to under the 2001 Abuja Declaration, leaving a funding gap estimated at more than ₦6 trillion if the pledge were to be honoured.
Analysts calculate that while government plans to spend roughly ₦10,300 per Nigerian on health in 2026, it is prepared to commit about ₦66,000 per person on debt servicing alone, underscoring how low public health sits in national priorities.
Within the health vote, the Federal Government has highlighted a proposed ₦42.18 billion package to deliver “basic healthcare” to about 10 million vulnerable Nigerians, covering drugs, equipment, consumables and diagnostics nationwide.
Yet this supposedly safety‑net funding is only a small slice of the total health allocation and must stretch across all 36 states and the FCT, where primary health centres frequently lack electricity, oxygen, and essential emergency medicines.
For residents of the Federal Capital Territory, the seat of power, the daily reality in many facilities still includes long queues, out‑of‑pocket payments for basic tests, and referrals from ill‑equipped clinics to “better” hospitals that may themselves be short of lifesaving supplies like antivenom.
While no detailed, disaggregated 2026 figure is publicly isolated for FCT health spending alone, sectoral breakdowns show that health’s share of the federal budget remains smaller than allocations to defence, security‑related spending, and some large‑ticket infrastructure and debt obligations.
Between 2023 and 2026, Nigeria’s total budget more than doubled, yet the proportion dedicated to health stubbornly stayed below six per cent, even as population and disease burdens rose.
The Nigerian Medical Association and civil society groups have repeatedly condemned this pattern, arguing that without substantial, ring‑fenced investment in primary care, emergency medicine, and referral systems, tragedies like Ifunanya’s will continue to recur.
Ifunanya’s case is not merely about one hospital’s conduct, but about a country where a young woman can survive a snake’s fangs only to be undone by shortages, delays and conflicting stories in the very system meant to save her.
Her story now stands as a haunting question to policymakers in Abuja: how many more voices must be silenced before health stops being the afterthought of a budget and becomes the backbone of governance in Nigeria’s capital and beyond?
Nigeria’s current health budget falls well below key World Health Organization–linked benchmarks and African commitments for adequate public health financing.
In 2001, African Union countries (including Nigeria) signed the Abuja Declaration, pledging to allocate at least 15 per cent of their annual national budgets to health. This 15 per cent target is widely referenced in WHO and continental health‑financing discussions as a minimum benchmark for prioritising the sector.
Under the proposed 2026 federal budget, Nigeria plans to allocate about ₦2.48 trillion to health out of roughly ₦58.47 trillion total spending, which is around 4.2–4.3 per cent of the budget.
This means Nigeria is providing less than one‑third of the Abuja Declaration’s 15 per cent benchmark for health.
Analyses of recent budgets show that from 2023 to 2026, the health sector’s share of federal spending has remained under six per cent each year, despite total government expenditure more than doubling. Nigeria’s health allocation was about 4.9 per cent of the federal budget in 2023, around 4.6 per cent in 2024, and is projected at roughly 4.2 per cent in 2026.
Current health expenditure in Nigeria (all sources, public and private) is estimated at about 4.27 per cent of GDP in 2022, compared with a world average of roughly 6.7 per cent.
Within that, domestic general government health expenditure is particularly low, at under one per cent of GDP and projected to decline slightly over 2026–2028, highlighting weak public financing relative to WHO’s emphasis on stronger government spending for universal health coverage.