Like his predecessor, President Bola Tinubu has failed to honour Nigeria’s commitment to the African Union (AU) to allocate at least 15 per cent of the country’s annual budget to the health sector.
The commitment, which was made by heads of African countries in 2001 and is now known as the ‘Abuja Declaration’, is a collective effort to promote increased funding for the health sector in the region.
However, about 22 years after this commitment was made, many countries, including Nigeria, have not found the way or the will to meet this target.
A review of the budgetary allocation to the health sector in the last 22 years revealed that Nigeria has consistently fallen below the 15 per cent benchmark.
There was high optimism that Mr Tinubu would break this pattern and allocate more substantial funds to the health sector in his first full-year budget. However, the 2024 budget allocated just a little over five per cent to the…