Onyekachi Eze 
Former Vice President, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar has called for public audit and accountability in the $1.07 billion Federal Government’s budgetary appropriation in the 2025 budget for the health sector.
Atiku in a statement issued on Sunday noted that apart from the $1.07 billion to be expended in the primary health sector, there is an additional N2.48 trillion, the government had earlier proposed for the health sector in the initial draft of the budget.
“This development gets even more troubling when the government equally announced that the $1.07 billion it is adding to the health sector at the sub-national level was mainly sourced through foreign loans and a fraction of it being provided through an international donor agency,” he stated.
Atiku however noted that while healthcare, especially the primary sector deserves rapid investment in order to promote access to quality and affordable health services to Nigerians, “it will be immoral of the government not to provide extensive details of how the money allotted for the purpose would be dispensed.”
He accused the Federal Government of not providing comprehensive information on how it planned to expend the money, adding that as Nigeria is expected to pay back these loans, “It is required that the Nigerian people know the details of these loans and that its expenditure must be conveyed in a policy envelop that will explain how it will be spent.”
The former vice president stated that the failure of the Federal Government to commit to a single physical infrastructure in expanding the budgetary provision amounts to fraud.
He noted that the Federal Government promised that the funds would be directed towards improving governance in healthcare and enhancing primary healthcare services nationwide, as well as financing recruitment, training, and retention of healthcare workers and teachers at the sub-national level, but expressed doubt at the government’s sincerity.
“For an administration that has been known to have a deficiency of trust in the administration of its humanitarian services, Nigerians cannot take the risk of accepting a shoddy explanation on a budgetary provision that lacks a mechanism of tracking how the money is to be expended,” he said.
Atiku stated that “it is difficult for Nigerians to believe this current Federal Government given its proclivity to alternative truths, especially on their claims about investments in the social infrastructure.”
He accused the Tinubu administration of lying to Nigerians about the status of the nation’s tertiary hospitals when the sorry state of those hospitals lay bare for the people to see.
“Just recently, the government began a campaign of improvements in the standard of our tertiary health institutions, but Nigerians know that these teaching hospitals often lack basic amenities such as access to a steady supply of electricity,” he stated.
The former vice president decried the poor funding of the nation’s health sector by the Tinubu administration, noting that if the administration meant well in its claim to prioritise the health of Nigerians, his government should explain how it plans to spend the intervention fund in addressing common diseases in the primary health sector.
“On the contrary, what the government announced in its panic response to President Donald Trump’s announcement of the cancellation of American aid for the treatment of HIV/AIDS in Nigeria was a paltry N5 billion.
“If the Tinubu administration fails to provide a comprehensive framework to safeguard its purported huge investment in the health sector nor subject the appropriations to the scrutiny of the National Assembly, it may be safe to conclude that this is another episode of the administration committing a fraud in the name of public interest,” Atiku stated.
