Debt outstrips education, health per citizen under Buhari -

Eight years after he came into office, President Muhammadu Buhari is leaving Nigerians with a debt burden per head that outstrips the combined spending on education and health.

Official data compiled by BusinessDay show Nigeria’s debt burden per citizen grew at a faster pace compared to spending on education and health for a nation of more than 200 million people suffering from widespread poverty, deepening fiscal crisis, and widespread insecurity.

The country’s debt per citizen jumped by 215 percent from N68,852 in 2015, when Buhari took office, to N217,136 in 2022, according to data from the Debt Management Office.

Within the same period, Nigeria’s education spending per citizen stood at a meagre N6,056, despite growing by 125 percent from N2,688 in 2015.

Nigeria’s health spending per citizen also stood at a paltry N3,849 in 2022, compared to N1,404 in 2015. The bulk of that allocation is drained by recurrent expenditures such as salary payments, leaving a tiny fraction for the critically needed medical infrastructure around the country.

Most Nigerians are bewildered that a country that relies on development aids to tackle its high burden of diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS still prefers to place acquisition of huge debts for its citizens ahead of health infrastructure or improved quality of education accessed in the country’s 774 local governments.

Some analysts say the spending pattern is a crude reflection of a collective decision that issues such as debt servicing and petrol subsidies are more important than strengthening the health system.

“I think we are over-borrowing. We continue to rely on international benchmarks, which make us lazy in terms of revenue generation,” James Okweshine, a professor of economics at the University of Benin, said.

Okweshine urged the government to lessen its huge expenditure costs and channel money into more productive sectors of the economy.

Olamide Brown, founder of Flying Doctors Healthcare Investment Group, said a substantial amount could be recovered from avoidable expenditures to help Nigerians meet its commitment to apply at least 15 percent of its total budget to healthcare yearly.

“The bottom line is that Nigeria is not generating enough revenue, and it affects healthcare,” Brown said.

With the increasing borrowing appetite, Africa’s biggest economy uses a larger part of its resources to service its debt, and that has become of great concern to economists, especially in the wake of already lean revenues made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic.