A strange little note on Nigerian health care financing

The Guardian tells us - with the usual shock! horror! - that only 5% of the Nigerian federal budget is allocated to health care:

Nigeria currently spends less than 5% of its federal budget on health.

Compare and contrast to where the British government spends some 8 or 9 % of everything - of GDP not just the budget - on the NHS. Which is to miss the meaning of a rather important word there, that “federal”.

The Nigerian system allocates functions to different levels of government. As we do of course, local authorities here don’t run the Army and do run social care, it’s the same idea even if the distribution is different. If this is to be believed then in that Nigerian system the federal government is responsible for teaching hospitals and teaching hospitals only. The rest of the health care system is handled at lower levels and, presumably, lower level budgets.

You know, like Denmark where it’s regional and communal (ie, of the commune) taxation that deals with health care, or Sweden, where it’s largely the county.

We are not, just to be clear, defending the Nigerian government, its practices nor its budget. Rather, we’re pointing out that foreign countries are like the past, they do things differently there. We cannot, let alone should not, understand what Johnny Foreigner is doing simply by referring to our own methods of achieving the same task or goal. This about Nigerian health care spend is only a trivial exemplar - the point stands and is of hugely wider application.