Nigeria’s spending on treatment abroad rose again in 2025 even as its leaders pledged to rebuild care at home, The Punch reported. Citizens spent an estimated $465.67 million on medical services overseas in the first nine months of 2024, the paper said, a figure that climbed 17.96 per cent to $549.29 million over the same period of 2025. That outflow keeps draining foreign exchange from a system that cannot spare it.
The money leaving the country
The Central Bank of Nigeria put the 2025 quarterly spending at $151.53 million in the first quarter, $189.41 million in the second and $208.35 million in the third, The Punch reported. Those published totals may understate the true figure. In April 2025 Muhammad Pate, the Coordinating Minister of Health and Social Welfare, said Nigeria’s annual losses to medical tourism ran to about $2 billion, the paper said, a sum that presses on a naira already weakened by devaluation.
That spending sits against thin domestic funding. The government has not allocated even 8 per cent of its national budget to health, The Punch reported, short of the 15 per cent that African states committed to at Abuja in 2001. Pate said his ministry had received 36 million naira of the 218 billion naira set aside for capital spending in the previous year, the paper said. Public hospitals go without basic diagnostic tools while that underfunded gap holds.
Leaders who travel and citizens who cannot
Treatment abroad has long been a habit of Nigeria’s most powerful, The Punch reported. Former president Umaru Musa Yar’Adua spent months in a Saudi hospital before his death in 2010, and his successor Muhammadu Buhari made repeated trips to London and died in a London hospital after leaving office. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu travels abroad for reasons reported as health, often to France, the paper said. Each journey signals a verdict on the care available at home.
Most Nigerians have no such option. The author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has alleged that her 21-month-old son died in a Lagos hospital through negligence, The Punch reported, a case that revived questions about safety and accountability in the country’s hospitals. Between January and September 2025 the country recorded more than 20,811 maternal and child deaths, the paper said, and the most recent nationwide health workers’ strike ran for 84 days.
The doctors treating them abroad
The same conditions drive doctors out. The Nigerian Medical Association estimates that more than 50,000 Nigerian-trained doctors now practise abroad, The Punch reported, and many Nigerians who travel for care are treated overseas by those same emigrant doctors and nurses. That training holds up; the system that produced it does not hold on to it.
There is a standing way to read a case like Nigeria’s. Outbound medical travel of this kind is a symptom before it is a market: patients leave because the home system cannot yet deliver the care they can pay for, and the money that leaves is money the home system never gets to build with. This concentration runs the other way from most destinations, where a few source markets feed one hub. Here a single country exports both its patients and its doctors, and each outflow deepens the other. Money spent in London or Delhi does not fund a ward in Lagos, and a doctor retained in Manchester is not training juniors in Abuja.
The Punch reported the standard remedies: a law barring officials from state-funded treatment abroad, better security to draw diaspora doctors home, and sustained investment in hospitals. It set them beside a contrast. In England a prostate cancer drug, abiraterone, began rolling out free on the National Health Service from January 2026, after earlier adoption in Scotland and Wales, the paper said, the mark of a system that funds care rather than exports its need for it. Africa’s wider medical-tourism drain runs to billions of dollars a year, and India takes a large share of the Nigerian patients who leave.
The near-term test is measurable. Watch the Central Bank’s quarterly outflow figures against the $208.35 million of the third quarter of 2025, the health share of the next national budget against the 8 per cent floor it has not cleared, and whether any law on state-funded treatment abroad reaches the statute book before the next set of figures appears.
