Picture ₦13.2 million sitting in an account, untouched, for the better part of four years. No hospital built with it. No disease outbreak contained by it. No community protected because of it. That is precisely what happened in Adamawa state, where funds earmarked for epidemic preparedness under Nigeria’s Basic Health Care Provision Fund arrived in 2021 and 2022 — and then simply waited, frozen by a ministerial review process that dragged on until 2025.
On Thursday, 9 July, Connected Development (CODE) brought this and other uncomfortable findings to a national convening in Abuja, presenting the results of an independent investigation into the BHCPF’s epidemic preparedness component. The room included officials from the Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, representatives of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (NCDC), members of the legislature, development partners and civil society organisations — all of whom were asked to review the evidence and respond formally for the public record.
CODE’s investigation focused on the BHCPF-NCDC Gateway, the slice of the national health fund specifically designated for epidemic preparedness and emergency response. The NCDC Gateway receives 1.25 per cent of the BHCPF’s annual allocation, intended to fund disease surveillance, emergency operations centres, laboratories and outbreak response capacity. On paper, it is a sound mechanism. In practice, CODE found something rather different.
The organisation gathered its evidence through fieldwork conducted in Kano and Adamawa states in April 2026, supplemented by Freedom of Information requests, budget analysis and interviews with public health officials, community leaders and other stakeholders. What emerged was a picture of structural dysfunction — not isolated incompetence, but systemic failure at multiple levels of government.
In Adamawa, the problem begins before any money is even spent: BHCPF allocations do not appear in official state budget records at all. CODE described the funds as being “officially invisible” within the state’s financial reporting framework, meaning legislators, auditors and ordinary citizens have no practical way to track whether the money arrived or where it went. The ₦13.2 million that sat idle from 2021 to 2025 was eventually released after the prolonged ministerial review concluded — but as of April 2026, the state had yet to receive a single disbursement under the programme’s second phase.
That is a damning detail.
Kano presents a different but equally troubling picture. The state allocated ₦1 billion to epidemic preparedness in its 2026 budget, a figure that signals political intention, at least on paper. Yet CODE found that Kano had received only one quarterly disbursement of approximately ₦13 million since the BHCPF-NCDC Gateway was established. The gap between what the state budgeted and what it actually received from federal channels is not a rounding error — it is a governance failure of considerable scale.
CODE also identified a specific administrative bottleneck in Kano that compounds the problem. The State Epidemiologist serves as a mandatory signatory to the programme’s bank account, which means that whenever the post changes hands, access to federal allocations stalls until replacement signatories receive approval. That approval, CODE found, is not being granted promptly. A personnel transition, which should be a routine administrative matter, instead becomes a mechanism for freezing public health funds.
Beyond the disbursement failures, CODE flagged the near-total absence of meaningful oversight at the community level. Ward Development Committees in Adamawa — bodies that are statutorily responsible for overseeing primary healthcare funding — had either gone without inauguration for extended periods or been sidelined from financial decisions entirely. An audit of 29 primary healthcare facilities uncovered discrepancies between listed account signatories and actual office holders, which raises questions about who, if anyone, has been authorising financial transactions in the interim.
On transparency, the findings are blunt. No single institution holds comprehensive, publicly accessible records on BHCPF-NCDC Gateway disbursements. There are no real-time dashboards. There are no routine financial disclosures that would allow independent monitoring. The data that does exist is scattered, incomplete and largely inaccessible to the public that the fund is meant to serve.
The BHCPF is Nigeria’s primary domestic financing vehicle for basic healthcare. Its epidemic preparedness component exists because Nigeria has learnt, repeatedly and at great cost, that disease outbreaks do not wait for bureaucratic processes to resolve themselves. The Abuja convening was CODE’s attempt to place these findings directly before the authorities responsible for fixing the system — and to ensure that formal responses are recorded rather than quietly shelved.
Whether those responses translate into action is the question that matters. The funds exist. The mandate exists. What has been missing, as CODE’s investigation makes clear, is the accountability to ensure that money meant to protect Nigerians from epidemics actually reaches the people and facilities tasked with doing so. That gap is not a technical problem. It is a political one — and it has a cost measured not in naira, but in lives.