There are 774 local governments in Nigeria. It costs about 80 million Naira to build and set up a basic/ simple Primary Healthcare Centre in Nigeria, including full running costs for at least one year. The costs this would cover include those for medical consumables, essential drugs, personnel costs, power/energy, and basic medical equipment.

To build 774 PHCs of such standard, and run it perfectly well for a whole year would therefore cost only 61.92 Billion Naira per annum. To be very aggressive, and put the aforementioned cost of set up at 100 million Naira per Primary Health Centre, that would be about 77.4 billion naira needed to establish a working Primary Health Centre in every Local Government Area in Nigeria.

After building at least one Primary Health Centre per local government area across all states in Nigeria, the fund left would still be well over 500 billion naira! From experience, I can safely estimate that primary care accounts for about 75% of all healthcare encounters, while secondary care accounts for the remaining 25%. And primary care drives about 55% of all healthcare expenses, while secondary care drives the remaining 45%.

Therefore, if the 55% of all expenses required for healthcare is for primary care, and it has been well catered for by the establishment and smooth running of all Primary Health Centres across the country, then we can safely say that we have the 45% balance of all care (secondary care) well covered by the over 500 billion naira left.

Don’t forget that once you build the Primary Health Centres, all that would be outstanding would just be recurrent expenditures to be handled on an annual basis per Primary Health Centre.