By Tajudeen Kareem

As a direct response to the new policy thrust of the Bola Tinubu administration, a cluster of new cancer centres, a first-ever robotic surgery in Owerri, a ₦540 billion federal bet, and a wave of returning diaspora doctors are quietly rewriting Nigeria’s healthcare story — and testing whether the country can finally reverse a medical tourism bill once measured in the billions.

For two decades, medical tourism in Nigeria flowed in only one direction — outward. Presidents sought care in London, executives in Dubai, mothers in Delhi, and the middle class in Cairo and South Africa.

Indeed, the Nigerian Medical Association, NMA, estimates that roughly two billion dollars still leaves the country annually for treatment abroad. But a cluster of developments — new cancer centres, a landmark robotic surgery in Owerri, a N540 billion federal investment, and a quiet return of diaspora doctors — suggests the arrow may finally be beginning to flip.

The story’s emblematic moment came on Friday,August21, 2026, at the Imo Robotics and Oncology Centre, IROC, housed in the Imo Specialist Hospital Complex at Umuguma, Owerri. There, Professor Kingsley Ekwueme — a UK-based consultant robotic and laparoscopic surgeon and an indigene of Imo State — led an international team drawn from Europe and the United States in performing the state’s first-ever robotic-assisted surgery: a prostate cancer procedure of the kind Nigerians have historically crossed oceans to receive, while Governor Hope Uzodimma watched from behind the glass.
Ekwueme was blunt about the stakes: “The success rate of robotic surgery for cancer, especially prostate cancer, is phenomenal,” and patients “should not have to suffer prolonged incontinence or loss of sexual function after prostate surgery” — precisely the reasons so many Nigerians have boarded planes for this specific operation, and why a well-run centre in Owerri might keep them home.

Critically, IROC was conceived as more than a single procedure. It operates under a Public-Private Partnership in which, by the governor’s account, the majority of funding is private-sector — a structure meant to guarantee the equipment does not suffer the usual Nigerian fate of bright ribbons, commissioned machines, and then dust. Skill transfer is built into the design: the centre is intended as a training hub for Nigerian surgeons and technicians alongside visiting international teams, so the console does not “go cold” when Ekwueme flies back to the UK. Alongside this, Uzodimma has appealed to residents to enrol in the Imo State Health Insurance Scheme, recognising that the affordability question could make a mess of the goog intentions of government.

The early signs of reversal extend well beyond Owerri. Private tertiary hospitals in Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt now report that between ten and fifteen per cent of their specialist patients arrive from outside Nigeria — from across West and Central Africa, and from a diaspora slowly regaining trust in specialists at home.

Tertiary hospital in Lagos alone treated more than three thousand foreign patients in 2023. Most strikingly, the Central Bank of Nigeria’s data shows formal outbound medical-tourism spending fell by more than ninety-six per cent year-on-year in the first half of 2025, collapsing from $2.38 million in H1 2024 to just $0.09 million in H1 2025 — though this captures only formal FX channels, not the far larger informal flows.

Cancer has been the disease powering the outbound exodus. A diagnosis once amounted, for anyone who could afford it, to a ticket to India, South Africa, the UK or the US: radiotherapy was patchy, linear accelerators broke down and stayed broken, and waiting lists ran to months.

Nigeria’s new cancer centres are trying to unwrite that story. In Idi-Araba, Lagos, the NSIA-LUTH Cancer Centre — a 2019 joint venture between the Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority and the Lagos University Teaching Hospital, now also known as the MedServe-LUTH Cancer Centre — has grown into a high-volume outpatient oncology centre delivering radiotherapy, chemotherapy and palliative care through modern linear accelerators.

Also, government has approved an upgrade of the UCH Oncology Centre in Ibadan, with new linear accelerators and advanced diagnostics, while UCH has also received as donation the Olufunke Kikelomo Cancer Centre for research and treatment. Every course of radiotherapy completed at home is, in the ledger of medical tourism, one less flight boarded.

In Kano, the Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital — recently ranked Nigeria’s number-one healthcare facility in a national assessment — saw a raft of 2025-approved projects including a cardiothoracic centre, a paediatric complex, radiology renovations and a nursing students’ hostel, alongside a new School of Paramedic Technology.

In Enugu State, Governor Peter Mbah is set to commission the 300-bed Enugu International Hospital, billed as the biggest hospital in the South-East, fitted with modern, specialized diagnostic and medical tools.

Faith-based institutions are not left behind. The Redeemed Christian Church of God has built the 150-bed Redeemer’s Health Village at Redemption City on the Lagos–Ibadan Expressway corridor, offering primary, secondary and tertiary care from dental and renal services to trauma, emergency and intensive care.Together, these facilities sketch the outline of something Nigeria has long lacked: a distributed spine of credible tertiary care that no longer requires a passport.

At the federal level, the government has now supplied the balance sheet to match the states’ flagship gestures. The Federal Executive Council last week approved infrastructure projects worth roughly ₦540 billion for the National Hospital, Abuja and an associated cancer institute. About ₦255.66 billion is earmarked for the National Hospital itself — a new administrative block, modular clinics and theatres — with the explicit ambition of elevating it toward quaternary status, the level at which a hospital handles the country’s most specialised interventions.The remaining ₦302.3 billion will fund a standalone National Institute for Cancer Research and Treatment, targeting the disease that has driven the biggest medical-tourism outflows.

Around this sits a wider financing architecture: the Nigeria Health Sector Renewal Investment Initiative launched in 2023; a $1.2 billion Sector-Wide Approach, SWAp, aligning donor and government spending; a US government commitment of nearly $2 billion in grant funding between April 2026 and December 2030; a national commitment to allocate at least six per cent of budgets to health; and a partnership with the University of Chicago Medical Centre to upskill Nigerian medical professionals.

The NMA’s two-billion-dollar annual outflow estimate has not been retired; it sits beside the CBN’s 96 per cent drop as a reminder that the headline figure tracks only formal channels — not the cash in suitcases, the wire transfers through relatives, or the school fees quietly rebadged.

The workforce picture is grimmer still: only twenty to thirty per cent of Nigerian-trained doctors stay in the country; some 75,000 nurses have left since 2017; the doctor-to-patient ratio hovers around 1:4,000, nearly seven times worse than the WHO’s 1:600 benchmark; and 68 per cent of returning diaspora physicians report delays in licence validation — the bureaucracy of homecoming often slowing the homecoming itself.

Equally worrisome is the fact that out-of-pocket spending still accounts for more than seventy per cent of health expenditure, and most visible gains — over 60 private tertiary hospitals, 23 diagnostic centres, 6 catheterisation labs and 2 dedicated oncology centres — sit on the private side of the ledger. Is this a healthcare reset, or world-class care for the rich alone?

What would harden the moment into a shift? Workforce retention through pay, conditions, career pathways and a non-humiliating licence-validation process; universal health-insurance uptake; a durable federal financing floor at or above the six-per-cent commitment held for a decade rather than a year; and, above all, equity — extending the private-sector standard into public hospitals and rural facilities, so that “world-class Nigerian healthcare” stops meaning, in practice, a private wing in a mainland Lagos suburb.

•Kareem is a public policy analyst.