The Director-General of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, Jide Idris, has been caught in a web of contradictions after he scrambled to justify the ₦10 billion approved by President Bola Tinubu for Ebola preparedness by claiming the money was never meant for Ebola alone.
Idris made the claim during an appearance on Channels Television’s Politics Today, in a clip shared by anchor Seun Okinbaloye. “The ₦10 billion was requested not only for Ebola, but to address issues of control of other endemic diseases,” Idris said. “Lassa fever season is coming, and Lassa fever and Ebola are the same class of viruses”. He maintained that the fund was intended to strengthen the NCDC’s operational preparedness and support broader public health emergency response activities.
But the timeline exposes his shifting story. On October 20, 2026, the NCDC confirmed Nigeria’s first imported case of the Bundibugyo Ebola virus in a woman with recent travel history to Uganda. The confirmation triggered a national emergency response, contact tracing and the approval of ₦10 billion to contain the outbreak. On October 26, the World Health Organisation’s Regional Director for Africa, Professor Mohamed Janabi, confirmed that with the evacuation of the patient and her husband, Nigeria currently had no Ebola cases. Idris himself later confirmed that Nigeria could not yet be declared Ebola-free, noting that 54 contacts remained under surveillance.
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So what happened to the ₦10 billion? Idris has not provided a breakdown of how much has been spent, how much remains, or whether any of it will be returned to the treasury now that the index patient has left the country. He simply moved the goalpost. Yesterday, the money was for Ebola. Today, it is for Lassa fever. Tomorrow, it will be for something else. The one constant is that the NCDC collected the money and nobody knows where it went.
The numbers kept changing too. First, 44 contacts were being monitored. Then 54. The explanation for the ₦10 billion kept changing. But the one thing that has not changed is that the money has not been accounted for.
For a government that has spent 261 days abroad on 52 foreign trips, that has added N79.41 trillion to the national debt, and that is now asking the Senate to approve another $20.5 billion in foreign loans, the ₦10 billion Ebola fund is a rounding error. But for Nigerians who watched the NCDC announce an emergency, collect the money, and then move on to the next explanation, it is another reminder that the people who are supposed to protect public health are more interested in protecting their budget than in telling the truth. Idris is not protecting Nigerians. He is protecting his agency’s allocation. And he is doing it with a straight face on national television.
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