By Matilda Ikediobi

The way states allocate resources between defense and health has renewed debate over whether political systems shape how governments manage international security trade-offs under fiscal pressure.

The discussion followed President Bola Tinubu’s presentation of the N58.47 trillion appropriation bill to the National Assembly.

Vanguard observed that although the administration placed security, health, and human capital development at the center of Nigeria’s 2026 fiscal plan, N5.41 trillion was proposed for defense and security, while N2.48 trillion was allocated to health.

In Ghana, by contrast, a larger share of the 357.1 billion Ghana cedis appropriation bill approved for the 2026 fiscal year was directed to health rather than security.

The difference in these allocations is consistent with the argument advanced by political scientists Fidelis David and Nana Baah, whose research shows that political systems shape how governments manage the fiscal relationship between military and health spending.

According to the scholars, the key issue is not simply how much a state spends on defense, but how political institutions structure the trade-off between security and welfare. Their study challenges the view that any increase in military spending automatically reduces social spending. Instead, it argues that the relationship is nonlinear and conditioned by political system.

In their article, Rethinking the Guns vs. Butter Trade-Off: A Nonlinear and Regime-Conditioned Approach to Military and Health Spending, published in Defence and Peace Economics, the authors explain that an increase in defense spending does not immediately produce a decline in health spending. Rather, the relationship follows a three-stage pattern: at low levels of defense expenditure, health spending remains relatively stable; as military spending increases, fiscal pressure grows, but a direct trade-off is not yet fully realized; once defense spending passes a critical threshold, health expenditure declines more sharply, making the trade-off more visible.

The study further shows that this pattern varies by political system. Democracies tend to sustain health spending longer, even under rising defense burdens, while more autocratic systems experience the trade-off earlier because regime survival places greater weight on coercive capacity.

Within that broader framework, Nigeria reflects the logic of a hybrid regime. In the article’s findings, hybrid regimes display several budgetary features commonly associated with autocratic systems. This means the expected trade-off does not always unfold in the same way as in consolidated democracies. Instead, hybrid regimes can combine formal democratic institutions with budgetary behavior that remains more security-centered and less predictably welfare-protective.
That helps explain why Nigeria’s pattern differs from cases such as Ghana. While established democracies and some developing democracies are more likely to protect welfare spending even under security pressure, hybrid regimes often show a more uneven fiscal response because the political system itself shapes how security priorities are translated into budget choices.

What makes the study especially distinct is that it does not treat defense spending as producing a uniform effect across all regimes. By focusing on nonlinearity and political systems, the research shows that international security trade-offs emerge differently depending on the institutional setting in which budget decisions are made.