The death from a snakebite of singer Ifunanya Nwangene in an Abuja hospital last Saturday, allegedly after a frantic and failed search for antivenom, sent a familiar shudder through Nigeria. It was a profoundly personal tragedy, yet it felt grimly systemic. Within days, it became part of a devastating triad of events framing a national crisis. A few weeks before, the country had grappled with the death of novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s young son in a premium private hospital in Lagos, amid allegations of negligence. Just before that, there were the images of boxer Anthony Joshua, after a serious car crash near Lagos, being helped by bystanders with no ambulance or emergency service in sight.

A cobra in an upmarket apartment, a fatal error in a high-end facility, a wrecked car on the roadside. These seem like disconnected misfortunes: in truth, they are interconnected. They represent a diagnostic map of a health system in collapse, a system where survival is determined by a lethal lottery of geography, wealth, and sheer chance.

To view these events as isolated is to misunderstand the depth of the failure. They are not accidents; they are predictable outcomes. The 2025 SBM Intelligence Health Preparedness Index (HPI) provides a cold, data-driven diagnosis. It rated Nigeria’s health system as “dangerously unprepared” nationally, with not a single state achieving even 30% readiness for a health crisis.

Each tragedy aligns precisely with a core failure the index measures. The snakebite incident is a classic failure of supply chain and stock management. The inability of a leading federal hospital in the country’s capital to have a complete stock of life-saving antivenom is not an anomaly. It is the standard in a system in which critical drug shortages are chronic, procurement is broken, and storage is undermined by unreliable electricity. The private hospital tragedy points directly to the........

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