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May Nigeria Not Happen to You

The Deadly Labyrinth of Nigerian Healthcare

My mother miraculously survived a series of health scares—but she barely survived our country’s hospitals.

Iam packing my mother’s bags for the hospital. Neither of us know how long she’ll be away for, or precisely what the problem is, but around midnight she woke up with severe pain in her lower abdomen and a fever of 106°F, so we know we have to go. By now, I am practiced at this. Packing for the hospital has become normal and routine for us, a task akin to doing laundry or taking the dog for a walk. I put her toiletries, fresh clothes, her wallet, her Bible into her favorite bag, which is woven with brightly colored ankara fabrics. It looks more like the kind of bag you’d take to a party than to emergency surgery. When the packing is finished, the hospital informs us that there is no ambulance available tonight; they send apologies accompanied by vague excuses: no fuel in the car, no one around to drive. It’s not the first time this has happened. My uncle will have to drive us. By now, he’s practiced at that too.

We get my mother into the car safely, but as she takes her seat she turns around to look at me and sees the fear plain on my face. She tells me not to be afraid, that “what [you] fear will come upon [you].” I don’t realize this myself until much later, but she is quoting from the book of Job, the Bible’s most famous theodicy. Job, a rich man, favored by God, loses everything: his money, his family, his health, at the behest of Satan, who wants to test his faithfulness. After Job’s family dies and his wealth dries up, he curses the day of his birth, crying out that “what I feared has come upon me; what I dreaded has happened to me.” My mother quoted Job to stem my anxiety: His fear, the logic goes, is what opened the door to his ruin. In the absence of fear, the door stays shut.

But her instruction was impossible to follow. Outside, the car moves through potholed roads absent of street lights towards a hospital with no emergency staff, where a doctor’s actions further endanger my mother’s life. As my uncle pulled out of the metal gate away from our home, I watched as the night swallowed the car whole. I could not stop being afraid—because what if what you fear is not God, Satan, or some abstract terror, but your own nation’s indifference to your survival?

Nigeria has its own saying, a prayer really: “May Nigeria not happen to you.” The Nigeria in “May Nigeria not happen to you” is a metonym for a dysfunctional state, where a power cut occurs in the middle of a life-saving operation in Minna, or where a building burns in Lagos with no emergency services to evacuate its inhabitants. “I pray from the depth of my heart that Nigeria never happens to me or anyone I care about” is what journalist and activist Sommie Madegwu wrote on the night before armed robbers invaded her building in Abuja. When the men burst into her apartment, she jumped from her balcony and survived the fall. She did not survive the hospital. Staff at Maitama General Hospital reportedly insisted on seeing identification documents before providing medical attention, despite a Nigerian law requiring immediate treatment for victims of accidents or armed robbery. If Job feared that one day God would take away his riches and blessings, Nigerians have a different fear: We fear that the country we live in will be responsible for our death.

Nigeria happened to my family on November 18, 2020. My mother was in a bus with several of her friends, who were driving from Benin city to Akure on the way to a funeral. It was nighttime. They were riding along dilapidated roads with little to no visibility, when out of nowhere a truck crashed into their bus. My mother was one of two survivors. She was left with several fractures, including in both of her legs, and was bedridden for months. Over the course of two years, she would undergo multiple surgical procedures and physical therapy sessions to recover her ability to walk. After it happened, friends and family reminded me frequently of how God had saved my mother. God had saved her from becoming another statistic in Nigeria, where road accidents are the third-leading cause of death and the most common cause of disability. The WHO records 21.4 deaths per 100,000 people significantly higher than both the global and African averages. For comparison, the equivalent figures for the United States and Britain are 15 and 7 respectively. It is estimated that........

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