Childbirth is a death sentence in our country. It shouldn’t be. But it is. Our country loses a woman every seven minutes. That’s not a statistic. That is not just a scream in the dark, it is a cry searing the blinding daylight of a country that has grown numb to both the living and the dying. A country where indifference is policy, and silence is the only answer to suffering. A final breath. A mother dying while giving life. The BBC reports that our country is the world’s worst place to beget life. One woman dies every seven minutes. That’s 75,000 maternal deaths in one year. That’s 29% of all maternal deaths worldwide. Almost one in every three. That’s not a crisis. That’s a collapse. That number should shame our country and us as citizens. It doesn’t.
This tells a story. A tragic, brutal, relentless story. Of women bleeding to death in clinics. On beds without bedsheets. With midwives who have no gloves. Of babies born into silence. Of widowers cradling newborns. Poor fathers. Of children growing up without mothers. Of families shattered by the simple biological act of childbirth.
But childbirth here isn’t straightforward. It’s war. It’s women walking kilometres to underfunded hospitals. It’s labour rooms without light. Clinics without water. It’s rusted scissors. Torn gloves. Nurses working with torchlights. And stillbirths that go uncounted. Here? Emergency care is a complete farce. Blood banks? Dry. Anaesthesia? Non-existent. Bandages to hold cannulas in place? Paper stickers. Ambulances?
Pregnant women in labour hop on a keke ride and on a prayer.
This is our country – the land of our birth.
A country rich in oil and gas. Rich in resources. But bankrupt in everything else, especially leadership.
The women who die are poor. They are urban and rural. They are the forgotten ones. They are invisible. Their deaths don’t make much of the daily news. Their stories don’t make policy. They die in silence. Buried without outrage.
But, it doesn’t end with mothers.
Our children die too. Quietly. Slowly. Around and about. Development Reporting, a specialist media outfit, said it clearly. Our children are failed by the system. Unvaccinated. Malnourished. Out of school. Sick. Abandoned. They are growing up in hunger. In pain. They live without food. Without teachers. Without nurses. Without any chance. They have been left behind. To die. One in ten of our children never reaches their fifth birthday. Most deaths are preventable. Malaria. Pneumonia. Diarrhoea. Hunger. Simple diseases that kill fast because our country’s healthcare system habitually kills.
One in three children is stunted. That means their brains and bodies won’t grow as they should. That means their futures are already stolen. Malnourished children can’t learn. They can’t compete. They can’t lead. Our country has failed them. Repeatedly. Brutally. Little wonder the late, iconic South African-born reggae legend, Lucky Dube, lamented the moral decay of Africa’s governing class. “They won’t build no schools anymore,” he sang, “all they’ll build will be prison, prison.” His words echo like prophecy across our country’s broken landscape. If he had trained his mind on our country’s governing elite, he might well have added: they don’t build hospitals anymore; all they construct are flyovers to nowhere. Perhaps, to Samarkand, where fantasy lives and the sick are not their burden.
And, yet, our country pretends that all is well and good. While 18 million children are out of school, it pretends. While millions live in slums, drink dirty water, and battle diseases, it pretends. While clinics run out of vaccines, it pretends. While mothers weep over graves, it turns its eyes in the direction of Afghanistan. The governing elite are the worst culprits. Does the holy book not say, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted”? But these ones will not mourn. They do not weep for the dead. They do not grieve with the bereaved. Their hearts are sealed. Their eyes are dry. They soar, detached, above the suffering of ordinary citizens like Achebe’s Eneke the bird, who learned to fly without perching because men had learned to shoot without missing. Our rulers now fly too, sky-high, far above the dust and death they leave behind.
The president. His wife. The vice president. They spent N23 billion on foreign travel last year. That’s not a typo. N23 billion. For comfort. For luxury. For medical treatment. Paris for medical check-ups; but, masked as working holidays. Dubai for toothaches. Germany for routine tests. London for rest. While, back home, women are stitched without anaesthesia. Children die from coughs. While hospitals turn from Buhari’s mere consulting clinics to morgues. Here’s the truth: they flee the country they ruined. They simply cop out to countries that others built.
Where they don’t cop out, they hide inside the world of opulence they built for themselves from the stolen commonwealth. They don’t feel citizens’ pains. They don’t know what it means to hear a child convulse and die because there’s no oxygen. They don’t know what it feels like to hold a woman’s hand while she dies from a ruptured womb. They don’t bury children. They bury money. In Swiss accounts. Offshore firms. Dollar vaults. The Panama Papers reveal the truth. While our own currency can’t buy Panadol.
Our corrupt governing elite have eaten everything. Ours is now a country of locusts. Budgets are padded. Health budgets are looted. Drugs are stolen. Equipment is resold. Nurses and doctors, left unpaid and unappreciated, flee our country’s shores in despair, seeking dignity in foreign lands. In a moment that captured the callous indifference of our governing elite, former Minister of Labour, Chris Ngige, shamelessly declared that the exodus of doctors was of little consequence because, according to him, our country “has more than enough medical personnel… if you have surplus, you export”. It was a boast swaddled in ignorance, and beneath it lay the tragic arithmetic of a ruined country.
The World Health Organisation’s data pierces through Ngige’s fiction like light through the dark: as far back as 2013, our country had only 3.8 doctors for every 10,000 citizens; a ratio far below the WHO’s recommended ratio of one doctor to 600 patients. Twelve years on, the ratio hasn’t changed. This is not surplus; it is scarcity masquerading as strength. It is the cruel irony of a ruined country bleeding expertise while its governing elite speak in the hollow cadences of denial.
Our country has signed all manner of treaties.
The Sustainable Development Goals. The UN conventions. The AU declarations. Our country pledges. Our country makes promises. But nothing is fulfilled. Nothing reaches the dying woman in the cities and villages. Nothing saves the baby in the overcrowded wards of urban hospitals. Data is manipulated. Numbers are cooked. Reports are buried. Truth is hidden. But graves don’t lie.
Our mothers are dying. And no one is asking why they are dying. Even if someone is asking, no one is answering. Our governing elite are pursuing policies of indifference and neglect by design. Failure by choice. It is deliberate because they aren’t the victims of their own failure. They are protected from it. They are immune. They are medical tourists. Their wives won’t deliver in local clinics. Their babies won’t sleep on bare floors. Their lives are insured. Citizens’ lives are not. And so, our country stays broken. Because it works for them. Because there are no consequences for enthroning failure. So, they go on commissioning 30 kilometres highway and bus stops, and unveiling white elephant projects. Hosting summits. Garlanding foreign visitors.
Taking photos. Saying prayers. Meanwhile, more women keep dying. Children keep vanishing into the abyss. Citizens are told to be patient. To renew hope. But hope is not a hospital. Faith is not healthcare. Prayer doesn’t fix a torn placenta. Or stop post-partum bleeding. Or treat jaundice. Only investment. Only real governance. Only the political will of a responsible governing elite who know what to do: train midwives. Equip hospitals. Provide ambulances. Fund primary healthcare. Pay doctors and nurses. Build systems. Enforce accountability.
These are not puzzles wrapped in enigma; they are the fundamental functions of a competent state. Rwanda has done it, with clarity of purpose and political will. Ghana has made earnest strides. Even Sierra Leone, scarred by war and poverty, is learning to rise. But here in our republic, our rulers talk. They convene conferences. They inaugurate committees with fanfare. They rename hospitals as though renaming heals the sick. They switch uniforms as if new fabrics could staunch the bleeding. But they do not save lives. They perform the ritual of governance without its substance.
And the cost?
It is written in the silence of empty cradles and the wails of orphaned children. Seventy-five thousand women lost in a single year, not to the Boko Haram war; but to preventable complications. Buried without headlines. Yet, our governing elite have not declared it a war. There are no national mourning days. No flags lowered. No outrage. Just the quiet erasure of women, whose only crime was to give life in a country that does not value life. But it is war. On the poor. On the voiceless. On mothers. On children.
Every maternal death is a failure of leadership. Every child’s grave is a scandal. Every hospital without drugs is a crime scene. Citizens must speak louder. They must make their votes count. A country that abandons its women and children abandons its soul. This is not fate. This is not nature at work. These are premeditated murders. Matricide enabled. Infanticide engineered. Deaths orchestrated and sustained by our governing elite.
Silent though it is, our country is waging a war against women and children, and the generals of that war, the very men and women entrusted to protect the citizens, are the ones who pry open wounds, mother after mother, and children upon their first cries. Happily, history offers the lamp to courageous citizens who think of the Parisians who stormed the Bastille with unyielding revolutionary will and seek to enact their own history, not with bloodied pikes, but with their ballots, voices, and unyielding civic will.
That chapter in history will not be written by fate, but by paragraphs that citizens shall compose by choice.
Beware.
May our dead find peace.
