Nigeria, a country that has perfected the art of the preventable tragedy, has found its latest muse in the death of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s twenty-one-month-old son. It is a grim, Shakespearean irony that would be poetic if it weren't so nauseatingly literal: the woman who warned us about the 'danger of a single story' has been forced into the most singular, brutal narrative of all—the absolute, crushing incompetence of a state that cannot even keep its elite progeny alive. For those who haven't been paying attention to the decay, the details are as predictably horrific as a Lagos traffic jam. A leaked WhatsApp message—the primary currency of Nigerian 'truth'—reveals that Nkanu Nnamdi died because an anaesthesiologist in a Lagos hospital allegedly administered a lethal overdose of propofol. Propofol: the Michael Jackson special. In a functioning society, an anaesthesiologist is a precision instrument, a master of the delicate balance between consciousness and the void. In Nigeria, it appears they operate with the surgical nuance of a sledgehammer wielded by a blind man.

Now, predictably, we have the 'calls for reform.' I find these rituals of public outrage to be more exhausting than the tragedies themselves. The Nigerian healthcare sector has been 'undergoing reform' since the invention of the stethoscope, which is to say, it has been actively decomposing in real-time. The elites on the performative Left are wringing their hands, posting black squares and heart-wrenching threads on X, while the moronic bureaucrats on the Right promise 'commissions of inquiry' that serve no purpose other than to provide lunch stipends for the cronies appointed to lead them. It is a pantomime of governance. They all know the dirty secret: if you have a net worth higher than a street hawker’s, you don't go to a Nigerian hospital for anything more complicated than a band-aid. You get on a plane to London, Dubai, or Houston. To stay and trust the local 'system' during an emergency is an act of either supreme patriotism or terminal delusion.

Let us deconstruct the 'brain drain' that everyone loves to lament. Every doctor with a functioning synapse and a valid passport has already fled to the NHS or a private clinic in Riyadh, leaving the domestic front to be guarded by a skeleton crew of the overworked, the underpaid, and the dangerously under-qualified. We pretend to be shocked when a resident anaesthesiologist forgets the basic mathematics of dosage, but why? This is the logical conclusion of a system where the Ministry of Health is less of a regulatory body and more of a funeral parlor with better branding. The 'sector' is a series of hollowed-out buildings where the equipment is either broken or non-existent, and the staff are more concerned with their lack of salary than the life on the table.

Adichie’s status as a global intellectual giant provides no armor against the base-level stupidity of a failed state. In fact, her tragedy highlights the terrifying egalitarianism of Nigerian dysfunction. It doesn't matter how many honorary degrees you hold or how many TED Talks you’ve given when you’re standing in a ward that smells of bleach and despair, watching a medical professional fumble with a syringe. The public outcry is its own brand of uselessness. For forty-eight hours, everyone is an expert on medical ethics and hospital administration. They demand 'accountability,' a word that has no translation in the dialect of the Nigerian ruling class. By next week, the hashtags will have shifted to a new kidnapping or a fresh currency devaluation, and the hospital in question will continue its quiet work of turning patients into statistics.

We are witnessing the death of hope disguised as a healthcare system. The 'reforms' being shouted from the rooftops today will be the same reforms ignored tomorrow. The Nigerian state is a vampire that feeds on the potential of its people, and occasionally, it demands a blood sacrifice from its most famous daughters to remind the world that it is still there, still failing, and still utterly indifferent to the screams. It is a bleak, repetitive cycle of negligence followed by performative grief, and frankly, I am bored of the script. Another child is dead, another report will be filed into a dusty cabinet, and the elites will continue to buy their first-class tickets to better hospitals, leaving the rest of the country to pray they never have to encounter a man with a needle and a Nigerian medical license.