Nigeria likes to boast that “we don’t carry last.” But when it comes to life expectancy, we are not just carrying last, we are digging our own grave. At 64 years, Nigeria sits disgracefully at the rock bottom of Africa’s life expectancy tables, rubbing shoulders with war-torn South Sudan, Chad, and the Central African Republic. For a country with billions in oil and entrepreneurial brilliance, this is not bad luck. It is a policy failure of the highest order.
This is the silent crisis nobody in Abuja wants to talk about. The global average life expectancy is 73 years. Nigerians are dying nearly 20 years earlier than the rest of the world. That is worse than any credit downgrade, worse than any GDP slump. It is the ultimate humiliation: a nation where life itself has become tragically cheap.
The drivers are not mysteries. Mothers and children are dying in numbers that should shame any serious government. UNICEF reports that 102 children die for every 1,000 live births in Nigeria: four times the global target. Maternal mortality stands at a catastrophic 1,047 deaths per 100,000 births, among the worst on earth. In too many villages, families bury more children than they name. These are not just health statistics; they are the evidence of a state that has abandoned its most basic duty: keeping its people alive.
But Nigeria is not cursed. Other African nations, Ethiopia, Ghana, Tanzania, and Botswana, have proven that deliberate policy can save lives. Ethiopia deployed health extension workers into every community and cut child and maternal deaths dramatically. Ghana’s free maternal healthcare policy put skilled birth attendants into hospitals and reduced maternal deaths. Botswana turned an HIV death sentence into a survivable condition through mass antiretroviral rollout. These are not experiments; they are evidence that leadership matters.
Nigeria has programmes on paper, the Basic Healthcare Provision Fund, the National Health Insurance Authority, malaria interventions, and maternal and newborn initiatives. Yet the outcomes remain pitiful. In the last five years, while global maternal mortality declined by 40 percent, Nigeria managed only a 13 percent improvement. That gap is the cost of incompetence, corruption, and criminally slow implementation. Funds vanish between the Federal Ministry of Health, the National Primary Health Care Development Agency, and state ministries. Governors prefer to build vanity projects rather than primary health centres. Local governments, constitutionally tasked with basic healthcare, barely function. The result: Nigerians are dying young, not because of fate, but because institutions are failing them.
This is why this editorial piece insists: Nigeria’s life expectancy crisis must be treated with wartime urgency. Health must be elevated to the level of a national security emergency. That means:
Free, guaranteed maternal and newborn care: no mother should die because she cannot pay.
A nationwide surge in malaria control: universal insecticidal net coverage and accessible treatment.
Declaring malnutrition a national emergency, backed by measurable intervention targets.
Transparent, state-by-state healthcare scorecards so Nigerians can see which governors, commissioners, and institutions are failing them.
The money exists. The Basic Healthcare Provision Fund was designed to guarantee at least 1 percent of the Consolidated Revenue Fund for primary healthcare, yet implementation is slow and opaque. Billions are mismanaged, wasted, or stolen while children rot in malnourished graves. The cost of action is high, but the cost of inaction is the shortened life of every Nigerian.
Life expectancy is not destiny; it is a choice. Nigeria has chosen badly for decades, and the result is that millions never live to see old age. If leaders cannot be shamed by these numbers, they should at least be terrified: no economy can thrive when its people die before 55. No nation can compete globally while bleeding out its human capital in delivery rooms and children’s wards.
The question is blunt: will the Federal Ministry of Health, NPHCDA, and Nigeria’s 36 governors continue to bury their people young, or will they finally decide that the most basic measure of progress is keeping citizens alive?
The clock is ticking, not in election cycles, but in lives lost tomorrow.
