Healthcare professional in blue scrubs consulting a patient indoors. Photo credit: Klaus Nielsen/Pexels.
When I first read about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s fight for answers after the death of her son, Nkanu Nnamdi Esege, I did not read it as news. I read it as a Nigerian, as a sister, and as a member of a family that has lived through the brutal education of public grief. I recognised the machinery: the statements, the denials, the careful institutional language, the legal manoeuvring, the public sympathy that eventually thins into fatigue, and the unbearable expectation that grieving people remain composed while asking the most devastating question of their lives: what happened?
Publicly available reports say Adichie and her husband, Dr Ivara Esege, have alleged medical negligence following the death of their 21-month-old son at Euracare Hospital in Lagos. Euracare has denied wrongdoing. A coroner’s inquest, which should ordinarily serve as a fact-finding process into the circumstances of a death, has reportedly faced legal uncertainty after Euracare approached the High Court in relation to the proceedings. Evidence, expert testimony, medical records, and due process must be used to test the facts of the case. But beneath the legal vocabulary is a familiar Nigerian story: a child dies, a family asks what happened, and the institution at the centre becomes an actor in the contest over truth.
That is the real scandal. Not that a grieving mother is asking questions. Not that a hospital is defending itself. Not that lawyers are doing what lawyers do. The scandal is that Nigerians have become so accustomed to institutional defensiveness that we sometimes forget what accountability should look like. We have normalised systems in which families must chase records, preserve evidence, hire counsel, correct narratives, manage public opinion, and outlast delays before they can get close to clarity. We have normalised grief as a contest of stamina.
In November 2021, my younger brother, Sylvester Oromoni Jr., died after what my family has consistently described as a bullying-related incident at Dowen College in Lagos. He was eleven years old. His name became known across Nigeria. His face circulated on timelines. His story became a national conversation about bullying, school accountability, institutional responsibility, children’s safety and the limits of public outrage. But before he became a case, he was a child. Before he became a headline, he was my brother. Before strangers debated timelines and institutional statements, he was loved in the ordinary and intimate ways no headline can hold.
Two years later, after numerous delays, a Lagos coroner exonerated Dowen College and the students accused in the matter, attributing the death to other factors, including medical and parental negligence. My father publicly rejected those findings and alleged that vital evidence had been suppressed. That is the public record. But the public record, by its nature, is incomplete. It can capture dates, findings, statements and legal positions. It cannot fully capture what it means for a family to lose a child, then be required to keep proving that the loss deserves seriousness.
That is why what is happening with Adichie’s family feels painfully familiar. I see a grieving mother. I see a family trying to force a system to answer questions it may prefer to manage. I see lawyers, procedure, power, delay, and narrative. I see the same national pattern repeating itself in another form: when something goes wrong, the family must become relentless or risk being buried beneath process.
The question is not whether institutions deserve fairness. They do. No hospital, school, doctor, teacher, administrator, or professional should be condemned without evidence. Public anger can be imprecise. Grief can be raw. Outrage can flatten complexity. Due process matters, especially when the stakes are high. But due process is not supposed to become a fortress against the grieving. It is not supposed to reward the party with more money, more lawyers, more institutional memory, and more time to wait. A process that exhausts families before it reveals truth is not neutral. It is power wearing procedure as clothing.
This is why the Adichie case matters beyond Adichie. If a globally recognised writer, with visibility, resources, legal access, and cultural power, can still appear to face a long and difficult struggle for answers after the death of her child, what happens to the ordinary Nigerian mother whose child dies in a hospital and is told to “take heart”? What happens to the father whose son is harmed in school and is advised to let the matter rest? What happens to the family that cannot afford lawyers, cannot read medical records, cannot command press attention, and cannot pause the daily work of survival to pursue a system built to outlast them?
What happens to the rest of us?
Nigeria’s healthcare crisis makes this question even more urgent. The health system is not merely under pressure; it is structurally overwhelmed. Nigeria Health Watch reported in 2025 that the country had about 2.9 doctors per 10,000 people, roughly one doctor for every 3,474 people. It also estimated that Nigeria would need nearly 400,000 doctors to meet international standards, compared with about 66,000 available. In 2024, 4,193 doctors and dentists left Nigeria.
These are not abstract figures because doctor shortages, stretched nurses, delayed referrals, weak record-keeping, exhausted health workers, and high out-of-pocket costs all affect patient safety. World Bank data shows that out-of-pocket spending made up about 71% of Nigeria’s current health expenditure in 2023.
Many doctors across Nigeria are doing heroic work in conditions that would break people in better-funded systems, so this is not an attack on Nigerian doctors. But compassion for doctors must not excuse institutional opacity. A strained system still owes patients truth. Private hospitals that sell excellence cannot retreat into silence when families allege catastrophic failure.
This is where Nigeria’s class contradictions become impossible to ignore. Euracare is a private hospital in Lagos, the kind of place many Nigerians imagine as safer because it is expensive, modern and elite. If a family with resources can enter a high-end medical facility and still emerge with unanswered questions after a child’s death, then the comforting hierarchy collapses. Money may buy access, but it does not always buy safety. Status may buy attention, but it does not guarantee accountability.
Nigeria needs systems that make accountability routine. Hospitals should be required to preserve and produce relevant records after serious adverse events, families should be informed in plain language about review processes, children’s inquests should be protected from needless delay, and schools should be required to document, escalate, and report serious harm. It is the basic infrastructure of trust.
A society that refuses to ask hard questions after preventable or questionable deaths is not being peaceful. It is being trained to accept loss without explanation, to confuse endurance with virtue, and to treat powerful institutions as untouchable. Public grief taught me that institutions often survive by waiting out emotion. They know the public will move on. They know families will tire. They know legal processes can be slow. They know grief is expensive.
Adichie’s family deserves a fair process. Euracare deserves the opportunity to answer the allegations against it. The courts must do their work. The coroner’s process must be guided by law. But fairness must not become forgetfulness. Legal process must not erase moral urgency. At the centre of all this is a child who died. Around that child is a family asking for answers. Around that family is a country that should be asking what this reveals about the systems we trust with our lives.
Emphasisingly, Nigeria has an accountability problem. We have built institutions that too often ask for trust without offering transparency. We have built systems that treat questions as hostility. We have allowed too many families to discover, at the worst moment of their lives, that truth may be available only to those with the resources to keep fighting. That should shame us.
A country is not judged only by the talent it produces, the writers it celebrates, the doctors it exports, the schools it markets, or the hospitals it builds for those who can pay. It is judged by the enabling systems that exist within it. No family, famous or unknown, should have to fight this hard for answers after losing a child. No child should have to become a headline before institutions are questioned. Grief is already heavy enough to carry. Nigeria must stop making families carry institutions too.
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