A Child Who Should Not Have Died: Mourning with Chimamanda Adichie

The sudden and preventable death of Nkanu, the 21-month-old son of acclaimed Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie, in a Nigerian hospital once again exposes the shameful and unacceptable consequences of Nigeria’s poor healthcare delivery. According to an internal family memo, the family alleges that Nkanu’s tragic death resulted from severe medical negligence at Euracare Hospital in Lagos on January 6.

While in Nigeria for Christmas, Nkanu developed what initially appeared to be a cold but rapidly progressed into a serious infection. He was admitted to Atlantis Hospital and was scheduled to travel to the United States the following day under the care of Traveling Doctors, with a medical team at Johns Hopkins already prepared to receive him.

Required pre-travel procedures—a lumbar puncture, MRI, and central line insertion—led to a referral to Euracare Hospital. According to the internal family memo, during sedation, Nkanu was allegedly administered an excessive dose of propofol and was not adequately monitored. He became unresponsive, suffered seizures and cardiac arrest, and was placed on a ventilator before dying hours later. The family alleges criminal negligence by the anesthesiologist and later learned of similar prior incidents. They are demanding accountability—not only for Nkanu, but to prevent further loss of innocent lives.

While the Lagos State government has promised a full and transparent inquiry, this offers little comfort to a family devastated by an avoidable death. An inquiry will not bring Nkanu back. Nor will it, by itself, reform Nigeria’s broken healthcare system. In Nigeria, hospitals are often places where the sick go to die, and where the healthy become ill due to nosocomial—hospital-acquired—infections.

If this tragedy could befall such a prominent Nigerian family, one can only imagine the fate of millions of poor and voiceless Nigerians. The sad truth is that Nigeria consistently ranks among the countries with the highest rates of infant and under-five mortality (U5MR) globally—often second or among the top ten in total child deaths. These deaths are marked by deep regional disparities, especially in the northern part of the country, and are driven largely by preventable causes such as infections and birth complications.

The latest WHO Global Report on Under-Five Mortality (May 2023) offers a stark portrait of the precariousness of being born a child in Nigeria. Nigeria’s under-five mortality rate stands at approximately 105 deaths per 1,000 live births—far above the African average (about 67) and nearly three times the global average (about 37). Even within Africa, Nigeria is a high-burden outlier. A child born in Nigeria is about one and a half times more likely to die before age five than the average African child, and nearly three times more likely than the global average.

These disparities reflect deep and persistent structural failures: uneven access to primary healthcare, low immunization coverage in some regions, maternal health risks, malnutrition, conflict, poverty, and entrenched inequality. Nigeria’s progress in reducing child mortality has been slow, fragile, and uneven, underscoring the urgency of targeted, equity-driven child-survival interventions and comprehensive health-system reform.

Nigeria now stands alongside countries such as India, Pakistan, Ethiopia, and Bangladesh—nations that together account for over half of the global neonatal disease burden. Yet Nigeria’s share of this burden is especially tragic because so much of it is preventable, given Nigeria’s vast oil wealth. With corruption and a failed government, everything in the country continues to decay—much to our collective shame and pain. WHO data show that lower respiratory infections and malaria alone account for an alarming proportion of infant deaths, particularly among male children.

Despite spending about 4.08% of its GDP on health, Nigeria has failed to significantly improve life expectancy, reduce disability-adjusted life years (DALYs), or increase quality-adjusted life years (QALYs). In practical terms, this means that many Nigerians—especially children—live shorter lives characterized by illness, impairment, and preventable suffering.

The outlook for adults is scarcely better. Nigeria’s life expectancy is approximately 63.4 years—below the global average of 71.4 and barely at par with the African average. Even societies enduring prolonged crisis and war—such as Palestine and Haiti—have higher life expectancy than Nigeria. Within Africa, Nigeria’s life expectancy aligns with countries such as Chad, Sudan, and Lesotho.

With one of the world’s highest childhood disease burdens, a failed healthcare system, and a culture of opacity and impunity around medical malpractice, Nigeria has indeed become one of the worst places in the world to fall sick. The situation is even more dire in emergencies—as we saw not only in Nkanu’s case but also in the shocking failure to provide timely emergency and ambulance services to former world heavyweight boxing champion Anthony Joshua and his friends following a serious road accident on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway before Christmas.

Little baby Nkanu’s death is not an isolated tragedy. It is a national indictment. We mourn with our sister, Chimamanda, her husband, and their family. Soon, Nkanu will be laid to rest. Ministers and mourners will gather to pray for the repose of his soul. But I have long argued that it is no longer enough to blame God’s will for the inexcusable loss of life in Nigeria and across many parts of Africa. We, Church leaders and theologians, must do more to hold our society and governments accountable for their failure to protect and enhance the lives of our people.

In my book Where Is God?, I argue for what I call a theological social autopsy whenever deaths like Nkanu’s occur. Rather than rushing to say that his death was “God’s will,” we must interrogate the sinfulness of a society that fails to provide safe, effective, and efficient healthcare to its citizens. We must denounce medical practitioners whose negligence and malpractice betray the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm.

A theological social autopsy is a faith-based, morally rigorous examination of a preventable death that refuses to spiritualize injustice or excuse human failure in the language of “God’s will.” It begins with lament but does not end there. It insists that every premature or avoidable death demands accountability—not only from individuals but also from systems, structures, and moral cultures that make such deaths possible and excusable.

Unlike a medical autopsy, which examines organs and biological causes, a theological social autopsy examines institutions, policies, professional ethics, and social values. It asks not only how a person died but also why society allowed the conditions that led to that death to persist.

God is not the author of preventable suffering. When a child dies because of negligence, underfunded healthcare, corruption, incompetence, or indifference, the primary theological question is not to blame God or to ask why God did not intervene. Rather, we must confront human agency and social factors—especially failures in responsibility and the social sin destroying the common good in Nigeria.

We commend the Adichie family for speaking out even from the depths of unspeakable grief. There is nothing more devastating than losing a child. There is something even more unbearable about watching your child die when you know that timely therapies, effective emergency response, or competent ambulatory care could have saved a precious life.

For this reason, I returned to school as a priest to earn an additional Master of Public Health degree. I am convinced we can no longer blame God for the excess deaths that define life in Nigeria and across much of Africa. As religious leaders who proclaim a saving, healing, and liberating Gospel of life, we must lead our people toward accountability. At the very least, we must help stop the bleeding—physical, moral, and theological.

We suffer from religious pathologies that reject scientific inquiry and critical reasoning about why people die in such staggering numbers in our land. We plan elaborate funerals rather than invest in healthcare. We neglect health education, health promotion, disease prevention, and the structural roots of illness and avoidable deaths.

These words may offer little comfort to the Adichie family, but they are my way of standing in solidarity with them—and with countless other families who have heard Nigerian doctors say, “We could not save your child,” even though the child might have lived if the right equipment, staff, facilities, and expertise had been available.

That we continue to suffer and die needlessly in a richly blessed country like Nigeria remains a source of deep anguish for my soul.