There are statistics that wound the conscience of a nation. And then there are those that indict it irrevocably. Nigeria, once lauded as the “Giant of Africa,” now holds a distinction no government should ever claim: the lowest life expectancy in the world. The latest UN World Population Prospects report has handed Nigeria such an indictment: we are now the country with the lowest life expectancy on Earth – 54.9 years. The figures tell a story so grim it defies euphemism. The average Nigerian woman now lives no more than 54.9 years; men live 54.3 years. Nigeria trails even war-ravaged Chad, and rank lower than famine-stricken South Sudan and the Central African Republic. This is not an abstract number; it is a national indictment and a measure of collective decay. It is a mirror held up to the Nigerian state, reflecting decades of neglect, maladministration, and the hollow rituals of governance that substitute proclamations for policy, and press releases for reform. It indicts not fate, not poverty, but the chronic misrule of successive administrations, and most immediately, the government of President Bola Tinubu. A government that rose to power promising Renewed Hope now presides over a republic of accelerated mortality. It is, in short, the obituary of a nation’s promise.
How did we descend so far? The answer is both simple and shameful: neglect institutionalized as policy, decay enshrined as routine. The Nigerian state has for decades treated health as an afterthought, a playground for contracts rather than a sanctuary for the sick. Our hospitals are mausoleums of despair, our clinics relics of neglect, and our health workers exiles-in-waiting. This administration’s health policy is a tragic pantomime – verbose in intent, anaemic in execution. Ministers issue soporific statements about “universal health coverage” and “modern infrastructure,” yet hospitals lack paracetamol, and rural clinics remain derelict. Patients die awaiting miracles; doctors flee for survival. What should be institutions of healing have become theatres of despair. The government’s ritual denial only compounds the obscenity. When confronted with the UN data, a medical expert quibbled that the “criteria were faulty.” Such defensive pedantry is grotesque. Nigerians do not need UN algorithms to know they are dying young; they know it from the funerals they attend, the mothers lost in childbirth, and the hospitals that kill by neglect.
President Tinubu cannot plead ignorance or inheritance. To govern is to remedy, not to rationalize. His administration, instead of reversing decline, has perfected the art of inertia; announcing reforms without implementing them, allocating funds without accountability, and speaking of progress while presiding over regression. Under Tinubu, health funding remains criminally inadequate. Nigeria allocates less than 5% of its national budget to health, in open defiance of the 2001 Abuja Declaration, which compels African states to spend 15%. This persistent parsimony is not fiscal prudence; it is moral bankruptcy. Even worse, what little is budgeted is consumed by bureaucracy and waste. “Capacity-building” workshops and “health transformation summits” have become euphemisms for elite per diem collection, while the poor perish in wards that reek of neglect. The state’s indifference is not just administrative failure; it is a form of structural violence against its own citizens.
A government’s ethical compass is revealed by what it subsidizes. Tinubu’s administration can find billions to bankroll pilgrimages to Mecca and Jerusalem, yet cannot fund immunization campaigns or dialysis units. Faith is subsidized; life is forsaken. The moral order has been turned on its head. No government that truly believes in human dignity would preside over such perversity; where oxygen is a privilege, and blood transfusions a luxury. To rule over a dying populace and respond with press briefings is to mock the very idea of governance. The President cannot outsource morality to press officers or to the Ministry of Health; the responsibility is his and his alone. The tragedy is not in our poverty but in our priorities. Nigerians die not because the country is poor, but because their rulers are profligate. Ours is a political class that confuses looting with leadership, and equates press statements with progress.
Diseases that the world has tamed – malaria, tuberculosis, HIV – still ravage Nigeria. Meanwhile, non-communicable diseases like cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular illness advance unchecked. Preventive care, health education, screening – the basics of modern health policy – remain alien concepts. In the rural hinterlands, health centers stand as hollow shells, devoid of personnel, drugs, or power. Communities are condemned to primitive medicine, birthing babies by candlelight, and dying of treatable infections. Inequality itself has become a death sentence. The poor die younger; the rural die fastest. To live shorter than any people on Earth is not just failure; it is national humiliation. It exposes a state that values patronage above protection, spectacle above substance, and religion above reason.
Governance, at its essence, is the preservation of life. A government that cannot keep its citizens alive has abdicated its fundamental reason for existence. Tinubu’s presidency now stands on trial; not before opposition politicians, but before history itself. The ledger of the dead grows longer each day, and on that ledger, the names are written not in ink, but in blood. The mothers who die in childbirth, the children who never see their first birthday, the workers who collapse from untreated hypertension; these are Tinubu’s true performance indicators. He cannot build a legacy on fiscal reforms while citizens die from neglect. He cannot boast of macroeconomic stability while Nigerians perish in hospitals without light, drugs, or doctors. The moral calculus is simple: if citizens do not live long enough to benefit from policy, then policy itself is a fraud.
Yet redemption remains possible, but only through radical reform, not rhetorical flourish. The President must declare a national health emergency and make the sector the centerpiece of governance. Health spending must be tripled immediately and ring-fenced from corruption. Primary health care must be rebuilt from the ground up – staffed, equipped, and connected to functional referral systems. Rural infrastructure – water, sanitation, roads – must be prioritized, for health cannot thrive amid squalor. Massive public health campaigns for immunization, maternal health, and non-communicable disease screening must begin now. Accountability must become doctrine. Every health minister, agency head, and hospital administrator must answer for measurable outcomes – or be dismissed. Partnership with the private sector must be pursued, but never as an excuse for state abdication. The poor must remain at the center of every intervention.
Presidents are remembered not for how many reforms they announced, but for how many lives they saved. Tinubu’s legacy will not be determined by exchange rates or fiscal policies; it will be measured in funerals and life expectancies. If he fails to act decisively, history will record him as the man who presided over Nigeria’s biological decline; the custodian of a dying nation. But if he acts with moral courage and policy rigor, he may yet rewrite this tragic arithmetic. Until then, Nigeria remains what the UN has now declared it to be: a republic of premature graves.