When Nigeria Happens To You: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s grief

There is something deeply uncomfortable about the idea that Nigeria can “happen” to someone.

For many Nigerians, especially those in the diaspora, Nigeria can exist as two things at once: home and heartbreak. We can complain about it endlessly and still defend it fiercely when someone else points out its flaws. But it’s easy to idealise a country when its failures remain abstract.

It is different when Nigeria happens to you.

Because when a country is home, its failures don’t remain failures happening somewhere around you. Sometimes they become part of your own grief.

That tension is what comes to mind when I read Chimamanda’s account of the death of her 21-month-old son, Nkanu. Her child suffered a cardiac arrest after being sedated with propofol during what should have been a standard MRI check. The circumstances surrounding his death are now the subject of a coroner’s inquest.

Whatever one’s views of Adichie, there should be one thing that should not be up for debate: she is a grieving mother who lost her baby in circumstances involving alleged medical negligence in Nigeria. The harder question is this: what happens to your relationship with a country when its failures become inseparable from the worst thing that has ever happened to you?

I think we should be very careful about telling someone who has suffered a loss of this magnitude how they are supposed to feel about the place where it happened.

This is where Adichie’s grief becomes bigger than Adichie.

You can love Nigeria and still tell the truth about it

There is a particular kind of patriotism that asks people to separate the country from everything that happens within it. One of the strangest aspects we see of Nigerian discourse is the assumption that criticism is somehow evidence of hatred.

It isn’t.

You can love Nigeria and still acknowledge that its healthcare system is failing people. You can love your country and still recognise that corruption has hollowed out institutions and stripped politics of accountability.

You can also argue that ordinary people deserve functioning roads, reliable electricity, competent emergency services and a justice system that does not need to depend on wealth or connections.

In fact, sometimes criticism comes precisely because you love something enough to know that it can be better. And nowhere is that distinction more important than in healthcare.

Medical negligence happens in functioning countries too. People die because of mistakes made by healthcare professionals. Bad things happen everywhere. The difference is, what happens afterwards?

Is there an investigation and responsibility established? Are professional licences suspended or revoked where appropriate? Does the system learn from one person’s death so that another person does not suffer the same fate?

These are not unreasonable expectations. They are the basic architecture of a functioning society.

And this is why some of the responses to Adichie’s grief are so disturbing.

A grieving mother does not become irrational because she asks why her child died due to negligence. She does not become selfish because she expects accountability. And she certainly does not become a traitor for deciding to distance herself from a country that failed her. This is especially striking given how much she has previously done to champion Nigeria globally.

When suffering becomes normal, the burden subtly shifts from the institution that failed to the person who expected better. We start asking why they trusted the hospital, why they did not use their connections abroad, or why they did not take additional precautions.

The solution becomes: Japa to Canada. Seek out connections. Pay more. Everything BUT addressing the main issue.

That is not how a functioning system works. It is survival through privilege. And what happens to the average Ade who cannot afford to pay her way for things that should be a normal human right? If any Nigerian cannot reasonably trust a leading private hospital to safely administer a simple MRI procedure, what does that say about the system?

Money should buy access to better services. It should not, however, be necessary to pay for the basic expectation that a medical professional will do their job competently. And when that basic standard fails, the system should be accountable — not only to establish what went wrong, but to make sure it does not happen again.

But accountability has to mean more than identifying what went wrong after the fact.

So what do we do?

If Nigeria is going to stop “happening” to people, we have to stop treating each tragedy as an isolated tragedy.

A child dies because of a medical error. We mourn, argue online, blame the government, blame the hospital, blame the parents, then move on to the next trending topic.

That cycle has to end.

Accountability cannot depend on whether the victim is rich or famous enough to make the news.

We need professional bodies that actually discipline negligence. We need hospitals that are required to report serious medical errors and learn from them. We need governments that treat healthcare, emergency response, infrastructure and public safety as obligations rather than favours.

But accountability is not only the responsibility of institutions. Citizens have a role too.

We need to stop defending incompetence because admitting that something is broken feels like an attack on Nigeria. We need to stop using the failures other countries as an excuse for our own. We need to demand better, even when the tragedy has not happened to us yet.

Because that is ultimately what solidarity means.

You should not have to lose your child before you care about the hospital system.

You should not have to become a victim before you care about justice.

Nigeria should not have to “happen” to us before we decide that Nigerians deserve better.

And that is why I don’t think Adichie owes Nigeria her return. I don’t think she owes anyone patriotism in the aftermath of unimaginable grief. And I don’t think we get to judge the way she feels about a country after experiencing the loss of a child.

But I do think the rest of us have a responsibility to ask what her story reveals.

Not “Why did this happen to Chimamanda?”

But:

Why should this happen to anyone?

And, more importantly:

What are we going to do to make sure it happens to fewer people?