Andy Ezeani
Tuesday, January 13, 2026
Nigeria used to pride itself as the giant of Africa. It possibly still does. It desires to be a permanent member of the Security Council of the United Nations, too, for whatever that is worth.
These, basically, are legitimate aspirations. If only the Nigerian government could first undertake appropriate housekeeping.
On December 29 2025, World Boxing Champion, Anthony Joshua, on a holiday visit to Nigeria with two of his friends, had a fatal accident on the Lagos-Ibadan highway. Joshua is British, but with Nigerian roots.
Unlike another Nigerian-British, the leader of the British Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch, who is also of full Nigerian parentage, but spurns the country and all its ways, Joshua appears increasingly fond of Nigeria and his roots.
He came in at the end of the year to enjoy a holiday after his last exploit in the ring. The visit sadly ended up a tragedy.
An accident, anywhere in the world, involving an international star of Anthony Joshua’s stature, was bound to attract global media attention. Expectedly, the Lagos-Ibadan expressway accident of December 29, 2025, drew international media focus.
And what did the world see? Nigeria in its true habitat; a panorama of a wayward highway, with stationary heavy trucks and articulated vehicles on the hem, against a chaotic backdrop of shanties and sundry structures, all of which loudly proclaim the planlessness, indiscipline and underdevelopment of the country.
The corridor around the Lagos-Ibadan highway is representative of such stretches around most highways in Nigeria.
The weightier indictment of Nigeria and its political leadership on the Anthony Joshua accident was not even the uncomplimentary scenario of the mishap. What happened immediately after the incident spoke graphically of Nigeria as an embarrassment.
With no ambulance nearby or, indeed, anywhere, to call following the crash, the victims were physically helped into the vehicles that evacuated them. As is the case in every such accident across Nigerian roads, manual labour by Good Samaritans was the only means to lift victims into vehicles to convey them to the hospital.
As it turned out later in the Joshua case, Good Samaritans and rogues worked side by side at the scene of the accident. It was discovered later that the boxer’s cellphone had been stolen.
Five days before the Anthony Joshua incident, on the eve of Christmas, also in Lagos State, unarguably the epicentre of market fire disasters in Nigeria, three promising siblings; Stephen Omatu,40 years old, Casmir Omatu,39, and Collins Omatu,37, perished in the fire disaster that razed a building ironically named Great Nigeria House, in Balogun Market of Lagos.
The Omatu brothers, promising young men rounding up their business for the year, perished in a most horrendous manner, alongside a yet indeterminate number of other victims, because the fire service reportedly had no water to combat the fire. They promptly gave up effort to save the poor victims trapped in the inferno.
Lagos, a multi-trillion Naira economy, the famed commercial capital city of Nigeria, with an established history of frequent fire incidents, turned out to have a fire service that lacked the necessary tools to effectively fight fire and save persons trapped in a conflagration.
The fire service reportedly had no water to combat the fire at the Balogun fire outbreak. Earlier in 2025, another fire incident at the high-rise UBA building on Marina, Lagos, also claimed numerous lives. That is Nigeria before the world.
At the road accident on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway involving Anthony Joshua, there was no ambulance to lift victims. Yet, Lagos is a trillion-naira revenue-collecting state.
On January 6,2026, again in Lagos, Nigeria happened, as the expression goes, to the internationally-acclaimed author, Chimamanda Adichie and her spouse. What the couple initiated, with doctor’s recommendation, as a precautionary hospital visit to attend to the health of their infant son, before a scheduled trip abroad for medical care, ended up in a characteristic Nigerian agony.
The less than two-year old boy who was taken to the hospital alive did not return alive to his devastated parents. Negligence was alleged.
Death in hospitals due to negligence of medical personnel or infrastructural inadequacies have become common in Nigerian hospitals, irrespective of their category. Clearly, the problem is systemic.
News is what newsmakers do or what concerns them. Chimamanda Adichie losing her child is global news. Details of the sad incident will naturally follow.
Nigeria loses once more, as it comes out as a place where death stalks both the old and the young. Those who escape terrorists and bandits, road mishap claims. Those who escape the road perish in fire outbreaks. Those fire fails to consume, hospitals do.
A day before the tragedy involving Chimamanda’s son, on January 5,2026, in the federal Capital Territory, Abuja, Nigeria’s often proclaimed modern capital city, a female lawyer, Princess Nwamaka Mediatrix Chigbo who boarded a taxi within the city, never reached her destination. She did not return home alive, either. The poor lady was kidnapped and murdered. Just like that.
Her family reportedly reached out to the Police earlier, when her abductors made contact with her phone and demanded ransom.
Sadly, the Police could not track the criminals to avert tragedy. The Police has reportedly tracked and apprehended the killers. A similar fate befell a female nurse in the same Abuja, about the same time as the murder of Barrister Chigbo.
Nigeria is a scary place to be at the moment. Nothing is guaranteed. Not safety at home. Not justice in the court. Not protection from the agencies with the mandate to protect citizens. Not security in broad daylight. Not truth from those who govern. Not integrity of any product, no matter where it is purchased. Not the next meal for many….
Delusional claims by government officials and lackeys of the presidency about Nigeria’s quantum leap in socio-economic development in recent times have continued to crash in the face of reality. But do they care?
While Nigeria lacks the most basic of amenities and infrastructure to enhance the quality of life of the citizens, the political elite is preoccupied with the pursuit of power.
Out of this land without efficient fire service equipment, or ambulances on the highways, or security cameras on the streets of the cities, or amenities as basic as pipe born water and electricity, confounding sums of money will soon roll out to procure votes, or undermine the will of the people at elections.
What the world saw recently in the fate of global stars, Anthony Joshua and Chimamanda Adichie, is a glimpse of the tragedy of Nigeria.
The bigger tragedy is not what agents of the state say, but that a number of manifestly impoverished citizens have been corralled into singing that all is well.
