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Nigeria’s deepening crises in healthcare, security, governance and social cohesion are no longer abstract policy failures but lived realities measured in lost lives and eroded trust, experts warned on Sunday at the latest edition of the Toyin Falola Interview.
The widely followed forum, chaired by renowned historian Professor Toyin Falola, was streamed across multiple digital platforms and attracted more than 4.1 million participants from over 20 countries, underscoring the global concern over Nigeria’s trajectory.
With the theme “Nigeria in 2026,” the discussion brought together voices from medicine, economics, journalism and human rights, each examining the country’s condition from different vantage points but arriving at a shared conclusion: Nigeria is now confronting the cumulative consequences of choices repeatedly deferred.
Across disciplines, the panelists—which included Dr. Osmund Ugochukwu Agbo, a U.S.-based pulmonologist and critical care specialist; Dr. Tope Fasua, Special Adviser to the President on Economic Affairs; Zainab Suleiman Okino, Chairman of the Editorial Board of Blueprint Newspaper; and Professor Chidi Anselm Odinkalu, Professor of Practice in International Human Rights Law at Tufts University—converged on the view that Nigeria’s challenges are neither accidental nor inevitable, but structural and self-inflicted.
Dr. Agbo framed the national crisis through the lens of healthcare, which he described as both a moral and political barometer of governance.
“Looking at Nigeria’s healthcare in 2026 would naturally show that we have all been victims of a system that is unfit for purpose,” he said, noting that the failures of the system are so widespread that “you may either have experienced it on a personal level or done so vicariously through your friends, family or even those of them you spend time with in the church.”
Drawing from deeply personal experience, Agbo recounted the death of his mother in 1997, just weeks before his final medical school examinations. “She was never sick,” he recalled. “Somebody brought her some bad news and her brain could not handle it and she became unresponsive. She was rushed to the hospital and in a space of less than 24 hours she was gone.”
At the time, he said, there were no basic diagnostic tools to determine what had gone wrong. “There was no CAT scan machine and some of those other things you could use to investigate such things. And so we lost her.”
Nearly three decades later, the loss still weighs heavily. “No day passes without me wondering if my mum could still be alive today if we had had a functional medical system,” Agbo said.
He warned that Nigeria has failed to meaningfully correct course. “Nigeria remains a country where too many people die from preventable causes,” he said. “Nigeria is a country where surviving a medical emergency is predicated on some divine intervention and not alignment with the standard of care or what is called the global best practices.”
Agbo pointed to stark indicators: life expectancy stalled at 54 to 55 years, far below the African average; maternal mortality rates that still claim about one percent of pregnant women; and official data showing that 20,811 women and children died from maternal, neonatal and under-five causes between January and September 2025.
“This is not some kind of natural disaster that just emerged out of the blues,” he stressed. “It is a product of choices we have made or refuse to make over the years.”
While healthcare failures highlighted the human toll of governance lapses, Dr. Fasua offered a contrasting assessment from an economic standpoint, arguing that Nigeria’s outlook is not uniformly bleak.
“There are national governments that are more efficient than others, but these are products of history as well,” Fasua said, situating Nigeria’s current challenges within broader developmental contexts.
He cited recent data suggesting economic recovery. “Last week, IMF recognised Nigeria as one of the few countries in Africa that will contribute to global growth,” he said. “That tells us that we have prospects.”
According to him, Nigeria closed the previous year at about four percent growth, with a target of 4.5 percent, driven largely by the non-oil sector. “The key driver was the non-oil sector,” Fasua said. “This sector controls about 96.5 per cent of the economy right now. The oil sector is only about 3.5 per cent of the economy.”
He added that inflation is easing. “We had 34.8 per cent inflation as at December 2024. In 2025, there was a re-basing at the beginning of the year. All of that was to put the numbers in better perspectives.”
Defending government reforms, Fasua said: “We stopped fuel subsidy which used to take more than 10 billion dollars away from Nigeria every year. We recalibrated the naira. The payment that goes out into medical tourism went down about 95 per cent.”
“The naira is getting stronger. We are looking at getting to 1,250 naira to the dollar this year,” he added. “It is not all gloom and doom here in Nigeria. We know what the issues are. Revenue generation is still a big issue. But we are making progress.”
Yet, for Zainab Okino, the everyday experiences of Nigerians sharply contradict official optimism.
“We wake up to one tragedy or the other about our country,” she said, describing a nation increasingly defined by insecurity and disruption. She cited reports of market closures, park shutdowns and school closures across several states, developments that were once rare in Nigeria’s recent history.
“In no distant past, we never heard about primary schools being shut down for one reason or the other but now it is happening except when their teachers were probably on strike,” Okino said.
“With all this around us, it will not be out of place to say that 2026 outlook is gloomy. It is worrisome,” she added. “We ended 2025 with so many tragedies, killings, mass abductions. Unfortunately we are opening 2026 with these realities.”
She was sharply critical of governance responses. “Despite all these, all we have seen are knee-jerk reactions,” Okino said. “Three years down the line, nobody can talk about prosperity. Many of these reforms are not working.”
According to her, “The problem with making sacrifice for the development of the country is that such sacrifices are only made by the poor masses. There is lack of exemplary leadership when it comes to sacrificing for the good of the country.”
Prof. Odinkalu placed these failures within a broader ethical and legitimacy crisis, arguing that the Nigerian state has lost the moral authority needed to govern effectively.
“The state’s inability to protect life and earn trust lies at the heart of Nigeria’s crisis,” he said, stressing that reforms without legitimacy deepen alienation rather than restore confidence.
He pointed to two recent events to illustrate what he described as moral dissonance in leadership. “In the same week that over 300 Nigerians were massacred, Nigeria’s great and good led by the President were at the wedding of the ten children of the junior defence minister,” he said. “The people who were to protect them were in the mosque celebrating weddings. It is mocking the dead, their communities and the victims of the massacre.”
He added: “The geography of the massacres was everywhere: Kwara State, Katsina, Niger. What did the presidency say? Not much.”
Odinkalu rejected the notion that Nigeria’s core problem is economic. “Revenue collection is not our problem,” he said. “The reason Nigerian citizens are not willing to entrust their earnings to the Nigerian state is what we should investigate. It is not an economic issue. It is a political issue. It is a legitimacy of the state.”
“The fact that someone occupies an office does not make them a leader,” he concluded. “Leadership comes with legitimacy.”
