A Nation’s Lost Potential
About two months ago, my 12-year-old daughter came home from school eager to have a conversation with me about something she had heard in class. “Today in our Geography lesson we were talking about HDI, the Human Development Index,” she said, “and the teacher told us that Nigeria has the lowest life expectancy of all the countries in the world.”
“That cannot be true,” I countered. “I know Nigeria has been in the bottom ten or thereabouts for the last few years, but the very bottom of the list? That cannot be right.”
“Well, it is,” she said. “We checked.”
It turned out I was the one who was behind the times. I had not realized quite how much worse things had become. So I checked for myself. One source said the same thing. Then another. Then another. Without exception, they all placed Nigeria at the bottom of the list.
I do not know the full details of that classroom conversation, or how Nigeria came to be the main talking point in a Year 7 class in a small English town. But my daughter was clearly troubled by what she had heard. And embarrassed too, unsurprisingly. Although she has been to Nigeria only three times, the first when she was just under two years old, she is very proud of her Nigerian heritage. She is the quintessential conscious Gen Alpha British Nigerian, always first in line to set the record straight in defense of her fatherland. But here was one record that was shockingly hard to defend.
I could picture her there: one of only four children of Nigerian heritage in a classroom of about 30 pupils, surrounded by white and other non-African classmates, listening as the statistics were rolled out. Shocked. Speechless. Embarrassed.
And she certainly cannot be the only one asking: what in God’s name are the adults doing about the state of that country?
That, surely, is the question that ought to focus our minds. What are we all, Nigerians at home and in the diaspora, doing about the state of this country? What future, exactly, are we bequeathing to our children?
The Crisis of Life Expectancy
Nigeria’s life expectancy crisis is not just about how long people live. It is about the conditions that make life shorter, harsher and more fragile. A life expectancy of 54 years is not merely a statistic. It is a verdict. It is the cumulative measure of lives cut short by bad governance, poor healthcare, deepening poverty, widespread insecurity, broken systems and the routine failure of institutions that ought to preserve life.
And the tragedy does not begin and end with longevity. It also runs through the quality of life available to people while they are alive. The same human capital data that tells us Nigeria is in such dire straits tells us something equally devastating: a child born in Nigeria today is expected to realize only about 36 per cent of his or her productive potential by adulthood because of failures in health and education.
Pause on that for a moment. Thirty-six per cent.
In plain terms, nearly two-thirds of the potential of the average Nigerian child is already being written off by the society into which that child is born. That is not fate. It is failure. It is the cumulative consequence of choices made and unmade by those entrusted with public power, and tolerated for too long by the rest of us.
The Realities Behind the Numbers
The realities behind the numbers are grim enough. Millions of children of primary and secondary school age are out of school. Even among those who are in school, far too many are not learning enough to read with understanding or solve basic mathematical problems. In health, the picture is no less disturbing. Nigeria is delivering far below the level of essential healthcare that citizens should be able to count on, and the cost of what little care exists falls heavily on households, with families paying directly from their pockets for treatment that in any serious society ought to be more accessible, more affordable and more reliable.
Then there is insecurity, which keeps shortening lives directly and traumatising people daily. Kidnapping, banditry, terrorism, violent crime and pervasive fear have become part of the texture of ordinary life. The statistics are gloomy, but even they cannot fully capture the deeper reality: a country where movement is shadowed by fear, where roads, farms, train routes and even homes can become theatres of terror, is a country actively consuming the future of its young.
A Glimpse of Hope
In October 2025, we held the annual showcase event for the Byte Busters Coding Club, an intervention that is part of the DEFINED project, under the auspices of the Oodua Investment Company. One of the pupils in the overall winning team had, just seven months earlier, been completely clueless about what to do with a computer mouse. There he was, less than a year later, writing code with his teammates and helping to produce a brilliant idea for an educational computer game that expert judges deemed worthy of first prize.
It was one of those moments that fills one with hope. A glimpse of what is possible. A reminder that talent is not scarce in Nigeria. Intelligence is not scarce. Curiosity is not scarce. What is scarce, far too often, is opportunity. What is scarce is structure. What is scarce is the kind of public investment and social infrastructure that allow talent to breathe, grow and bear fruit.
Imagine how many thousands, indeed millions, of schoolchildren like him are scattered across the country, unable to access the tutoring, resources, facilities and encouragement that many other societies take for granted. Imagine the inventors who will never invent, the scientists who will never experiment, the teachers who will never teach, the entrepreneurs who will never build, the doctors who will never heal, because the pathways that ought to carry them from potential to possibility are cracked, blocked or simply absent.
Or imagine that a child is fortunate enough to gain access to quality teaching and decent facilities. Imagine that he survives the neglect of the classroom and begins to flourish in spite of it. What then is the likelihood that he will live long enough, and safely enough, to bring his knowledge and skills to bear for the collective good and progress of society?
That is the deeper tragedy. In Nigeria, even when talent breaks through, life itself remains precarious—more than it is almost anywhere else in the world. A gifted child may learn to code, dream boldly and begin to flourish, only to come of age in a country where promise is routinely stalked by violence.
Think of Dr Chinelo Megafu, the young dental surgeon killed in the Abuja Kaduna train attack in March 2022, just days before she was due to leave Nigeria for a new chapter abroad. Think also of Abba, the NYSC corps member whose family reportedly paid a ransom of ₦10 million in March 2026, yet still could not secure his freedom. These are not random horrors at the margins. They are reminders that in Nigeria, the wasting of youth does not happen only in neglected classrooms and broken hospitals. It also happens at gunpoint.
The Lived Realities
So when we speak of low life expectancy, poor HDI rankings, weak human capital outcomes and all the rest of it, we must resist the temptation to treat these as abstract policy categories. They are not abstractions. They are lived realities. They are the names and faces of young people whose futures are dimmed, delayed or destroyed. They are children whose gifts remain undeveloped, students whose ambitions are starved of oxygen, workers whose bodies are broken by poverty and exclusion, and families who must continue to live with grief that should never have been theirs.
And this is precisely where the argument must now move. If the first question is what has gone wrong with the lives and prospects of Nigerian children, then the next is unavoidable: who is responsible, and why do citizens so often keep rewarding failure?
