Owaen Fred Itua
Death is not the great interrupter. It is the great revealer, the final, unsparing mirror in which every man must confront what his days were truly spent upon. What it so often reveals, in the quiet aftermath of a life fully spent, is not triumph or fulfilment, but the hollow echo of a life deferred.
We are a people who have perfected the art of postponement.
There is a sentence that has quietly destroyed more lives than poverty ever could: when things get better, I will enjoy myself.
The Nigerian man who says it means well. He rises before the sun, boards a danfo before daybreak, navigates the chaos of Lagos or Kano or Onitsha with grim determination, and sleeps only long enough to repeat the cycle. He is disciplined. He is resilient. He is, by every social measure, admirable.
Yet, beneath all that industry, there is a life he has promised himself but never claimed. A rest earned but never taken. A joy perpetually scheduled for a season that, with cruel consistency, never quite arrives.
He will see the doctor once this contract is done. He will rest after the children finish school. He will breathe when things stabilise. Always after. Always when.
Life does not negotiate with when. It arrives in the present tense, unfolds in the present tense, and ends with breathtaking indifference to our plans, in the present tense. The man who survives fuel queues, naira devaluation, and NEPA darkness for thirty years, only to collapse from an untreated heart condition at 54, did not die from poverty alone. He died, in part, from the belief that death would wait for him to be ready.
There is no figure more quietly tragic in the Nigerian imagination than the father who gave everything and kept nothing. He came of age understanding that survival was a collective enterprise, that his body was not entirely his own, that his labour belonged first to ageing parents, then to a wife, then to children, then to an extended family whose edges were never clearly defined.
So, he poured. For decades, he poured. School fees and rent. Hospital bills and burial levies. His youth went into foundations he would never fully inhabit. His health went into educations he would never use. His prime was a long, generous offering laid at the altar of everyone else’s future.
Then, somewhere in the silence after the children left and the noise died down, he discovered, too late, always too late, that he had forgotten to tend to himself. The back pain he dismissed as ordinary stress had become something irreversible. The blood pressure he managed with prayer and agbo had compounded quietly in the dark. The prostate he was too busy, or too afraid to examine had made a decision without his permission.
He dies in the same scarcity he spent his life fighting, his sacrifices consumed, his health depleted, his modest savings swallowed by the final cruelty of medical bills he should have addressed years earlier. His children mourn him genuinely. His community praises his dedication. Rarely does anyone pause to ask whether, beneath all that sacrifice, there was a man who deserved to live, not just to provide, but to live.
Here, a man does not simply die of old age. He dies of a pothole. A hospital generator that ran out of diesel. An oxygen cylinder that was empty when it mattered most. A diagnosis that arrived six months too late because the consultation felt too expensive and faith seemed cheaper.
He dies of a country that has extracted the best years from its citizens and returned, in exchange, roads that swallow vehicles whole, institutions that humiliate the living, and a retirement that looks indistinguishable from punishment.
The widow who loses her husband to a road accident on the Abuja-Kaduna highway is not a victim of fate alone. She is a victim of a system that treats human life as expendable, where road maintenance is a political gesture rather than a moral obligation, where ambulances are a luxury, and where the poor man’s death barely interrupts the news cycle.
This is the environment in which the ordinary Nigerian is asked to thrive. To build. To hope. And still, with magnificent stubbornness, many do, which makes the tragedy not smaller, but larger.
Then, there are those who govern. There is a peculiar blindness that power bestows upon men who hold it in Nigeria, a hallucination of permanence so convincing that politicians who were born without shoes begin, within a single tenure, to behave as though death itself requires an appointment to see them.
They loot the healthcare budget and travel to London for routine check-ups. They allow public hospitals to decay into structures of managed despair, knowing their own children will never set foot inside them. They allocate funds for roads that are never built, and ride through the consequences in bulletproof convoys.
They govern as though they are eternal.
But the graves of Nigerian leaders, celebrated and condemned alike, tell a different story. The General who seized power with a broadcast at dawn. The senator whose name was synonymous with a particular brand of impunity. The governor who treated an entire state as a personal estate. They are gone, every one of them, returned to the same earth they presided over with such magnificent arrogance. Their tenures ended. Their immunity lapsed. Their convoys dispersed.
Death is magnificently egalitarian. It has never once been impressed by a ministerial appointment. It does not acknowledge immunity clauses. It has no record of anyone negotiating a second term.
The man who lets a teaching hospital rot while flying abroad for treatment will one day find himself in a body that no amount of foreign currency can permanently repair. If you are doubt, ask late Umaru Musa Yar’Adua.
The official who stole the pension funds will die and somewhere, a retired civil servant who cannot afford medication will die too, and the distance between those two deaths will be nothing but the accident of proximity to power.
The question, then, is not whether we will die; that has been settled since the first breath. The question is whether we will have truly lived in the interval.
To live is not merely to survive fuel scarcity and exchange rate fluctuations and the monthly ritual of managing impossible logistics. It is to be present in one’s own existence. To honour the body that has carried you faithfully through every hardship. To rest without guilt. To seek joy as earnestly as one seeks contract approvals. To say I matter too without an apology.
This is not an instruction to abandon your family or your duty. It is an instruction to include yourself among those you consider worth protecting. See the doctor before the symptoms become a crisis. Eat the meal that nourishes rather than merely fills. Take the rest your body has been quietly begging for. Laugh with your children now, not later, not after the next promotion. NOW, while they are still small and the world still holds magic for them.
The good days you keep postponing are not accumulating in a vault somewhere, awaiting your readiness. They are dissolving, one unclaimed morning at a time, into the irreversible past.
Every grave in every Nigerian cemetery holds, among other things, a story of things left undone, words left unsaid, rest never permitted, and a self never fully inhabited. The earth beneath us is patient and it is not selective, it receives the powerful and the powerless alike, the senator and the subsistence farmer, the man who lived on his own terms and the man who only ever planned to.
The most defiant act available to a Nigerian in a system designed to exhaust you into early death is simply this: to decide, while you still can, that your life belongs to you.
Not entirely to your family. Not to your employer. Not to a state that has shown, repeatedly, that it does not regard your existence as precious.
To you. Today. In this breath, which is the only one you are absolutely certain of. The clock does not hoard its hours for the deserving. It spends them, equally, indifferently, on everyone and it does not ask whether you were ready.
