I watched the funeral this week with a heaviness that refused to lift. A young woman, 26 years old. A rising voice. A life that had barely unfolded. The tears were raw, the kind that come when potential is buried alongside flesh.
Ifunanya Nwangene should have been planning tours, recording sessions and new beginnings. Instead, what followed the snakebite at her Abuja residence was a frantic race against time, with movements between medical facilities, urgent appeals for help, and the reported discovery that antivenom, the specific treatment required for snake envenoming, was not readily available. Each delay narrowed the margin for survival. She was eventually rushed to the Federal Medical Centre, Abuja, where she was later confirmed dead. What should have been a treatable emergency became a fatal episode, not because the danger was unknown, but because the remedy appeared just out of reach.
In Nigeria, when something painfully dysfunctional happens, people mutter a familiar phrase: “Nigeria has happened to them.” It is a phrase that angers some who believe tragedies occur everywhere. Snakebites are not uniquely Nigerian. Antivenom shortages have happened even in developed health systems during supply disruptions. Nature does not discriminate.
That is true.
The World Health Organization estimates that between 4.5 and 5.4 million people are bitten by snakes globally each year. As many as 2.7 million develop clinical envenoming. Tens of thousands die. The burden is highest in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, but no continent is snake-free. In that sense, snakebite is not an indictment of a country. It is a biological hazard.
But context matters. Sub-Saharan Africa carries one of the heaviest snakebite burdens in the world. In West Africa alone, thousands die annually, likely underreported. In Nigeria, one hospital reportedly treated 6,687 snakebite cases in just three years. This is not an obscure medical curiosity. It is a recurring emergency.
When a condition is predictable, preparedness becomes an obligation.
In December 2024, the Foundation for Investigative Journalism (FIJ) reported how poet Adedayo Agarau spent 13 agonising hours searching for snake antivenom across hospitals in Ibadan, including the University College Hospital, Ibadan. None had the drug in stock at the time. It was eventually sourced from a private pharmacy after delay and desperation. That episode was not an ancient memory. It was barely a year ago.
Patterns complicate the argument that “these things happen everywhere.”
Still, fairness demands balance. Health systems are complex organisms. Antivenom supply chains are delicate. Some products are expensive, have limited shelf life, and require cold-chain storage. Electricity instability, funding constraints, bureaucratic procurement delays, and security challenges all strain the system. Even well-resourced countries occasionally face stockouts of specific drugs. It would be simplistic to reduce a tragic outcome to a single villain.
Medicine also does not deal in certainty. Not every snakebite is survivable, even with immediate care. Severity depends on species, venom load, time to treatment, and the victim’s physiological response. We cannot retroactively declare with mathematical confidence that Ifunanya would certainly be alive had antivenom been instantly available.
And yet, there is a philosophical perspective that sharpens the discomfort. Socrates, in describing what he called the “city of necessity,” argued that human beings form communities because they cannot meet their basic needs alone. It is our needs, he suggested, that create the city. Food. Shelter. Security. Health. The city exists first to meet necessities, not luxuries.
If a society cannot reliably provide the minimum response to foreseeable medical emergencies, especially those it knows are common within its geography, then the social contract begins to fray. The issue stops being about desire and becomes about necessity.
Snake antivenom in a high-incidence country like Nigeria is not a luxury item. It is not ornamental infrastructure. It belongs in the category of necessity.
So was her death avoidable? The honest answer is that we cannot know with absolute certainty. What we can say is that in time-sensitive envenoming cases, early administration of appropriate antivenom significantly improves survival. When access is delayed or unavailable, the probability of survival narrows. Systems do not need to be perfect to save lives; they need to be functional.
Is this an isolated case? The WHO data, the Ibadan ordeal, and repeated reports of emergency drug shortages suggest otherwise. Underreporting remains severe, especially where victims rely on traditional healers due to cost, culture, or lack of access. Many deaths never make headlines. They vanish into rural silence.
Which returns us to that uncomfortable phrase: did Nigeria happen to her?
If by that we mean the existence of snakes, then no. Snakes bite in Australia and India too.
If by that we mean the convergence of known disease burden, fragile emergency preparedness, inconsistent essential drug availability, and systemic underinvestment in public health logistics, then the question becomes harder to dismiss.
At her funeral, what pained me most was not only the grief of her family, but the sense of interrupted possibility. A young woman in her prime, part of the economically productive age group that W.H.O identifies as disproportionately affected by snakebite mortality. A life snatched not by exotic pathology, but by something epidemiologists have been warning about for years.
Nelson Mandela once said there could be no peace or lasting security without basic necessities such as health care. That insight is structural. Health security is must be guaranteed.
The debate, then, should not devolve into patriotic defensiveness versus cynical fatalism. It should mature into policy urgency. Essential medicines must be treated as truly essential. Stock visibility systems must improve. Procurement must anticipate burden data. Emergency referral pathways must be strengthened. Public education must reduce dangerous delays.
Grief is inevitable in human societies. Preventable grief is not.
Ifunanya’s voice is now memory. Whether her death becomes another passing headline or a catalyst for systemic repair will reveal whether we understand what a city for, because if the city arises from necessity, then meeting that necessity is not optional. It is the reason it exists at all.
Seun Perez Adekunle is a Political Science and International Relations lecturer who writes from Ibadan.
