Famed Nigerian Author Blames Death of Toddler Son on Negligent Care

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is accusing a private hospital in Lagos of administering an overdose of a sedative, prompting an outpouring of complaints by Nigerians about their health care system.Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at her home in Maryland in February.Credit...Schaun Champion for The New York TimesDionne Searcey and Ismail AuwalDionne Searcey reported this story from Lagos, Nigeria. Ismail Auwal reported from Kano, Nigeria.Jan. 11, 2026, 5:33 p.m. ETThe celebrated Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is accusing a private hospital in Lagos of negligence that led to the death of her 21-month-old son after the family traveled there from the United States for the holidays.The boy, Nkanu, who was suffering from an unspecified infection, died on Jan. 6, a day before he was to be flown to The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for additional treatment. He was one of twin boys of the author and her husband, Dr. Ivara Esege. The couple also has a 9-year-old daughter,Ms. Adichie outlined what she said were the circumstances that led to her son’s death, blaming an overdose of a sedative by an anesthesiologist at the private Euracare Hospital, in a group WhatsApp chat with family and close friends. The chat was leaked to the public and shared on social media. A family representative, Omawumi Ogbe, confirmed the details of the chat.“Suddenly, our beautiful little boy was gone forever,” Ms. Adichie wrote. “It is like living your worst nightmare. I will never survive the loss of my child.”Euracare officials said in a statement that the boy had arrived critically ill, and that “the suggestion that this tragic outcome resulted from medical negligence is erroneous.” They said they were investigating what had occurred.Ms. Adichie gained fame both in Nigeria and abroad for novels such as “Half of a Yellow Sun,” which is read in some U.S. high schools, and her TEDx talk “We Should All Be Feminists,” which was sampled by Beyoncé.That a son of Ms. Adichie, who likely could afford to pay for private care, experienced a medical catastrophe in Nigeria, prompted an outpouring of complaints about the country’s lagging health care system across social media.Among Nigerians interviewed on Sunday, one father said that his daughter, who was just a little more than 1 year old, died after a hospital failed to give her oxygen quickly enough. Another man complained that his catheter was inserted incorrectly and his bleeding and cries of pain were ignored. Yet another said that a lab had sent him out to buy his own syringe, and that he waited two hours in line to buy one.“Health care in Nigeria is terrible,” said Bitris Zira, who was sitting on a curb outside Gbagada General Hospital, a public facility in Lagos, where he had taken his teenage nephew whose fingers were severed while working at a mosquito coil factory. “Who will fight for you? Only God,” he said. Government officials in Nigeria have tried to improve the state of health care by training more workers and providing more funding. But even in major cities, many clinics and hospitals are overcrowded and lack expertise. In some rural areas, health care is nearly nonexistent.Many wealthy Nigerians and politicians travel abroad for health care. Nigerians have accused President Bola Tinubu of traveling to Europe for medical care, but his office has said the trips were for other matters.Mr. Tinubu released a statement of condolence for Ms. Adichie over the weekend, saying,“As a parent myself who has suffered the loss of a loved one, no grief is as devastating as losing a child.”ImageThe novel “Americanah,” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.Credit...Sonny Figueroa/The New York TimesKemi Ogunyemi, the Lagos State governor’s special adviser on health, said in a statement that the office has opened an investigation into the death of Ms. Adichie’s son, and that it “maintains zero tolerance for medical negligence or unprofessional conduct.”In her message, Ms. Adichie said that her son had fallen ill after suffering what the family first thought was a cold, which then became “a very serious infection.”The boy was first treated at Atlantis Pediatric Hospital, a private facility in Lagos. He was awaiting a medical evacuation on Jan. 7 to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, but doctors there asked for a lumbar puncture test and an MRI before he could travel. Atlantis doctors referred the boy to Euracare for the procedures.The boy’s father carried him into the hospital, Ms. Adichie wrote, where health care workers told the family he would need to be sedated for the MRI.She wrote that she saw people “rushing into the theater and immediately knew something had happened.” A doctor emerged and told her Nkanu had been given too much propofol by the anesthesiologist, had become unresponsive and was quickly resuscitated.“But suddenly Nkanu was on a ventilator, he was intubated and placed in the ICU,” she wrote. “The next thing I heard was that he had seizures. Cardiac arrest. All these had never happened before.”“Some hours later, Nkanu was gone.”Ms. Adichie called the anesthesiologist criminally negligent, saying he had switched off the boy’s oxygen and “had just casually carried Nkanu on his shoulder to the theater, so nobody knows when exactly Nkanu became unresponsive.”Ms. Adichie wrote about the death of her father in “Notes on Grief,” released in 2021, the same year her mother also passed away. She has talked openly about her difficulties returning to writing after the painful losses.About the loss of her son, she wrote, “This must never happen to another child.”Dionne Searcey is a Times reporter who writes about wealth and power in New York and beyond.SKIP