Seven Hospitals, No Help 😭 I have held back from writing this for days, partly out of respect for a grieving family, and partly because I wanted to have more information. But the facts, as reported, are now too stark to ignore. A young Nigerian gospel singer - Toluwanisings, barely forty-one, slumped last week in Ibadan. He was allegedly taken to seven different hospitals, and at each one, he was reportedly turned away, with the explanation that doctors were on strike. He did not survive. I did not know his face until he died. I knew him through those soulful recordings that played in the background of life without ever announcing themselves, and it is a strange and painful thing to finally put a face to a voice only after the voice has gone silent. My condolences go to his young family, his loved ones, and everyone who knew him. But grief is not the same as silence, and we owe this man more than tears. We owe him an honest accounting of the systems that should have saved him. Let me begin with the most immediate failure, the alleged refusal at seven hospitals. If this is true, then it is not a misfortune; it is a scandal, and it demands a formal investigation. A patient in an emergency is not a customer to be accepted or declined based on convenience. Hospitals do not operate on the logic of a market stall, and doctors do not possess the luxury of deciding, in the critical minutes of a collapsing life, that a strike absolves them of the duty to stabilise a dying human being. Even in a strike, there is a thing called emergency care, a minimum service that every civilised health system preserves precisely because life does not respect industrial action. If hospitals turned this man away, then somewhere there is a decision, a duty roster, a phone call, a person who said no. The Oyo State government must investigate, identify those responsible, and hold them accountable. A strike cannot become a licence for manslaughter. And while we are on the matter, let us be honest about where the buck stops. Primary and secondary health care are squarely within the remit of state governments. This was an emergency of the most basic kind: a man collapsed, and what was required was rapid response, stabilisation, and resuscitation. Does Oyo State have a functioning emergency line? Does it have an ambulance and medical response system that actually works, that a distressed family member can call at any hour and receive help? Or is the emergency number, if it exists at all, a number that rings into a void? How much does a defibrillator cost that a local or state government cannot afford to place them in strategic public locations? How many millions go into ceremonies, vehicles, and allowances while the basic equipment that restarts a heart sits out of reach? I single out Oyo State because that is where this man died, but the failure is national in its architecture and only local in its execution at this time. There is also a civic dimension that we, the people, must confront. How many Nigerians know how to perform CPR? How many even know that the technique can be learned from a free video on YouTube? We cannot outsource all responsibility to government while remaining ignorant of the basic interventions that keep a person alive until help arrives. Civic education is not a luxury; it is a survival skill. And civic responsibility cuts both ways: an informed citizenry is also a citizenry that can hold its government to account, that can demand functioning emergency services, that can ask why a state of over eight million people cannot guarantee that a collapsing body will receive oxygen in time. A people who can organise around politics should be able to organise around the question of whether the nearest defibrillator is within reach. And then there is the doctors' strike itself. What manner of strike is conducted at the expense of human life? I understand the grievances of medical professionals in Nigeria, and many are legitimate. p.1/2