What is killing Nigerians?

There are moments when coincidence begins to feel like a pattern.

Over the past few months, news of Nigerians dying from cancer has arrived with disturbing regularity. In May, Nollywood actor Alexx Ekubo died at only 40. His family said the cause was complications from advanced metastatic kidney cancer. Then, in August, came the death of veteran Yoruba actor Taiwo Hassan, popularly known as Ogogo, at 66 after a battle with stage-four cancer.

These are prominent names, and prominence can distort perception. For every public figure whose diagnosis becomes news, there are countless Nigerians whose stories remain within families: the colleague who suddenly disappears from work, the relative for whom an urgent fundraising appeal begins to circulate, the friend diagnosed when there is already little that medicine can do.

Ogogo’s case was particularly sobering. His daughters said he had been diagnosed only about three weeks before they made an emotional public appeal for help on 17 August. His condition had initially been treated as an ulcer. By the time further examinations revealed the severity of his illness, the cancer was at stage four. His daughters were desperately searching for treatment options. Six days after the public appeal, their father was dead.

Nobody can say that an earlier diagnosis would necessarily have produced a different outcome. Cancer offers no such guarantees. But there is something deeply unsettling about discovering a disease at stage four and, within weeks, confronting death.

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It is tempting, confronted with stories like these, to ask the obvious question: is cancer increasing in Nigeria?

The responsible answer is that we do not know nearly as well as we should.

That is not the same thing as saying there is no problem. According to the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s GLOBOCAN 2022 estimates, Nigeria recorded 127,763 new cancer cases and 79,542 cancer deaths that year. Breast cancer accounted for the largest number of new cases, followed by prostate and cervical cancers.

These figures are sobering, but they are estimates. Therein lies part of the story.

For a country of more than 200 million people, Nigeria’s capacity to count cancer remains inadequate. Cancer registries are indispensable because they tell us not simply how many patients arrive at particular hospitals, but how disease is distributed across populations and how that distribution changes over time.

Before asking whether cancer is increasing, therefore, perhaps we should ask something even more basic: would we know if it were?

There are reasons to take the question seriously. On 31 August, *Nigerian Tribune* reported the concerns of clinical oncologist Dr Omolola Salako, who said oncologists were seeing increasing numbers of cancers among Nigerians aged between 18 and 39. Younger patients present a particular difficulty because they often fall below the age at which routine cancer screening would normally be recommended.

Clinical experience is not population-level evidence. But when doctors begin noticing something, a functioning surveillance system should be capable of telling us whether they are seeing an aberration or the beginning of a trend.

Then comes another question. What are Nigerians being exposed to?

I returned to the UK in the first week of September after spending about three weeks in Nigeria in August. Food was, as always, one of the pleasures of the visit: eating in restaurants, enjoying familiar dishes and occasionally buying something by the roadside. One particular favourite of mine is roasted corn. I ate it while I was there. Boiled corn too.

Until recently, I cannot remember looking at a cob of corn and thinking about a risk register.

Perhaps nobody should.

Food is sustenance, culture, memory and pleasure. Nigerians should not approach every meal with suspicion. But a 2025 systematic review published in the Journal of Food Composition and Analysis examined 1,627 Nigerian maize samples drawn from 25 studies across different agroecological zones. Aflatoxins and fumonisins were among the most prevalent mycotoxins identified, with contamination varying considerably by season and location.

That does not mean roadside corn causes cancer. It would be irresponsible to make that leap. Aflatoxin exposure is associated with increased liver cancer risk, but whether any particular cob of corn presents a hazard depends on circumstances extending from cultivation through harvesting, drying and storage.

And therein lies the problem. The person buying roasted corn beside a Nigerian road cannot possibly know its history.

The same applies to much of what we eat.

In March, a systematic review published in Food Science & Nutrition brought together 41 Nigerian food-contamination studies conducted between 2015 and 2025. Across those studies, researchers found microbial hazards, heavy metals, pesticides, mycotoxins and other pollutants. More than four-fifths of the studies examining heavy metals reported concentrations above international regulatory limits, while some assessments produced estimated cancer risks above conventional safety thresholds.

The point is not to frighten Nigerians away from markets, street food or home cooking. It is precisely the opposite. Consumers cannot laboratory-test everything they eat. Food safety is therefore not primarily an exercise in individual vigilance. It is a function of systems.

And the concern does not end at the dinner table.

Recent Nigerian research has raised questions about contaminants in drinking water and food chains in pollution-prone communities. These are local studies and cannot simply be converted into a national diagnosis. But they add to a question that becomes increasingly difficult to avoid.

Who is measuring the cumulative environment in which Nigerians eat, drink, breathe and work?

Think about how much Nigeria has changed in 30 or 40 years. The population has expanded dramatically. Cities have sprawled. Traffic has multiplied. Millions of generators have filled gaps in electricity supply. Plastic consumption and waste have increased. Mining, industrial activity, pesticide use and complex food-distribution networks have expanded. Open burning remains commonplace.

The Nigeria of 2026 is not the physical environment of 1986.

The question is whether our capacity to monitor the health consequences of that transformation has advanced at anything approaching the same speed.

I hasten to say that Nigeria is not starting from zero. The Federal Government’s National Cancer Control Plan 2026–2030 addresses prevention, screening, early detection, treatment, research and cancer surveillance. Eight preventive oncology clinics are now operational in federal tertiary institutions. These are important steps.

But cancer policy cannot begin and end at the hospital door.

It begins much further upstream: with the water people drink, the integrity of food supply chains, the chemicals applied to crops, industrial emissions, mining contamination, petroleum pollution, occupational exposure and the air entering people’s lungs. It requires laboratories that test routinely, regulators that enforce standards, cancer registries capable of detecting changes and researchers able to follow environmental exposure and health outcomes over time.

There is danger at both extremes of this conversation. One is complacency: cancer is complicated, so no connection should be investigated until perfect evidence arrives. The other is alarmism: somebody ate this food, lived in this city or drank this water and later developed cancer, therefore one caused the other.

Neither serves the public interest.

A cluster of heartbreaking deaths is not, by itself, an epidemic. Finding contaminants in particular foods or communities does not establish the cause of an individual’s cancer.

But uncertainty is not ignorance either.

Nigeria already knows enough to know that it needs to know much more.

Perhaps that is the question raised by the recent procession of sad news. Not simply whether more Nigerians are dying from cancer, but whether the country sufficiently understands the changing risks among which its citizens are living.

There is an old management maxim that what gets measured gets managed. The reverse deserves greater attention. What a country fails to measure can quietly accumulate until the consequences become impossible to ignore.

Cancer is too complex for easy explanations. Complexity, however, must never become an excuse for incuriosity.

Before Nigeria can answer the frightening question, “What is killing us?”, it must become much better at knowing what is happening to us, what surrounds us, and what is entering our bodies every day.