EDITORIAL: When hospitals become graveyards: The shame of UNTH, Enugu - ITREALMS

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The death of Mrs. Charity Unachukwu at the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital (UNTH), Enugu, after what her family describes as 12 hours of bureaucratic delay and neglect, is more than a personal tragedy. It is a mirror held up to Nigeria, reflecting the decay of our health system and the betrayal of citizens by institutions meant to preserve life.

Hospitals are supposed to be sanctuaries of healing. Instead, stories like Charity’s turn them into graveyards where negligence, incompetence, and indifference claim more lives than the ailments patients bring. It is telling and damning, that testimonies of other families quickly followed, each recounting a similar experience of abandonment at UNTH. This is no coincidence. It is a pattern.


Nigeria cannot continue to treat such tragedies as isolated incidents or dismiss them as the “cost of living in a broken system.” When laboratories shut down at night while emergency patients bleed to death, when porters and junior staff joke while lives hang in the balance, when doctors insist on paperwork instead of urgent action, we are witnessing systemic collapse, not human error.

The excuses have run out. Nigerians are tired of burying their loved ones because of failures that are entirely preventable. The federal government must act decisively, not with cosmetic panels or empty promises, but with concrete reforms: accountability for medical negligence, investment in modern facilities, enforcement of professional standards, and an end to the culture of impunity in our public hospitals.

As families mourn, the bigger tragedy is that political elites, who should fix the system, continue to fly abroad for even minor ailments, leaving ordinary citizens to die in hospitals that have become death traps. This is an indictment of governance itself.

UNTH, Enugu, should be the beginning of reform, not just another scandal buried under public apathy. If Nigeria cannot guarantee the basic right to life in its hospitals, then what truly is left of the social contract between government and the governed?

ITREALMS believes the time to act is now. Hospitals must return to their true purpose; places where lives are saved, not lost to neglect. Anything less is a national disgrace.

By ITREALMS Editorial Board