Nigeria is sleepwalking into a public health disaster as life-saving contraceptives vanish from clinics nationwide, leaving millions of women with no choice but brutal back-street abortions or unwanted pregnancies.
The stark warning came yesterday from the Africa Health Budget Network (AHBN) at the 9th Annual Conference of the Association of Nigerian Health Journalists (ANHeJ) in Abuja.
“Nigeria risks an overwhelmed health system, skyrocketing unsafe abortions, deeper child poverty and a flood of unintended pregnancies if we don’t act now,” declared Dr Aminu Magashi, AHBN Coordinator, through his representative Ms Amina Haladu Mohammed.
The crisis is simple but deadly: pills, injectables, implants and condoms bought with donor and government money are piling up in warehouses or stuck in transit, never reaching the rural clinics where ordinary women need them most.
From Lagos ports to the last-mile primary health centre, the supply chain is broken. Logistics funding has dried up, trucks don’t move, state warehouses sit half-empty, and local government stores are often the weakest link of all.
The result? Empty shelves, desperate women, and a ticking time bomb.
“These stock-outs will push more girls and women into the hands of quacks. We will see more maternal deaths, more abandoned children, more poverty,” the AHBN presentation warned.
With Nigeria already struggling to feed its 230 million people, the failure to let women plan their families threatens to erase any hope of a demographic dividend and turn the country’s youthful population from asset to catastrophe.
AHBN called on the federal government to release promised funds immediately, fix the logistics nightmare, and make the entire supply chain transparent.
They also threw down the gauntlet to journalists: “Use investigative reporting to follow the money and the missing pills. Hold leaders accountable so these commodities reach the woman in the village, because her life, her dreams and Nigeria’s future depend on it.”
As one delegate whispered after the session: “If we can’t get a packet of condoms to a health centre, how do we plan to run Africa’s biggest economy?”
The clock is ticking.
