Nigeria Keeps Selling Poison in Bottles While Our Children Die

Four young Nigerians walked out of their final exams and into a party to celebrate. Two young men and two young women. They were supposed to be leaving university with diplomas, job applications, and the first real hope their families had invested in for years. Instead, their parents are receiving the news that their children are in a mortuary, waiting for autopsies, while the university shuts down its calendar for three days of mourning.

We do not yet know exactly what killed them. The police say alcoholic drinks were recovered from the scene. The university's own vice-chancellor says the preliminary findings point to alcohol abuse or drug paraphernalia, and he is not prepared to be conclusive. Fine. Let the investigators finish their work. But let us be honest about the context in which these four students died, because the context is what should keep every Nigerian awake tonight.

Let us ask the question that should be on every front page in this country. How many more bottles must be poisoned before the state treats the poisoning of its citizens as a national emergency?

Consider what happened in Ondo State this September. Locally made alcoholic drinks and herbal mixtures sent dozens of people to hospital in communities across the state. More than 11 people died in the Araromi-Obu area alone. More than 50 others were hospitalised. Investigators found that some of the drinks had been contaminated with methanol, a toxic alcohol that destroys the optic nerve and kills. Nigeria's food and drug regulator, NAFDAC, eventually counted more than 150 cases nationwide, including 48 confirmed deaths, more than 80 people hospitalised, and five who lost their sight permanently.

Five people will never see their children's faces again because someone decided that a cheaper cut of alcohol was worth the risk. Forty-eight families buried a father, mother, brother, or sister because a product reached a market it should never have reached. Those are not statistics. Those are funerals. Every one of them was preventable, and every one of them was a failure of the people who were paid to prevent it.

NAFDAC has since been raiding suspected producers of fake and adulterated drinks and food. Good. But raids after the bodies are counted are not governance. They are damage control. The regulator is running to catch up with a market that has been operating in the open for years, selling products that any competent inspection regime would have flagged long before a single person went blind. Nigeria has known for decades that unsafe and adulterated goods are a public health threat. Campaigners have been warning about it for years. The question is not whether the threat exists. The question is why our institutions keep arriving at the scene of the crime after the crime is over.

Some will say this is a story about youthful recklessness, about students who went too far at a house party. We reject that framing. Young people celebrate. They always have. A final-year party should not be a death sentence, and a bottle of spirits bought from a market should not carry a hidden poison. When a state fails to guarantee that what its citizens consume is safe, it has failed them, whatever choices they made on the night.

This is also a story about priorities. Nigeria can mobilise security agencies to shut down campuses, ban celebrations, and track students to their hostels. It can deploy police to investigate a single party within hours. Yet the production lines of contaminated spirits, the informal distributors, and the herbal mixers who sell death in unlabelled containers are allowed to operate for years until the body count forces action. The energy is there. It is simply pointed at the wrong target.

The University of Nigeria's decision to ban signing-out celebrations may be sensible as a short-term measure, but it is the institutional equivalent of telling students to drink less instead of telling the sellers to stop poisoning them. Blaming the victims is the easiest response for an administration that does not want to admit its surroundings are unsafe. We will not accept that. Ask what the vice-chancellor's security teams, the Hilltop community, the local licensing authorities, and the state government knew about the sale of alcohol around the campus. Ask who was checking the bottles.

There is a path out of this, and it is not complicated. It requires political will, institutional discipline, and a government that understands that the rule of law includes the right of citizens not to be poisoned by the goods they buy. Nigeria should adopt mandatory licensing and batch-level traceability for all alcoholic beverages, from industrial producers down to informal brewers and distributors. Every bottle sold should carry a verifiable registration number that a buyer can check with a text message. NAFDAC needs a standing, funded laboratory capacity to test methanol levels in the field, not just in Abuja after people have already died. Prosecutors must treat the knowing sale of toxic alcohol as attempted mass murder, with sentences that make the trade unprofitable. Licences must be revoked for any producer caught in contamination, and those revoked licences must be published so that no company can simply rebrand and reopen down the road.

Africa already has proof that this works. Botswana has built its reputation on predictable, transparent institutions and rule-based public administration, and it has shown what happens when a state commits to governing rather than improvising. Mauritius has built a regulated economy in which the rules are published, the courts are trusted, and businesses know the cost of cutting corners. These are not utopias. They are countries that decided the boring work of institutions mattered more than the dramatic gesture of the moment. Nigeria has the talent, the scale, and the regulatory architecture on paper. What it lacks is the consistency to enforce it before the funerals start.

So here is what we demand. We demand that the federal government fund NAFDAC as a true public safety institution, with independent budgets, field laboratories, and enforcement powers that cannot be quietly bargained away. We demand that the Senate and state assemblies pass traceability laws for alcoholic beverages within the next session. We demand that the Nsukka investigation be completed in full, published openly, and followed by charges against anyone found responsible for selling contaminated product. We demand that universities and local governments stop treating student safety as a tent-pole problem that appears once a year, and start treating it as a standing duty of the state. And we demand that every Nigerian voter ask their representative a simple question before the next election: what did you do to stop people from dying of poisoned drinks?

Four students should be walking across a stage this week. Forty-eight Nigerians should be at their own tables, not in cemeteries. Five people should still be able to see the faces of the people they love. None of this was inevitable. Each of it was a choice made, or left unmade, by people with power.

We are done accepting explanations. We want accountability, and we want it now.

Based on reporting by BBC