There is an old, cynical joke that for a Nigerian, you do not just have to hustle to survive; you must also hustle to die with proper paperwork.
Passports are supposed to be the great equalizers of national identity. If two people carry the green-backed book stamped with the Nigerian coat of arms, the constitution insists they share the exact same claim to fundamental dignity and justice. But citizenship, like roaming data on a prepaid SIM, appears to depend entirely on which borders your passport happens to cross.
Consider the tragic, bizarre, and cautionary demise of 43-year-old Igho “Tiny” Ubiribo. In the early hours of March 6, Mr. Ubiribo died in Bangkok, Thailand, under circumstances that would test the poker face of even the most hardened coroner. He succumbed to a pulmonary embolism triggered by illegal, black-market genital enlargement injections. It is the sort of scandalous, tabloid-ready catastrophe that easily invites cruel mockery.
Yet when his body was repatriated to the United Kingdom, where he was domiciled, the British legal machinery did not chuckle, cringe, or look away. Under UK black-letter law, when a resident’s body is brought home after an unnatural, violent, or sudden death abroad, the state has a non-negotiable duty: a coroner’s inquest must be opened.
British coroners do not care if the incident happened in a clinic in Southeast Asia or an alleyway in Manchester. Pathologists were engaged, the clinical timeline was reconstructed, and the brutal, embarrassing facts were placed squarely on the public record. No Victorian prudery was allowed to hide the truth, and no bureaucratic shrug was permitted. The evidence was published, accountability was documented, and only then was the man released to his family. In life, his choices may have courted scandal, but in death, the state ensured he received the absolute dignity of due process.
Now pivot home to Nigeria, where Mary Habila recently slipped from this world under equally unexpected and unexplained circumstances.
Did the Nigerian state pause? Did a coroner step in? Did the law insist on peering into the shadows to determine what actually took place?
Hardly. There was no forensic inquiry, no institutional curiosity, and no demand for answers. The Coroner’s System Laws sitting quietly in Nigeria’s statute books, statutes that explicitly mandate an inquest into sudden, unnatural, or suspicious deaths, were treated as purely decorative. Instead, the family printed the standard, glossy funeral brochure, inserted an unchallenged, polite line attributing the loss to “a hole in the heart,” and buried her without much ado.
Case closed. No post-mortem scrutiny, no official validation, and no forensic certainty. Her dignity, along with any uncomfortable questions about what truly ended her life, was shoveled into the red earth right alongside her.
Here lies the cruel, tragic irony: two citizens of the same nation, yet governed by two entirely different universes of state duty.
Even when a citizen perishes thousands of miles away in Bangkok from a botched cosmetic gamble, the UK system takes custody of the remains, opens the books, and insists that a life, no matter how tragically or foolishly cut short, demands a formal accounting. Meanwhile, on home soil, a young woman dies in mysterious circumstances, and the local system simply cannot be bothered to look up from its desk.
A nation’s respect for its people is not measured by the lofty rhetoric in its constitution or the patriotic anthems taught in school. It is measured by what happens when a citizen’s pulse stops. When the law looks away and allows mystery to masquerade as medical fate, it does not merely abandon the dead, it whispers a chilling message to the living: that out here, your life is cheap, and your death is entirely your own business.
Mary Habila deserved the truth. Igho Ubiribo was afforded it. Both held the same citizenship, but only one had the luck of being accountable to a system that remembers the dead still have rights.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 