Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has gone public with a letter accusing Euracare Multi-Specialist Hospital of
negligence, deception, and deliberate efforts to obstruct a coroner’s inquest into the death of her 21-month-old son, Nkanu, saying the hospital had stolen from her even the peace to grieve.
Nkanu Nnamdi Adichie-Esege died on January 7, having been taken to Euracare’s Victoria Island facility in Lagos the previous day for pre-flight diagnostic tests — including an MRI scan — as the family prepared to transfer him to Johns Hopkins Hospital in the United States for specialist care. He had first received treatment at Atlantis Pediatric Hospital for what had appeared to be a worsening but initially mild illness. During sedation at Euracare, administered by anaesthesiologist Dr. Titus Ogundare, the child suffered respiratory and cardiac arrest and a hypoxic brain injury. He never regained consciousness.
In the letter, dated April 16 and addressed to the chairman of Euracare’s board of directors, Adichie said the hospital’s own medical director visited the family at their Ikoyi home the morning after Nkanu’s death and told her that Ogundare had given the child too much propofol. That admission, she wrote, was never reflected in the hospital’s official account of what happened. Instead, she alleged, Euracare later listed meningitis as the cause of death on official documents — a characterisation she described as both false and without medical basis.
The author said she decided to release the letter, which she had originally kept private, because silence had become a form of complicity. “I have decided to make this letter public because to keep silent about Euracare’s evil is to enable it,” she wrote, adding that she woke each morning with her heart racing, undone by the loss of what she called her diokpala — her firstborn — and by the institution’s conduct since.
What has compounded the family’s anguish, Adichie wrote, is the hospital’s legal campaign to stop the very inquest it had initially said it supported. A Lagos State High Court granted Euracare leave on May 26 to challenge the jurisdiction of the Coroner’s Court, staying inquest proceedings and pushing the next hearing to October. The Lagos State Attorney-General and the Chief Coroner have since filed a preliminary objection, calling the hospital’s application incompetent, premature, and an abuse of court process.
Earlier, a medical panel had suspended Ogundare from practice, along with the chief medical officer of Atlantis Pediatric Hospital, Dr. Atinuke Uwajeh, pending tribunal proceedings after a prima facie case of negligence was established against both. Euracare, which has not publicly responded to the latest letter, previously said it was launching an internal investigation and denied that reports about the incident were accurate.
