A poem by Dr. Ebere Okereke – Inspired by Kwesi Brew’s “The Sea Eats Our Land”
Dr Ebere Okereke wrote this poem in the wake of several deaths close to her, each painful and, in important ways, avoidable. They did not arise from one isolated failure. They reflected a chain of neglect, weak infrastructure, delayed care, unaffordable treatment, poor health education, and the normalisation of preventable loss.
The poem draws on Kwesi Brew’s “The Sea Eats Our Land,” a poem she first read in her early teens and has stayed with her since. She borrows that sense of a steady, consuming force and redirects it toward the political, social, and institutional failures that erode people’s chances of survival in Nigeria. Too often, these deaths are explained away as ‘God’s will’, or attributed to ‘village people’, yet many are the result of neglect that has become routine.
This is a poem of grief, but also of indictment. It asks what it means to live in a country where people die from disease or injury compounded by their circumstances: bad roads, power cuts, absent emergency response, weak primary care, unaffordable medicines, and the quiet resignation that follows. She hopes it unsettles that resignation.
They say death came.
No.
It was sent for.
It came through insulin
priced out of reach,
doses missed and delayed,
through blood sugar rising quietly
like flood water in the night,
through words never spoken
about wounds and danger signs,
through sores and numb feet
left untreated,
left to darken and decay.
It came through the stairs
badly built,
uneven,
unlit in a power cut.
It came through a fall,
through a head struck hard,
through a body laid on a bed
and left unwatched
because no one knew better,
because no one had been taught
what danger looks like.
It came on potholed roads,
on roads unmaintained,
drivers unchecked,
cars unserviced,
where metal screamed
and bodies broke
and no one came.
No siren.
No stretcher.
No trained hands
to pull breath back into the chest.
It came after childbirth,
after the child’s first cry,
when the mother kept bleeding
and the help she needed
was not there in time.
And the room went on
with the tired knowledge
of people who have seen this before,
with not enough blood,
not enough skill,
not enough speed.
They say these were misfortunes.
No.
They were arranged.
By roads left in disrepair.
By clinics without medicines.
By hospitals without power.
By wards without oxygen.
By ambulances that never arrive.
By training without support.
By public systems without urgency.
By leaders without shame.
This is larger than one hospital,
larger than one ministry,
larger than one failed ward
or one absent doctor.
It is the road.
It is the light.
It is the blood bank.
It is the drug shelf.
It is the phone call unanswered.
It is the delay excused.
It is the warning not given.
It is the life priced cheaply
again and again.
It is the life priced cheaply
again and again.
The system knows how to wait.
It waits on the roadside,
in the rural clinic,
in the city hospital
in the maternity ward at dawn,
in the long line at the pharmacy,
in the silence after,
when a family is told
‘it is God’s will’
or ‘it is well’
And every day
it eats our people.
It eats quietly.
It eats publicly.
It eats without trial.
It eats without consequence.
And we bury the dead
and call it fate,
call it God,
call it Naija,
call it one of those things.
But I have seen the teeth.
I have seen them
in delay,
in shortage,
in darkness,
in indifference,
in systems built thin
and left to fail.
I have seen them
and I will not name this natural.
This is how a country kills
without touching.
This is how a system destroys
without a knife.
And still
it eats our people.
And still
it eats our people.
And still
it eats our people.
Dr Ebere Okereke is a global health physician, specialising in health system strengthening and leadership.