Sometimes I sit quietly and ask myself, how did we get here?
How did a continent so rich in life, soil, sun, food, and wisdom become the place where people die the youngest?
In the latest UN report for 2025, Nigeria is listed with a life expectancy of just 55 years. Chad is the same.
Most of the countries where people die the youngest are in Africa. But I want to say clearly, this is not our destiny.
It is a crisis of forgetting.
We forgot the things that made us live long before hospitals and supplements.
Here are some of the reasons, coming from my research and real-life experience, why many Africans are dying early, and what we must do about it.
- We sell out our minerals and buy back disease. I’ve seen it too many times, our local herbs, roots, and minerals are exported to Europe or Asia, then brought back to us as expensive capsules and syrups. We don’t use our soil to heal ourselves anymore. This is not just economics, it is biological dependency.
- We prefer the American Standard Dietary Plan, which create the American Standard of Disease when we do not have the American Standard of Healthcare. Here is how, our plates are now filled with refined flour, soft drinks, artificial meat, and snacks. But their health systems have insurance, ambulances, and emergency interventions. We don’t. So when we copy their lifestyle, we get their diseases, but we don’t get their solutions.
- In the past, we ate food in season. Our bodies followed the rhythm of nature. When it was mango season, we ate mango. When there were bitter greens, we used them to clean the blood. Now, we want everything year-round, even if it’s pumped with chemicals. We break our natural balance and expect our bodies to cope. Upee!
- I remember growing up in the village, everyone moved. My grandmother used to walk to the farm before dawn. My uncles would trek long distances without seeing it as exercise. Now, in the cities of Nigeria and South Africa, people sit all day, in traffic, in offices, in front of screens. This stillness is killing us slowly.
- We no longer cook with herbs. Before, scent leaf, bitter leaf, uziza, turmeric, and garlic were normal in the kitchen. Not just for taste, but for healing. Now, many people throw cubes and packaged seasoning into food, thinking they are modern. But those things weaken the liver, inflame the gut, and change the way our cells behave.
- Our food used to have meaning. Millet wasn’t just food, it cleaned the stomach. Palm oil wasn’t just red oil, it was a source of vitamin A. Now, we choose fast and fancy food over functional ones. The food looks nice and tasty but does nothing for our body. We easily forget that the palate is not the determinant of a healthy food.
- Too many people are self-medicating. From Nigeria to South Africa, I’ve met people who take antibiotics without tests, mix herbs with alcohol, and swallow drugs based on guesswork. This is how we enter drug resistance. It damages organs, confuses the immune system, and leads to silent death.
- We are still treating yesterday’s diseases with yesterday’s tools. Typhoid, malaria, and infections are no longer behaving the same. These germs mutate. They resist. But many of our clinics don’t have up-to-date testing or training. We are fighting a new war with old weapons, and we are losing.
- Our markets are full of silent killers. I say this with pain. Fish preserved with formalin. Expired drugs rebranded and sold. Palm oil mixed with dye. Even bottled water that is not filtered. Every day, someone is being poisoned, and they don’t even know what’s wrong with them until it’s too late. All these are done by US, our parents and relatives and we know those behind this!
- We have lost the moral fear of harming others. In the past, our ancestors believed that if you poisoned someone or sold fake medicine, you could be spiritually punished. Now, many people do it for profit. No fear, no conscience. But a society that loses its ethical immune system will lose its biological one too.
These things are not theory for me.
I have seen them in the villages of Abia, in the clinics of Lagos, and even here in Johannesburg.
I’ve seen old people with sharp minds and strong bones fade because of fake food and wrong drugs.
I’ve seen young people collapse from untreated infections that should have been simple to manage.
As the founder of Afrolongevity, and as someone studying biophilosophy, the science of life, meaning, and aging, I say this from my heart:
Africa is not supposed to die young. We are meant to live long, strong, and fulfilled lives. But we have to return to what worked for us. Not by rejecting modernity, but by remembering our biological truth.
We must rebuild our health systems, yes. But we must also rebuild our culture of food, ethics, and self-care. We must remember that longevity is not just about hospitals. It is about how we eat, how we move, how we treat each other, and how we remember who we are.
Self-care is not luxury. It is an art and act of love.
Africa doesn’t lack health. It lacks memory. And until we remember, we will keep dying young in the land where life began.
Let us change this.
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