Nigeria has once again stolen a life too soon. Somtochukwu “Sommie” Maduagwu, just 29 years old, was a young woman full of light, talent, and promise. A broadcaster, news anchor, lawyer, and producer, she had become a trusted face on television screens.
Her career still unfolding, her future very bright, yet in the early hours of Monday, September 29, her life was violently cut short.
The details are as heartbreaking as they are familiar. Armed robbers, reportedly 15 in number, stormed her apartment in Katampe, Abuja. Neighbours, terrified but desperate, called the police, but no one came.
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When Sommie and another victim were finally rushed to Maitama Hospital, after she jumped from the 3rd floor of her building, their lives might still have been saved. However, according to reported accounts, they were denied urgent treatment until they produced their identification cards.
"She jumped from her home when she heard that 14 armed robbers had come to her house. She didn’t die on the spot, she went to the hospital, and she was rejected."
-Arise News' Ojy details the circumstances of the death of Arise News anchor, Somtochukwu Christelle Maduagwu. pic.twitter.com/docUaDHBUd— Imran Muhammad (@Imranmuhdz) September 30, 2025
What makes Sommie’s story unbearably cruel is that it seemed like she foresaw it. Just weeks earlier, precisely in August, she had shared a prayer online: “May Nigeria never happen to me or my loved ones,” she wrote on her X account. Unfortunately, Nigeria happened to her. The country she prayed against became her undoing.
What I feared has come upon me; what I dreaded has happened to me — Job 3:25
These scriptural words could have been written for Sommie because she tweeted that prayer weeks before her death. Yet the very thing she feared came upon her. Sommie could have had a better life, according to a “friend” on X who revealed that she had the opportunity to stay in England but she wanted to make a difference in Nigeria.
Sommie was not the only life lost that night. According to a neighbour, the security guard who bravely tried to resist the robbers also paid with his life.
Sommie’s death is not an isolated tragedy; it is part of a devastating pattern. Time and again, Nigeria has swallowed its brightest…a country where insecurity, weak institutions, and systemic neglect conspire to cut short the lives of its youth.
A Pattern of National Decay
In 2020, Oke Obi-Enadhuze, a 21-year-old product designer and software engineer, had built tools to save lives. He created an app that connected blood donors, an innovation meant to help others in crisis. On the day the #EndSARS protests raged, he tweeted: “Nigeria will not end me.” Hours later, in his family’s home in Mafoluku, Lagos, a stray bullet tore into his neck. The same country he was trying to improve ended him.
Or is it Dr. Chinelo Nwando Megafu, a 27-year-old dental surgeon, who died in March 2022, after she boarded the Abuja–Kaduna train. She had visited Abuja to finalise her exit from Nigeria, and on her way back, terrorists struck! Her final words were sent out on Twitter: “I’m in the train. I have been shot, please pray for me.”
She was weeks away from leaving Nigeria for a new life abroad. She was on a route considered safer than the highways until terrorists stormed the train, spraying bullets and abducting passengers.
There was also Dr. Vwaere Diaso, who died in August 2023 after she entered an elevator at the General Hospital in Odan, Lagos Island. She was only going down to collect a food delivery. The elevator failed, plunging from the 10th floor. Help, as usual, came too late. Engineers arrived 40 minutes after the crash.
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She was extracted an hour later, and resuscitation commenced immediately. ‘I don’t want to die, ’ those were her last words, according to her colleague, but she did die. Moye, who also works at the hospital, said she was standing in front of the elevator and pressed the open button, but didn’t enter because she was on a video call. She described the gory scene…
Her forehead had a horizontal cut, her mouth had another one and she had raccoon eyes. She was lying in between the base of the elevator and the ground floor, with the engine hanging over her head, which meant any miscalculation in movement, she’ll be crushed to instant death. She was literally sandwiched in between the hanging engine and below the ground floor with blood on broken glasses and fractured limbs. It’s not a sight to describe.
To date, the elevator at the General Hospital in Odan has not been fixed.
And then Greatness Olorunfemi, a young leader and member of the Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI) Network, who fell victim to “one-chance” robbers in September 2023. She was violently thrown out of a moving vehicle along the Maitama–Kubwa Expressway and left for dead. Her injuries were devastating, and despite being rushed for help, she did not survive.
Her death became yet another haunting reminder of how unchecked criminality and systemic neglect continue to cut short promising Nigerian lives.
Will Nigeria Happen to Me Too?
These names — Sommie, Oke, Chinelo, Vwaere, Greatness — reflect a generation of young Nigerians whose lives are being cut short by the failures of the system. Others have died, unknown and maybe forgotten. They are lives, families, futures, proof that Nigeria is at war with its own youth, not through formal battles but through relentless decay like insecurity, police negligence, collapsed healthcare, and infrastructure that kills instead of saves.
Each of them had done everything right. Sommie worked hard to build a career in journalism. Oke was using technology to solve real problems. Chinelo was preparing to leave for a better life, taking her skills abroad. Vwaere was saving lives as a young doctor, and Greatness was planning to go to the US to pursue her PhD in Microbiology.
Yet, each was betrayed by a country that asked so much of them but gave back nothing when it mattered most. Every young Nigerian sees themselves in these stories and wonders, will Nigeria happen to me too? God forbid!
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