EVERY few weeks, a family somewhere in Nigeria receives the kind of news that no amount of prayer or preparation ever makes easier to hear. Their child, their sibling, their cousin who had travelled abroad full of ambition and promise, has died. The death that wasn’t from a car accident or a violent crime, but from exhaustion, from a body that was pushed beyond the limits of what human flesh can bear, from long hours on their feet in care homes, warehouses, hospitals and restaurants, with barely a moment to eat, sleep or remember that they too are human beings with a heartbeat worth protecting.
The bodies are flown back home in caskets draped with the quiet tragedy of a life that ended far too soon, and the communities that once threw send-forth parties for these young people are now gathering for funerals instead. This is not a rare story anymore. It is becoming a pattern, and Nigeria needs to look it in the face.
To understand why this is happening, one must first understand the kind of pressure that a young Nigerian carries on their shoulders the moment they land in a foreign country. The journey itself is usually not cheap. Most of them arrived through scholarships, work visas, student visas, or through arrangements that cost their families significant amounts of money. Some families sold land, borrowed from cooperative societies, or depleted lifelong savings to fund the trip.
By the time the young person arrives in the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, Ireland, or wherever the destination happens to be, there is already a debt in the air, a silent but heavy obligation to make the sacrifice worth it. Nobody says it out loud every day, but the young person feels it in every phone call from home, in every conversation where their mother casually mentions that the roof needs fixing, that a younger sibling needs school fees, or that a relative is sick and needs money for treatment.
Nigeria’s economic situation has made this pressure even sharper in recent years. The naira has lost enormous value against major foreign currencies, which means that even a modest wage earned abroad translates into a substantial sum when converted back home.
A young Nigerian earning the minimum wage in the United Kingdom is, in naira terms, earning what would be considered a very comfortable salary back home. This reality is not lost on the worker or on the family that depends on them. The temptation to work more hours, take more shifts, and send more money home is not irrational but deeply logical. The problem is that this logic is slowly becoming lethal.
The care sector in countries like the United Kingdom has been one of the most common places where Nigerian migrants find employment. The demand for care workers grew substantially after Brexit reduced the number of European workers willing to fill those roles, and Nigeria became one of the top sources of recruitment.
Thousands of young Nigerians entered the country on health and care worker visas, often recruited by agencies who painted the opportunity in the most appealing terms. What they found on arrival was often different from what they expected. The pay was decent but the conditions were grueling. Care work, by its very nature, involves long hours, physical demands, emotional strain, and a chronic shortage of staff that leaves existing workers stretched thin across multiple responsibilities.
When a care home is understaffed, which is a regular occurrence across the sector, the workers who are present are expected to cover the gap. This means that a shift that was supposed to last eight hours sometimes stretches to twelve, fourteen, or even sixteen hours. A worker who agreed to do three shifts a week sometimes ends up doing five or six because the agency calls and the worker, desperate to save money, says yes.
There are Nigerian workers who have spoken openly about doing double shifts back to back, sleeping briefly in their cars before returning to the floor, surviving on energy drinks and the sheer willpower that comes from knowing that people back home are counting on them. This is not sustainable. The human body has limits, and when those limits are ignored repeatedly over months and years, the consequences can be catastrophic.
The deaths that have come to public attention have followed a disturbing pattern. A young person, usually between the ages of twenty-five and forty, collapses at work or at home after a long shift. A cardiac event, a stroke, organ failure, sometimes simply a body shutting down from accumulated fatigue. In many of these cases, the deceased had not taken a proper holiday in months.
They had been working consecutive shifts, sending money home regularly, and postponing rest with the promise that they would slow down soon, after one more month, after the next set of bills was paid, after they had saved enough for a particular goal. The slowing down never came, and neither did the chance to enjoy the life they were working so hard to build.
One of the uncomfortable truths about this crisis is that it is partly sustained by silence and pride. Nigerian culture, for all its warmth and vibrancy, carries within it a certain expectation that those abroad are doing well. The WhatsApp photos show smiling faces in nice coats outside famous landmarks.
The conversations with family are carefully edited to remove the exhaustion and the loneliness. Nobody wants to be the person who went abroad and came back with nothing to show for it, so they keep working, keep sending money, and keep pretending that everything is fine. Meanwhile, the physical and mental toll accumulates quietly in the background, invisible to the family at home and sometimes even unacknowledged by the worker themselves.
There is also the matter of how some Nigerian workers are managed by their employers and agencies. Not every employer is exploitative, and it would be unfair to paint the entire care or service industry with a single brush. However, there are documented cases of Nigerian workers being encouraged, or in some situations subtly pressured, to take more shifts than is advisable. It is a fact that many of these workers are on visas that tie them to specific employers.
This makes them feel unable to refuse extra shifts out of fear of jeopardizing their immigration status. This power imbalance creates a situation where saying no becomes genuinely difficult, not just financially but legally. The worker is caught between the needs of their employer, the demands of their family back home, and the precariousness of their immigration situation, and in that squeeze, their health becomes the casualty.
Nigeria’s foreign missions in the countries where these deaths are occurring must be far more active in educating workers about their labor rights, about the legal limits on working hours, about the importance of reporting unsafe working conditions, and about the resources available to them when they are being treated unfairly. A Nigerian worker in the United Kingdom, for instance, has legal protections under employment law, but those protections are meaningless if the worker does not know they exist or fears that asserting them will cost them their visa.
Beyond the government, there is a role for Nigerian communities abroad to play. Diaspora associations, churches, and social groups have enormous reach and influence within these communities. These platforms are often used for celebrations, fundraising, and cultural events, but they could equally be used to have frank conversations about overwork, health, and the importance of rest.
A pastor who is willing to preach about hard work and prosperity must be equally willing to preach about the biblical command to rest, about the body as a temple that requires care, about the sin not just of laziness but of self-destruction through excessive labor. Community leaders who are respected voices in their circles have the power to normalize the idea that slowing down is not failure, that taking a day off is not a betrayal of the family back home, and that no amount of money sent home is worth the price of one’s life.
- West is a seasoned journalist and development practitioner with over a decade of experience in media, human rights advocacy, and NGO leadership. Her syndicated column, The Wednesday Lens, is published every Wednesday in News Point Nigeria newspaper. She can be reached at bomawest111@gmail.com.