Arogundade Warns, 25.4m Nigerians Face Kidney Disease

Professor Fatiu Arogundade warned on Thursday, 8 October 2026, that roughly 25.4 million adult Nigerians now live with overt or covert chronic kidney disease. The vice chancellor of the Federal University of Medicine and Medical Sciences in Abeokuta delivered this grim epidemiological appraisal during an academic lecture, noting that an unrecorded health disaster currently guts the nation’s prime working population. Silent renal damage kills without early warning.

Hypertension, unmanaged diabetes, and persistent chronic infections drive this massive rise in renal failure across every geopolitical zone of the country. Unlike their elderly Western peers, Nigerian kidney patients present at hospital wards between the active ages of twenty and fifty years old. Untreated high blood pressure destroys young lives.

Most families discover the fatal condition only after kidney tissue suffers permanent, irreversible structural damage. Routine primary clinics lack basic diagnostic strips and modern laboratory equipment to catch trace protein in urine before organs fail completely. Basic health centres offer little diagnostic care.

Private households must pay for life-saving dialysis sessions and complex organ transplants entirely out of their own empty pockets because state health insurance funds exclude advanced kidney replacement therapy. A patient needs three dialysis visits every single week at costs that exceed the entire monthly national minimum wage within a few days. Catastrophic medical bills bankrupt entire families.

Federal authorities must integrate preventative kidney screening into basic primary health programmes and subsidise renal replacement therapies to curb this national emergency. Ministers cannot watch a tenth of the adult population slide into fatal organ failure while public tertiary hospitals run out of functional dialysis consumables and trained nephrologists flee abroad. Official neglect carries a lethal human cost.