Our Death Certificate Problem

We grew up hearing these stories. Scandalous tales about how a new family or children emerge after a man dies suddenly. Bastard children? Ah! That one plenty! A hidden wife and kids in another state? Common drama, especially back in the day when phones and the internet didn’t exist. So, when I heard this young man’s story, I wasn’t entirely surprised. What I found incredulous, though, was the issue of the death certificate. Let me start from the beginning. A young man walked into a hospital recently looking for something that most people would expect to have been collected, filed and forgotten years ago: his father’s death certificate. His father had supposedly died about five years earlier in a road traffic accident somewhere in Rivers State, and, according to the story the family had been told, he was among several people who died in the accident and were buried together. There had been no complicated estate to administer, no property worth fighting over and, as far as the family knew, no property substantial enough to make anyone particularly interested in paperwork. The man was from a village in Katsina and travelled to the south, where he sold meat in a local market in a town his son couldn’t pronounce. The family had mourned and carried on with life, which is what families are expected to do when death comes knocking. Five years later, however, someone arrived with the sort of news that can destabilise an entire family WhatsApp group: their father was allegedly alive and living in a rural village in Ghana. The person swore his friend’s brother had spotted him in Tamale. At first, everyone assumed it was one of those cruel rumours that occasionally circulated after someone dies, especially when the deceased had been a private person, travelled frequently or had relationships that his family knew little about. Then came the more interesting part: apparently, the man had another family in Ghana. Suddenly, the father who had been safely buried five years earlier had acquired a new geography, a new family and, potentially, a new life. The family wanted proof. When the man died, someone had called the family and informed them of his death. That ‘someone’ had even sent a death certificate to them via a motor park. When this rumour started, the dead man’s son had dug out his father’s death certificate and travelled to Port Harcourt to locate the hospital that had confirmed his father’s death. There wasn’t such a hospital. The document they were shown as evidence of the man’s death turned out to be fake. That was when the family began looking for the real death certificate. There is something almost comical about the situation until one remembers what’s actually at stake. A death certificate is supposed to be the bureaucratic equivalent of a final full stop. It tells the state, the family and anyone else with a legitimate interest that this particular human being existed, lived and died. Yet in Nigeria, that seemingly simple piece of paper can sometimes be surprisingly difficult to produce, verify or even locate. We tend to think of death certificates as documents needed only when there is money involved. If someone dies with a house, bank account, pension, insurance policy or other assets, suddenly everyone remembers the importance of documentation. Lawyers, banks, pension administrators become interested. Family members who had not spoken to the deceased in years suddenly develop an impressive knowledge of his assets. But if a poor man dies without property, insurance or formal employment, there may be little immediate incentive for his family to register the death at all. This is one of the reasons Nigeria’s death-registration system remains so weak. A systematic review of death registration in Nigeria found that only about 13.5 per cent of deaths were registered in 2007, falling to approximately 10 per cent in 2017. The National Population Commission itself currently reports death registration at about 10 per cent. So, while we are trying to understand why, where many Nigerians are dying, and what they are dying from, approximately nine out of every ten deaths may never make it properly into the national death-registration system. You see wahala? This isn’t merely a bureaucratic inconvenience. Death certificates have legal, administrative and public-health consequences. They provide evidence that a person has died and can be crucial for inheritance, insurance claims, pensions and other legal processes. More importantly, properly certified deaths contribute to the statistics that tell a country what is killing its people. The reasons why Nigerians don’t bother with the death register is a story for another day. For deaths resulting from accidents, violence or other suspicious circumstances, this becomes particularly important. A body found after an accident isn’t merely another administrative statistic. Identification, the circumstances of death, and cause of death matter. The

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