Blood Pressure & Broken Systems: Nigeria’s New Public-Health Frontier
By STELLA JOHNSON OGBOVOVEH
NIGERIA is confronting a hypertension crisis so expansive that it has now become one of the clearest fault lines in the country’s health-security and economic-development frameworks. Researcher Aminat Dosunmu, a cardiovascular disease specialist, warned that high blood pressure has grown into one of Nigeria’s deadliest epidemics, not only because of its prevalence but because of the structural weaknesses surrounding detection, treatment and public awareness. Her report indicates that 27 million to 39 million adults are hypertensive, with regional prevalence spanning 22 to 44 per cent—figures that place Nigeria among Africa’s most-burdened countries in cardiovascular risk.
Her analysis spotlighted the awareness paradox: only 29 per cent of hypertensive Nigerians know their status, while control rates fall as low as 12 per cent in some demographics. The report underscored that the knowledge gap is so severe that more Nigerians are familiar with digital finance access codes than their own blood-pressure numbers, a metaphor for how the condition has thrived undisturbed in the blind spot between public education, preventive medicine and primary healthcare. Because hypertension rarely presents symptoms until organ damage is advanced, most diagnoses occur only after stroke events, kidney injury or cardiac emergencies, by which point the condition has already shifted from preventable to catastrophic.
Dosunmu tied the crisis to both lifestyle triggers and Nigeria’s broader socioeconomic strain ecosystem, citing salt-heavy diets, low physical activity, rising alcohol use, smoking, stress hormones induced by economic pressures, chronic sleep loss, noise pollution and urban congestion. The report went further to frame hypertension as a national productivity drain, estimating that millions of Nigerians are living with medically unmanaged BP while remaining active in the workforce—unknowingly operating at elevated risk of stroke, heart failure or sudden death. This places the crisis not just in hospitals but in offices, schools, marketplaces, motor parks and trading clusters where long working hours, irregular meals and psychosocial stress remain unregulated health determinants.
Her policy prescription prioritised national coordination: free or subsidised BP checks, hypertension medication support through public-private partnerships, expansion of preventive cardiology units at community level, integration of BP surveillance into existing national health data grids, and the creation of a dedicated National Blood Pressure Surveillance System to monitor trends and guide interventions. Her verdict was unambiguous: hypertension has exposed the cost of building systems for treatment without building systems for prevention, and 2026 must be the year Nigeria closes that gap.
