Five months have passed since Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and her husband, Dr. Ivara Esege, lost their 21-month-old son, Nkanu Nnamdi, on January 7, 2026. Months of grief that, by Adichie’s own account, has been made heavier by the conduct of Euracare Multi-Specialist Hospital in Lagos, where Nkanu died.

On Sunday, June 14, 2026, Adichie broke her public silence. She shared, for the first time, a letter she had written in April to the Chairman of Euracare’s Board of Directors. Adichie in twenty numbered points gave a detailed account of what she says transpired at the hospital, and a damning indictment of the institution’s response to his death. She introduced the letter with words that carry the full weight of a mother’s sleepless nights: “I wake up every single morning with my heart racing. Did this really happen? My precious son, Nkanu Nnamdi. My KanKan, my diokpala.”

The letter opens with a warm reminiscence of Nkanu, the older of the couple’s twin boys, named after his grandfather, the celebrated obstetrician-gynecologist Dr. Nkanu Esege. A boy with unusual emotional intelligence for his age, who rubbed his mother’s knee when she complained of pain, gave his toys to his brother, and charmed everyone around him. A relative, watching him, once said he was “just a jolly good fellow.” In a devastating turn, Adichie writes “We have two highchairs in the dining room, two car seats in the car, two toddler beds in the bedroom. And now only one toddler.”

What follows in the letter is a detailed chronological account of what Adichie says happened at Euracare. The letter enumerates what Adichie describes as a pattern of institutional evasion that followed her son’s death: an initial admission of error by the Medical Director who later, under apparent pressure from hospital management, reversed course; promises of situation reports and medical records that were delayed, incomplete, or withheld; and Euracare’s lawyers who referred to the death of a toddler as a “dispute,” a word she describes as “baffling in its heartlessness.” She also writes that Euracare listed the cause of death on Nkanu’s death certificate as bacterial and fungal meningitis, a claim she calls inaccurate and one she is demanding be corrected. A coroner’s inquest, which was scheduled to begin on April 14, has been further complicated by what Adichie describes as deliberate delay tactics by Euracare’s legal team. Most recently, she says, the hospital has moved to ask a High Court to stop the inquest entirely. “If Euracare cares about the truth,” she writes, “then why create delays and distractions and now, finally, try to stop an inquest?” She closes the letter with a sentence that carries the full weight of five months of grief compounded by institutional stonewalling: “The lack of moral courage exhibited by Euracare is shameful.”

Adichie says she chose to make the letter public because “to keep silent about Euracare’s evil is to enable it,” and she has redacted two names for the protection of individuals while leaving others for what she describes as “clarity and credibility.” She notes that since the letter was sent in April, the hospital’s conduct has, in her assessment, only worsened. Brittle Paper notes that these are Adichie’s allegations as stated in her letter. Euracare has not publicly responded to the specific claims made in this document.

As we reported in January, Adichie and Dr. Esege had already served Euracare with a formal legal notice alleging medical negligence, and Lagos State Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu had ordered a probe into the matter. The coroner’s inquest process, which was meant to be the mechanism for establishing the truth about what happened to Nkanu Nnamdi, remains unresolved, its path obstructed, the family says, at every turn.

She ends her caption with a plea: “Please continue to pray for us. This weight is too heavy.” We do not have the words to meet a grief this size. We hold Chimamanda, her husband Dr. Ivara Esege, their daughter, and their surviving twin in our thoughts, and we pray that they find, in time, the peace and the justice that Nkanu deserves.