WHEN LEADERS NEED TO FEEL THE PAIN FIRST On Governor Umo Eno's Incubator Order and Nigeria's Culture of Selective Governance

There is a photograph circulating on social media. It shows Governor Umo Eno of Akwa Ibom State, smiling broadly, beside a quote that reads: "I lost a grandchild because there was no incubator in the hospital. Starting today, I'm ordering all the hospitals in Akwa Ibom to have one."

The caption underneath reads: "Compassion in Action. Progress in Motion."

The people of Akwa Ibom should not be moved by this. They should be angry.

Not because incubators in hospitals is a bad idea, it is an excellent idea. Not because the Governor does not deserve credit for acting ,action is better than silence. But because the question no one in that press office thought to ask is the most important question of all:

Why did it take his grandchild?

The Data Was Always There

Neonatal mortality in Nigeria is not a secret. The statistics have been published, debated, and mourned for decades. According to UNICEF and the World Health Organisation, Nigeria consistently ranks among the countries with the highest rates of newborn deaths in the world,tens of thousands of infants lost every year to conditions that are preventable with basic equipment.

The mothers of Akwa Ibom have been losing babies in those hospitals long before the Governor lost his grandchild. Their cries were data. Their empty cribs were policy failures. Their grief was a governance emergency waiting for a response that never came, until it became personal.

This is not compassion in action. This is empathy delayed by privilege.

The Pattern Is Bigger Than One Governor

What happened in Akwa Ibom is not an isolated incident of slow governance. It is the defining pattern of leadership in Nigeria: rulers who have insulated themselves so completely from the consequences of bad governance that only personal catastrophe can break through.

They send their children to private schools, so public education rots unchallenged. They travel abroad for medical care, so public hospitals remain underfunded and under-equipped. They move in armed convoys, so the roads that kill ordinary Nigerians daily are nobody's urgent problem.

The system works perfectly, for them. It is only a crisis when it crosses their gate.

The Children of Oyo

As I write this, families in Oyo State are waiting. Children who should have spent Children's Day laughing and playing were instead spending it in the hands of kidnappers. A teacher was beheaded. The rest of the abducted have not come home.

The response from the state and federal machinery has been, by every observable measure, insufficient.

Ask yourself honestly: if those were the children of a Governor, a Senator, or a President, how many hours would it take before the full weight of Nigeria's security apparatus was deployed? How many phone calls would be made? How many emergency sessions would be convened?

The answer is: very few hours. Because when power is personally threatened, power moves.

The children of Oyo are not the children of power. And so they wait.

The Real Indictment

We often celebrate Nigerian leaders when they finally do the right thing. And there is a temptation, especially when the right thing is genuinely good, like incubators for hospitals, to set aside the question of why it took so long.

We must resist that temptation.

Because the celebration of late action is what teaches the next generation of leaders that late action is acceptable. That governance can wait until it is personal. That the suffering of ordinary citizens is background noise until it becomes headline grief.

Governor Umo Eno's order should be implemented fully, immediately, and without political fanfare. The children of Akwa Ibom deserve those incubators. But the people of Akwa Ibom also deserve leaders who do not need to bury their grandchildren before they read the mortality statistics.

What We Must Demand

The standard we must hold is simple: govern for the people you will never meet. Govern for the child in the rural clinic whose name you do not know. Govern for the family on the Oyo highway who does not have your phone number. Govern as if their lives matter as much as your grandchildren's, because they do.

Until Nigerian leaders are held to that standard ,at the ballot box, in public discourse, and through relentless civic accountability, we will keep producing flyers that celebrate the obvious as if it were extraordinary.

An incubator in every hospital is not a political achievement.

It is the bare minimum.

It should have been done before the first child died.