Rekpene Bassey
Nigeria is confronting an old law with a new question: when a citizen survives an attempt to end his or her life, should the state respond with handcuffs or with help?
The Federal Government’s move to decriminalise attempted suicide is therefore more than a technical amendment. It is a test of whether public policy can finally recognise suicidal behaviour principally as a health and social crisis rather than a crime.
That shift moved closer to reality on August 19, 2026, when the Federal Executive Council, presided over by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, approved a proposed amendment to Nigeria’s mental-health legislation.
Coordinating Minister of Health and Social Welfare, Prof. Muhammad Ali Pate, said the measure would be transmitted to the National Assembly as an executive bill intended to replace prosecution with treatment, psychological support, rehabilitation and care.
The distinction is important: Nigeria has not yet decriminalised attempted suicide. The Federal Executive Council has approved the government’s legislative position, but the National Assembly must enact the necessary amendments before existing criminal provisions cease to have effect. Until then, the gulf between compassionate policy and punitive law remains legally significant.
Section 327 of the Criminal Code, applicable across much of southern Nigeria, makes attempted suicide a misdemeanour punishable by up to one year in prison. Section 231 of the Penal Code similarly provides for imprisonment, a fine or both.
These provisions belong to an older legal philosophy that approached self-harm through the lens of public order rather than psychological distress.
That philosophy increasingly conflicts with Nigeria’s National Mental Health Act 2021, which established a rights-based framework for protecting people experiencing mental-health conditions, improving treatment and guarding against discrimination. But the same legal system has continued to expose a person who survives a suicide attempt to possible arrest and prosecution.
The contradiction is more than untidy legislation; it can obstruct prevention. Families fearing police involvement may conceal suicide attempts. Survivors expecting shame, interrogation or prosecution may avoid hospitals.
Health workers, meanwhile, can find themselves caught between their ethical responsibility to treat a distressed patient and a legal framework that still regards that patient as an offender.
The World Health Organization has urged governments to abandon criminalisation, warning that it can deepen stigma, discourage help-seeking and undermine accurate reporting.
Decriminalisation, however, should not stand alone. Experiences from countries such as Guyana, Pakistan and Singapore demonstrate the importance of accompanying repeal with public education, trained first responders, community mental-health services and clear crisis-response protocols.
The scale of Nigeria’s problem gives the reform urgency. According to figures cited by Pate, WHO estimates indicate that more than 7,000 Nigerians die by suicide annually, while approximately 300,000 attempts occur each year and more than 450,000 people require psychosocial support. These remain estimates rather than a comprehensive national count because suicide is seriously under-reported.
Indeed, criminalisation and stigma may themselves contribute to weak data. Families may describe suicide deaths as accidents, while survivors may avoid formal health facilities. Nigeria is consequently trying to contain a crisis whose true dimensions it cannot confidently measure.
Recent research suggests the hidden burden may be considerable. A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis of 52 Nigerian studies conducted between 2007 and 2025 estimated pooled suicidal ideation in community populations at about 8 per cent, suicidal planning at 1.9 per cent and attempts at 1.3 per cent, although researchers cautioned that methodologies and regional representation varied.
More disturbing are the indicators among young Nigerians. The analysis estimated suicidal ideation at 11.2 per cent among secondary-school students and 17 per cent among tertiary students, while suicide attempts among secondary-school students were estimated at 6.3 per cent.
They are not census figures, but they are serious warning signals for a country whose future rests heavily on its youthful population.
The evidence also points beyond the psychiatrist’s consulting room. Conflict exposure, unemployment, educational disadvantage and geography matter.
Insurgency, banditry, displacement, bereavement, disrupted schooling and destroyed livelihoods leave psychological wounds that conventional casualty statistics rarely capture.
Economic hardship, food insecurity, indebtedness and family strain may further intensify vulnerability, even though poverty alone cannot explain suicidal behaviour.
Suicide therefore sits at the intersection of mental illness, trauma, chronic disease, substance use, unemployment, family breakdown, violence, isolation and economic despair. No single factor explains every case, and no credible prevention strategy can consequently be confined to hospitals.
Nigeria at least possesses a policy compass. The National Suicide Prevention Strategic Framework 2023–2030 seeks to reduce suicide mortality by 15 per cent by 2030 through stronger governance, legal reform, resource mobilisation, surveillance, research, public awareness and improved access to integrated mental-health services.
The target is commendable, but it requires scrutiny. The Sustainable Development Goals and WHO’s Comprehensive Mental Health Action Plan envisage a one-third reduction in suicide mortality globally by 2030.
Nigeria’s more modest target may reflect weak baseline data and institutional limitations, but measurable annual indicators are essential if progress is to be independently assessed.
Decriminalisation, therefore, must be understood as the beginning of reform, not its culmination. Removing a prison sentence does not place psychiatrists in rural hospitals, finance counselling, create crisis-response teams, train primary-health-care personnel or guarantee confidential support to a distressed student before despair becomes catastrophe.
Nigeria’s mental-health workforce remains dangerously thin, with specialists concentrated largely in major urban centres. This makes integration into primary health care indispensable.
Doctors, nurses, community-health workers, counsellors and social workers must be equipped to recognise depression, trauma, substance-use disorders and suicidal risk, provide first-line intervention and refer severe cases appropriately.
Financing is equally important. Most Nigerians still pay for mental-health services out of pocket. For families struggling with food, rent, transportation, school fees and medical bills, campaigns urging people simply to “seek help” mean little if professional care remains inaccessible or unaffordable.
Substance abuse further complicates the picture. Nigeria’s 2018 national drug-use survey estimated that 14.3 million people aged 15 to 64—14.4 per cent of that population—had used drugs during the preceding year.
Cannabis was the most widely used substance, followed by pharmaceutical opioids and other drugs. Eight years later, the country urgently needs a new prevalence survey rather than continued dependence on an ageing baseline.
The treatment gap revealed by that survey was especially troubling. Nearly 40 per cent of high-risk drug users reported an urgent need for treatment and about 80 per cent expressed some need, yet only 12 per cent had ever accessed treatment and just 4 per cent had received it during the preceding year.
Cost, stigma, limited services, lack of information and fear of registration were among the barriers.
Drug use does not automatically lead to suicide, just as depression does not inevitably result in an attempt. But substance-use disorders can coexist with trauma, depression, impulsivity and social isolation.
A suicide-prevention architecture that excludes substance-use prevention, treatment and rehabilitation is therefore structurally incomplete.
This requires a genuinely integrated governmental response. Health, Justice, Education, Youth, Humanitarian Affairs and Interior; the police, correctional services, NDLEA, state governments, schools, universities, traditional and religious institutions, professional bodies and civil society cannot continue to function as separate islands.
A person in crisis does not experience government in ministries; he or she experiences a chain of response, and that chain either works or fails.
Once the law changes, police and hospital practice must change with it. A survivor of a suicide attempt should be protected from immediate harm and referred for urgent medical and psychosocial assessment, not processed through a police cell.
Hospitals likewise require standard procedures for risk assessment, safety planning, treatment, referral and follow-up rather than merely treating physical injuries and returning patients to the circumstances that produced their crisis.
Nigeria must also build a credible suicide-surveillance system. Suicide deaths and serious self-harm presentations should generate anonymised public-health data on age, sex, location, occupation, circumstances and trends.
Without reliable surveillance, government cannot identify hotspots, target resources intelligently or establish whether its promised reduction in suicide mortality has actually occurred.
Prevention must equally move upstream. Schools and universities need counselling and referral pathways; primary-health-care centres need trained personnel; communities need trusted gatekeepers who can recognise warning signs; families need mental-health literacy that substitutes early intervention for shame.
Responsible media reporting and evidence-based restrictions on access to common lethal means are also important. Effective prevention is rarely one dramatic intervention; it is a succession of barriers placed between a moment of despair and an irreversible act.
Ultimately, compassion announced at a Federal Executive Council briefing must become compassion at the police station, emergency ward, school clinic and primary-health centre.
The National Assembly must enact a legally coherent reform that neutralises the punitive provisions of the Criminal and Penal Codes, while federal and state authorities provide the resources, personnel and services necessary to make decriminalisation meaningful.
The true measure of reform will not merely be that Nigeria stopped punishing people for surviving suicide attempts, but that it built a system capable of reaching them earlier, treating them humanely and helping many more of them survive.
Bassey is the President of the African Council on Narcotics and a Security Specialist
