Nigeria Is About To Stop Prosecuting People For Surviving
Abuja · Friday 21 August 2026
On Wednesday the Federal Executive Council approved an amendment to the National Mental Health Act that would remove attempted suicide from Nigeria's criminal law. It will go to the National Assembly as an executive bill. If it passes, the country will stop treating a person who survives a suicide attempt as someone who has broken the law.
The current position is a colonial inheritance and looks like one. Under the Criminal Code, which applies in the southern states, attempting suicide carries up to a year in prison. Under the Penal Code, which applies in the north, the penalty is up to a year, a fine, or both. Nigeria did not write these provisions. It kept them, for sixty-six years after independence.
The scale, stated plainly
More than 7,000 Nigerians die by suicide each year. Around 300,000 attempts are recorded annually. Those two numbers together describe a population roughly the size of a large Nigerian town in which, every year, several hundred thousand people reach a point of crisis and most of them survive it.
Under the law as it currently stands, every one of those survivors has committed a criminal offence at the moment of their worst hour.
Bars are drawn to scale against each other. The gap is the point.
What criminalisation actually does
The defence of the old provisions, when anybody bothers to make it, is deterrence. It does not survive contact with how the law works in practice.
Prosecutions are rare. What is not rare is the shadow the offence casts over everything that happens after an attempt. A family that takes a relative to hospital is taking them to a place where a criminal act may have to be recorded. A hospital that treats the patient is handling a case with a potential police dimension. A person who survives, and who most needs to talk about what happened, has a legal reason not to.
The result is systematic under-reporting. Nigeria's 300,000 figure is a recorded number, and everyone who works in the field will tell you the real number is higher, because criminalisation is a machine for producing silence. You cannot build a mental health system on data that the law itself suppresses.
A law that is almost never enforced can still do enormous damage, if its main effect is to stop people asking for help.
The target, and why it is a real one
The Federal Government has attached a number to the reform: a 15 per cent reduction in suicide deaths and attempts by 2030. Targets in Nigerian policy documents are usually decorative. This one is measurable, it is on a short enough timescale that the current administration would still be answerable for it, and it depends on something other than the reform itself.
Decriminalisation on its own does not save anyone. What it does is remove the legal barrier to the things that do: crisis lines people are willing to call, hospital protocols that treat an attempt as a medical event, primary care staff trained to ask the question, and follow-up in the weeks after discharge, which is when risk is highest. None of that is cheap and none of it is in this bill.
| Element | Status after this bill |
|---|---|
| Criminal liability for an attempt | Removed, if the National Assembly passes it |
| Crisis line capacity | Unchanged, largely carried by NGOs |
| Hospital protocols | Unchanged, varies by facility |
| Follow-up care after discharge | Unchanged, largely absent |
| Trained mental health workforce | Unchanged, far below need |
Legal reform clears the road. It does not build what is meant to travel on it.
The route through the National Assembly
An executive bill has a better path than a private member's bill, but it is not automatic, and this is a subject that attracts objection from directions that do not usually align. Some of it will be religious. Some of it will be framed as a concern that removing the offence signals approval. That argument confuses a criminal sanction with a moral position, and it is worth naming early rather than being surprised by it in committee.
The counter is not complicated. Countries that removed the offence did not see rates rise. What they saw was reporting improve, which looks like an increase in the data and is not one. Nigeria should expect the same optical effect, and should decide now that it will not be read as failure when it happens.
The part that is genuinely hopeful
Nigeria has spent a long time treating mental health as something outside the health system, funded by charities and discussed in euphemism. The National Mental Health Act was the first serious attempt to change that. Amending it to remove a criminal provision is the sort of unglamorous legislative housekeeping that almost never makes a front page, and it is exactly the kind of change that alters what is possible afterwards.
For every family that has taken someone to a hospital and worried about who else would find out, this is the removal of a fear that should never have existed. That is worth marking, whatever comes next.
Reporting: Vanguard, Leadership, Daily Nigerian, Africanews and Information Nigeria.
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