The Silent Crisis: Why Nigerian Men Are Dying Years Before Their Time

On a quiet evening in Jimeta, 72-year-old Mrs. Mary Bala sat outside her house, peeling oranges for her grandchildren. Her laughter filled the compound as she corrected one child’s homework and reminded another to wash his hands before eating. She still attends community meetings, still walks to the nearby Jimeta modern market, still checks her blood pressure every week at the clinic.

Ten years ago, she buried her husband.

Mr. Bala Moses was only 66 when he slumped in his sitting room after complaining of persistent headaches he had ignored for months. “It’s just stress,” he would always say. “I’ll be fine.” He never went for the check-up his wife kept suggesting.

His story is not unusual in Nigeria. It is, quietly and devastatingly, the norm.

What the Numbers Are Saying

The 2024 State of the Nation Report, obtained by the News Agency of Nigeria and published in March 2025, confirmed what public health experts have long suspected: Nigeria’s overall life expectancy stands at just 54.6 years, a figure that is 25.5 percent below the global average of 73.3 years. Women in Nigeria live to approximately 54.9 years on average, men to 54.3 years, a gap that mirrors the global trend even if Nigeria’s numbers are far below what they should be.

Globally, the picture is sharper. According to the World Health Organization, women live to around 76 years on average worldwide, compared to 70.7 years for men. In the United States, the gap widened to 5.8 years in 2021, with men averaging just under 76 years and women reaching 81. In countries with persistent social inequality, the gap stretches even further, reaching up to 13 years in parts of Eastern Europe.

“From a human standpoint, it’s really remarkable that women live longer across almost every country in the world,” said Johanna Stärk, lead author of a landmark October 2025 study published in Science Advances by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Her team analyzed 528 mammal and 1,176 bird species held in zoos worldwide and found that in 72 percent of mammal species, females outlived males; on average, by 12 percent of their total lifespan. The survival advantage, the research confirmed, is not unique to humans. It is woven into the biology of our species.

But biology alone does not explain all of it. And in Nigeria, the non-biological part of the story is where lives are actually being lost.

Biology Sets the Stage; Behaviour Writes the Ending

Science has established the biological foundations clearly. A comprehensive systematic review published in 2024 by the journal Clinical Research and Reports, drawing on studies from PubMed, Scopus, and the Web of Science between 2010 and 2024, found that cardiovascular deaths are 1.7 times higher in men than in women. Men carry 22 percent shorter mean telomere length, meaning their cells age faster at the molecular level. And behavioural risk exposure, across smoking, alcohol consumption, and hazardous occupational conditions, is two to four times higher in men than in women across documented populations.

The chromosomal explanation is foundational. Women carry two X chromosomes, giving them a genetic redundancy that men do not possess. When one X chromosome carries a defective gene, the second can often compensate. Men, carrying one X and one Y, have no such buffer. A harmful mutation on their single X chromosome expresses itself without opposition. Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demonstrated that women outlive men even during famines, epidemics, and slavery, conditions where both sexes faced extreme mortality pressure, confirming that the survival advantage has deep biological roots that even catastrophic environments cannot erase.

Oestrogen also plays a protective cardiovascular role, maintaining healthy blood vessels and cholesterol balance, particularly in the decades before menopause. Heart disease, one of the world’s leading killers, consistently strikes men earlier. That timing is not coincidental; it is hormonal.

But as the Max Planck study noted, gaps persisted even among zoo populations, where predation and environmental stress are removed. The biological component is real and permanent. What is not permanent, and what is fully within Nigerian men’s power to change, is the behavioural and cultural layer that sits on top of it.

‘Masculinity Prevents Me From Going to Hospitals’

A peer-reviewed study published in the Cogent Social Sciences journal, conducted across Nigerian academic institutions and available through Taylor & Francis Online, documented what happens when masculinity norms collide with healthcare decisions in this country. The findings were striking.

One male respondent, speaking candidly in an in-depth interview, explained his relationship to hospital visits with a sentence that captures the problem entire: “Masculinity prevents me from going to hospitals. You will go, then a woman will be attending to you as a man. No oh!”

Another respondent in the same study stated simply, “I seek professional healthcare only when there is a major problem.”

These are not isolated voices. A cross-sectional survey of 658 Nigerian men conducted by researchers at the University of Lagos College of Medicine found that 78.4 percent of men with mild symptoms did not seek medical care at all. The study, published in the World Journal of Men’s Health, found that even among men who knew something was wrong, the overwhelming majority chose silence over the clinic.

A 2024 study published in Unizik Journal of Gender Research, drawing on qualitative research across six geopolitical zones in Nigeria, concluded that “women tend to display positive health-seeking behaviour than men,” and that the key factors widening the gap in Nigeria specifically are belief systems, income barriers, and place of residence.

In rural northern Nigeria, those three factors converge with particular force. Men who believe symptoms will resolve on their own, who cannot easily afford transport or consultation fees, and who live hours from the nearest functioning facility, are men for whom the hospital remains entirely theoretical. Mr. Bala Moses was not irrational by the standards of his community. He was, tragically, completely normal.

What Women Do Differently — and What It Costs Them

The Lancet published a major study in May 2024 drawing on data from the 2021 Global Burden of Disease Study, covering approximately 20 major pathologies across more than 200 countries. Its central finding was double-edged: women live longer, but they carry a heavier burden of disability-adjusted life years. They survive more, but they also suffer more from conditions like depression, anxiety, and chronic pain across those additional years.

“Women aren’t that biologically different than men,” said study co-author Guilhem Rosier in the Lancet research. “But culture and gender do determine these differences, which is why we need to focus on and investigate these cultural and socio-economic determinants that differentiate us.”

The study found that most illnesses disproportionately affecting each sex begin to diverge during adolescence, the period when gender norms intensify and puberty reshapes self-perception. For girls, that period begins a lifetime of engagement with reproductive health services, antenatal systems, and routine screening. For boys, it often begins a lifetime of performing toughness and equating silence with strength.

Mrs. Mary Bala has attended women’s fellowship every week for years. She talks, she laughs, and she shares her worries with people who know her name. Research consistently links strong social bonds to lower cortisol levels, better immune function, and longer life expectancy. Men who internalize stress without releasing it carry that physiological load invisibly; chronic stress raises blood pressure, weakens immunity, and accelerates the very cardiovascular damage that already claims them earlier.

A 2024 qualitative study in Discover Global Society confirmed that stigma remains a structural barrier to healthcare access in Nigeria, noting that cultural and religious doctrines reinforce avoidance of the health system, particularly among men who associate seeking help with weakness or spiritual failure.

The Gap Is a Choice, Not a Sentence

Nigeria’s numbers are sobering. At 54.6 years, the average Nigerian is dying nearly two decades before the global average. The gender gap within those numbers, though smaller than in wealthier countries, is consistent and predictable; women outlive men, even here, even with all the disadvantages Nigerian women carry in poverty, limited education access, and rural isolation.

The Max Planck Institute’s October 2025 research confirmed that the longevity gap between sexes is “unlikely to disappear anytime soon” because its causes run deep into evolutionary biology. But the same research, and every Nigerian study cited here, also confirms that the gap is not fixed. In countries where men have adopted more consistent healthcare habits, where social norms around masculine vulnerability have shifted, and where primary care has become accessible and destigmatized, the gap narrows. In Scandinavian countries, projections suggest men could reach parity with women in life expectancy by 2050.

Nigeria is not Scandinavia. But the distance between dying at 54 and dying at 65 is not biology. It is a check-up. It is a blood pressure reading taken before the headache becomes a stroke. It is a man who decides, against everything his culture has told him, that his life is worth a clinic visit.

Schedule a check-up at least twice a year. Monitor blood pressure and blood sugar before symptoms appear. Reduce alcohol and tobacco. Build real friendships and use them. Walk, sleep, eat with intention.

And when something feels wrong, go. Do not wait. Do not say “I’ll be fine.”

Mr. Bala Moses said that too.

Mrs. Mary Bala is still peeling oranges for her grandchildren. He is not.

That distance, six years between them, is the distance this story is written to close.