Nigerians have called for urgent reforms to the healthcare sector after the death of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 21-month-old son prompted an outpouring of grief and accounts of negligence and inadequate care.

In a leaked WhatsApp message, the bestselling author said she had been told by a doctor that the resident anaesthesiologist at the Lagos hospital treating her son Nkanu Nnamdi had administered an overdose of the sedative propofol.

Adichie and her husband, Dr Ivara Esege, have begun legal action against the hospital, accusing it of medical negligence.

For decades, the state of Nigeria’s public health sector has made national headlines with accounts of underpaid doctors carrying out surgeries by candlelight in the absence of power supply, patients paying for gloves and other missing basics, dilapidated facilities and nonexistent research departments. Those who can afford to seek care abroad typically do so.

There is also a dearth of emergency response services. When the former world heavyweight boxing champion Anthony Joshua survived a car accident in Nigeria in December, he was helped at the scene by bystanders, with no ambulance in sight.

Adichie’s sister-in-law Dr Anthea Esege Nwandu, a physician with decades of experience, has called for change.

She told Agence France-Presse: “This is a wake-up call, for we, the public, to demand accountability and transparency and consequences of negligence in our healthcare system.”

An exodus of medical personnel has exacerbated the situation, resulting in a doctor-to-patient ratio at the last count of 1:9,801. According to the health ministry, an estimated 16,000 doctors have left Nigeria in the last seven years.

‘The will of God’

As Nigerians at home and abroad mourned Adichie’s son this week and the Lagos state government ordered an inquiry, stories flooded social media about a crisis of errors by medical personnel.

In Kano state, authorities said they were investigating the case of a woman who died four months after doctors left a pair of scissors in her stomach during surgery. The woman repeatedly visited the hospital complaining of abdominal pain, but was only prescribed painkillers. Scans revealed the scissors just two days before she died.

For Ijoma Ugboma, who lost his wife in 2021, the tragedy felt painfully familiar. Peju Ugboma, a 41-year-old chef, had gone into hospital for fibroid surgery and died due to complications exacerbated by staff putting “the wrong setting of the ventilator [on] for 12 hours”, her husband said.

“Surgery on Friday, ICU on Saturday, dead on Sunday. I asked for the death certificate … but at that point I knew that I wasn’t going to let this thing go like that,” he told the Guardian.

Almost two years after Peju’s death, after a battle Ugboma said had tested him “mentally, emotionally and financially”, three of the four doctors in the operating theatre were indicted for professional misconduct.

The law firm of Olisa Agbakoba, a medical negligence lawyer with two decades’ experience, was one of two that represented the Ugboma family in court. He said in Nigeria there was no rigorous regulatory structure in place in the health sector.

“There is no requirement for routine submission of reports, no systematic inspections, and no effective enforcement of professional standards,” he said.

Agbakoba said his brother had undergone surgery by a physician who was not suitably qualified, resulting in sepsis that required a month-long treatment. “That was absolute incompetence,” he said.

Despite the abundance of medical malpractice claims, formal complaints and lawsuits remain remarkably low, partly because negligence is hard to prove. But many say there is also a cultural and spiritual dimension involved.

“People say it’s the will of God,” said Agbakoba. “They just go home and don’t talk about it … It’s underreported because many people don’t really do anything about it.”

Finding justice

Even when issues are escalated legally, medical personnel are reluctant to give professional opinions in court. Two of the three expert witnesses that testified for the Ugbomas live outside Nigeria.

“People told us they’d read through the case notes, they’d seen all the fault lines … but nobody wanted to talk and that is part of the rot in the system because there’s an unwritten oath of secrecy,” Ugboma said.

Some people are cautiously optimistic that the high-profile death of Adichie’s’s son will trigger an overhaul of the health regulatory framework.

For Ugboma, his long fight for accountability was worth it. “Right now, I can talk to my children and tell them I fought for their mother even in death,’ he said. “There’s justice out there if only one can persevere. It’s a marathon. But we can only have a better system if more people begin to challenge them.”

A much-hyped novel about a housewife who uses Tupperware parties to secretly smuggle erotic stories to her friends and neighbours is causing a stir in the television world, igniting a fierce bidding contest over the right to adapt it for the small screen.

Wet Ink, a novel by the 33-year-old London-based author Abigail Avis, is not scheduled to be published until the spring 2027, but industry insiders said a fierce auction between six major production companies had already taken place for the TV rights.

Those interested in the project have called the novel “Tupperware erotica”, and the frenzied interest is part of a recent spate of books by female authors to prompt huge competition for their TV rights as streamers and production companies search for bankable titles that can be sold around the world.

The battle follows a similar contest over the publishing rights for the novel, which eventually went to Hodder & Stoughton, owned by Hachette UK, for a six-figure fee. The publisher is already planning a global marketing blitz.

Set in 1960s London, the book charts the literary ambitions of Mitzy Barlow, a housewife and mother-of-two stranded in a loveless marriage who has grown weary of the mind-numbing monotony of her life.

She begins hosting Tupperware parties – ubiquitous events in the 1950s and 60s – to make some extra income from selling the plastic containers to women in her neighbourhood.

However, she soon begins to combine her role as hostess with a burgeoning career as a writer of sexual fantasies, which she starts to compose each night in a journal to help her deal with the bleakness of her marriage.

As her confidence grows, Mitzy begins writing her own stories under the pseudonym Queen B. Before long, her part-time job selling Tupperware becomes a cover for smuggling erotic stories to her customers, with the stories stashed safely inside the airtight containers.

As her alter ego finds success, Mitzy is left with a dilemma over pursuing a different life, fraught with the danger of being accused of indecency.

The novel’s TV rights were eventually secured by Kudos, part of Banijay UK, one of the world’s biggest production companies. It has been behind programmes including the Netflix series The House of Guinness, and the BBC’s This Town and SAS Rogue Heroes.

“We are thrilled to have acquired the rights to Abigail’s novel,” said Karen Wilson, the joint managing director of Kudos. “She is a brilliantly talented writer, and Wet Ink is a must read. We cannot wait to get started on developing it into a TV series for both the UK and international market.”

Insiders said the demand was a sign of the continuing importance to production companies of hunting down new content, as competition has intensified with the rise of the streamers. There has also been a recent trend of books by female writers to be the subject of ferocious auctions.

Industry sources said that in another such contest, 21 offers had already been made. The field for that title has been whittled down to a final 10, described as “a roll-call of glittery producers”. The book in question has not even been finished.

Another novel, Death’s a Bitch by the debut author Eloise Rodger, was acquired earlier this year by another Banijay-backed producer, , after international interest led to intense competition for the rights.

The novel follows Aggie and the plight of her younger sister Marcie, who has faced a long illness and endless waiting lists. Death offers Aggie a job that will ensure Aggie survives.

Avis, who studied and taught English literature before entering a fellowship with The Royal Literary Fund, has said the idea for Wet Ink came to her during one of her children’s midnight feeds. Her agent, Hayley Steed, said that in selling the book rights she had never seen a reaction like it.

“Within mere hours we were turning down international pre-empts and it has broken agency records around the globe,” she said. “Abigail has written a book that encapsulates the perfect bookclub read; an empowering call to arms, a warm story of female community and friendship, and just the right amount of naughtiness with its snippets of erotica.”

An AI fiction translation service aimed at both traditional publishers and self-published authors has been launched in the UK. GlobeScribe.ai is currently charging $100 per book, per language for use of its translation services.

“There will always be a place for expert human translation, especially for highly literary or complex texts,” said the founders Fred Freeman and Betsy Reavley, who previously founded Bloodhound Books, which specialises in crime and thrillers. “But GlobeScribe.ai opens the door to new opportunities, making translation a viable option for a much broader range of fiction.”

GlobeScribe conducted “extensive blind testing” of its tool. Native speakers reviewed GlobeScribe translations alongside human-translated versions of texts without being told which method had been used. “The feedback consistently showed that readers could not reliably distinguish between them,” according to a company statement. “In some cases, reviewers even felt the AI-assisted versions were closer in tone and fidelity to the original English manuscript.”

However, prominent translators along with a translators’ organisation have expressed concern over the initiative.

GlobeScribe “may claim to unlock global access for fiction, but their approach sidelines the very people who make literature resonate across cultures,” said Ian Giles, chair of the Society of Authors’ Translators Association. “Suggesting that AI can match, or even surpass, the nuanced work of human translators on behalf of authors is flat-out wrong.”

“The best literary translations offer more than simple accuracy, more than literal fidelity to the words making up the sentences,” said Polly Barton, writer and translator of works including the bestselling Butter by Asako Yuzuki from Japanese to English. “They are engaging with the context from which the book has come, and reproducing the pacing, atmosphere, emotional timbre, rhythm, and all the other, less superficially obvious factors that ultimately determine how fulfilling and rich the reading experience is.”

Deepa Bhasthi, whose translation of Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp from Kannada into English won this year’s International Booker prize, said that “there are many words in Kannada that contain whole cultural worlds in them, where there is as much hidden or implied within a cultural context as is conveyed in literal meaning. And that needs a human being, with an understanding of these visible and invisible worlds, to translate such words”.

Asked about GlobeScribe’s testing method, Barton said that being a native speaker of a language “doesn’t necessarily equip one to judge all translations from that language with total authority”. Bhasthi added that “we are not told what kind of texts they were given, what kind of readers the test subjects were”.

GlobeScribe’s founders said that while they “recognise that parts of the industry are understandably cautious about what AI might mean for the arts”, they “believe these tools are here to stay and that they should be embraced thoughtfully and responsibly”. They added that AI could enhance creativity and help professional translators “increase their productivity and output”. The founders “are clear that this is not about replacing human translators”.

Julia Sanches – the translator of works including Boulder by Eva Baltasar from Catalan into English – said: “Even though I don’t think Globescribe can translate the kinds of literary texts I translate, I am gloomy about the emergence of all these new AI ‘translation’ services. They give the appearance that translation is instant, which devalues my labour, and also that it is mediocre, which could make ‘good enough’ the new standard for the literary arts. And that’s a disservice to both authors and readers.”

“This doesn’t just end with translation,” said Barton. “Maybe translators are at the frontline of people being put out of work by AI technologies, but soon there will be more and more jobs threatened to be wiped out in this way. It lies in our hands to decide whether or not we want this to happen.”

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