Last week, news came from Odigbo in Ondo State that at least 32 people had died after drinking a locally made alcoholic substance suspected to have been contaminated. Many others were taken to hospital. By September 17, the Ondo State Government had put the number of deaths at 49.

Before the country fully absorbed the scale of the tragedy, another terrible story emerged from Niger State. Thirty-seven suspected illegal miners died while in the custody of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps. The circumstances of those deaths are still being investigated, but the basic fact is already clear: people who entered government custody alive died there.

The two tragedies are different. One concerns a dangerous drink and the failure to prevent a harmful product from reaching consumers. The other concerns citizens held by the state and the conditions in which they were detained. Still, both tragedies raise a difficult question: what happens to a country when citizens are exposed to so many preventable deaths that each new tragedy begins to feel like another sad story rather than a national emergency?

Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of habitus helps us understand this problem.

Habitus is the way people learn to see the world and behave in it through repeated experience. Citizens are not born knowing what to expect from their country. They learn it, along with the boundaries of acceptable conduct, through the institutions that govern their everyday lives. Home, school and the workplace each teach lessons about authority, obligation and what can reasonably be expected from those who exercise it.

Over time, citizens also learn what their country can be relied upon to provide, what they can ignore and what they can secure for themselves. In Nigeria, many citizens have learnt that things do not always work as they should and gradually adjust their lives to the possibility of institutional failure.

Extra money is kept at hand in case a public service requires a bribe. Private security becomes necessary when public protection cannot be trusted. Electricity is supplemented with generators, water with boreholes, and an ordinary complaint may require access to someone with the right connection before it receives attention. What begins as a response to institutional failure eventually becomes the Nigerian way of life.

None of these things begins as a normal part of life. Citizens learn them because they have experienced the same problems again and again. This is what makes Bourdieu’s idea of habitus useful. Repeated experience can change the way citizens think about what is possible and what is normal.

Citizens who grow up experiencing the failures of public institutions stop asking why the failures exist. The question becomes how to survive them. This change is important. Citizens who travel on broken roads would first ask why the government allowed the roads to become death traps. After years of travelling on the bad roads, the same citizens simply learn to drive more carefully, leave home earlier or find another route. The bad roads have not disappeared. The citizens have only learnt how to navigate them and live with the reality that they would never be repaired.

The same thing happens with death. If citizens repeatedly hear about deaths caused by unsafe products, they become more careful about what they buy. The same thing happens to citizens who hear stories of deaths in custody. They learn to see custody as a place where terrible things can happen. If they repeatedly hear about citizens dying because hospitals lack basic resources, as is the case of the National Hospital in Abuja that has become the place of assisted dying, they begin to believe that such deaths are simply part of life in Nigeria.

This does not mean that Nigerians do not care about human life. They do. The problem is different. Repeated suffering can teach citizens to expect suffering.

That is the danger of habitus. Citizens adapt and find ways to protect themselves, while developing their own solutions and learning which products to avoid, which roads not to travel, which offices to avoid and which Big Ogas to call when they need help.

These responses may be sensible. They may even save lives. But there is another side to this adaptation. The more citizens learn to protect themselves from institutional failures, the easier it becomes for those failures to continue without creating enough pressure for change.

A citizen buys an “I-Pass-My-Neighbour” generator because electricity is unreliable. He has solved only his immediate problem. The electricity problem remains. A family may try to find a warder to secure better treatment for its detained son, but the poor conditions inside the detention centre remain.

The citizen and the family have only adapted to their problems. The problems survive.

This is why the deaths in Odigbo deserve more than a temporary burst of public anger. The immediate questions are important. Who made the drink? Who sold it? How did it reach the people who consumed it? Were there warnings? Could the deaths have been prevented? What should regulators have done before people died?

The same questions arise from Niger State. Who was responsible for the conditions in which the detainees were held? Why were so many young men kept in a cell where they reportedly struggled to breathe? Were warnings ignored? Did officers know that the conditions were dangerous? What systems existed to protect people in custody?

These questions matter because prevention matters more than explanation after death. An investigation can tell us how people died. Accountability must also ask why they were placed in a situation where death was possible.

The citizens who died in Odigbo were not numbers. Neither were the 37 people who died in Niger. Each person had a family, relationships, plans and a life that others expected to continue. Someone expected a phone call, or was expected to return home. Someone made plans for the following day.

Statistics are necessary because governments need numbers to understand the scale of a problem. But numbers can also create distance. Saying that 49 people died can sound different from saying that 49 families lost someone they expected to see again.

Habitus helps us understand how that distance can grow. The more often a country encounters suffering, the more familiar suffering can become. Familiarity does not necessarily mean acceptance. It means learning to live with what once seemed unacceptable.

This is one of the most dangerous things happening in Nigeria today. Citizens are becoming very good at surviving poor electricity, bad roads, unsafe products, dysfunctional hospitals, insecurity and failing public institutions. They know how to find private solutions to public problems and carry on after tragedy.

But a country cannot measure the strength of its institutions by the ability of its citizens to survive their failures.

The real question after Odigbo and Minna is not simply how many citizens died. It is whether Nigeria will learn anything from their deaths before another group of Nigerians dies in circumstances that could have been prevented.

Bourdieu’s idea of habitus warns us about a society that learns to live with what should never have become normal. The greatest danger is not only that citizens die. It is that, after enough deaths, citizens become accustomed to deaths that should never have occurred.

Abdul Mahmud, a human rights attorney in Abuja, writes weekly for The Gazette