Scientists have issued a frightening warning that 31,400 Nigerians could die from extreme heat as Super El Niño threatens the Sahel between September 2026 and June 2027. A study by the Climate Impact Lab at the University of Chicago forecasts 66,800 additional heat-related deaths across the region, with Nigeria accounting for nearly half the projected fatalities.

The warning deserves serious attention, although Nigerians struggling with slave wages, poor living conditions, high prices of food and commodities, and erratic electricity supply might simply wonder why another threat to their survival requires a forecast from a distant lab before it receives national attention. For many citizens, the emergency began long before the scientists looked towards the skies.

Super El Niño, a climatic phenomenon, not a political party, though has not announced its intention to contest the next election, will not organise rallies in Abuja or distribute campaign rice to attract supporters. Its arrival will be measured in rising temperatures and the human lives they endanger.

The irony is that the people most exposed to its consequences are already fighting an exhausting battle against poverty, living in houses they cannot adequately cool, buying water they should have reliable access to and working under the sun because staying at home without earning a living is another way of going hungry.

The government cannot control the weather, and nobody expects it to summon a committee to negotiate with the Pacific Ocean. It can, however, address the conditions that make extreme heat particularly dangerous. A household with reliable electricity, clean water, adequate food and access to healthcare is better equipped to withstand a climate emergency than one forced to choose between buying food and paying for medication. Climate change may supply the immediate danger, but poverty determines who has the means to escape its consequences.

Nigeria’s own Super El Niño has been unfolding in the markets, homes and streets where ordinary people struggle to survive. It is the housewife who returns home with less food despite spending more money, the pensioner who postpones buying prescribed drugs for hypertension and diabetes because the family needs something to eat, and the father who tells his children to drink pure water because he has no money to buy food for them. These people do not need a scientific projection to understand what an emergency feels like. Their daily experiences have already supplied the evidence.

Reports circulating on Nigerian media platforms describe young and elderly people collapsing in public places, sometimes dying in circumstances that raise questions about hunger, exhaustion and deprivation. Such accounts deserve investigation, although a collapse cannot automatically be attributed to poverty without medical evidence.

Nigeria lacks a reliable national figure establishing how many people have died from hunger or poverty-related illnesses. The absence of such statistics should prompt an effort to investigate the problem rather than provide a convenient reason to ignore it.

Our national accounting has a curious quality. Governments can produce figures to explain economic growth, celebrate reforms and announce improvements in public finances, but the human cost of deprivation remains scattered across hospital wards and households struggling to make ends meet.

Parents who lose their children to illnesses aggravated by malnutrition may never appear in any official account of economic hardship. The family must absorb the consequences while the national conversation moves on to the next announcement of how the economy has grown by more than 4 per cent in 2026. What many Nigerians wonder about is how the reported economic growth is translating into improved living conditions for them.

Poverty, unlike Super El Niño, does not wait for a scientific forecast before beginning its work. A person who cannot afford adequate food is already living through an emergency, even if no government agency has declared one.

Extreme heat will make life more dangerous for farmers, construction workers, traders, transport workers and others whose livelihoods require prolonged exposure to the sun. Their survival will depend on access to drinking water, medical attention and some protection against lost wages when illness prevents them from working.

Nigerians have also been asked to admire their resilience in circumstances that should provoke greater public concern. The woman who survives on one meal a day is praised for her determination, while the unemployed graduate who starts a small business to escape destitution becomes an example of entrepreneurial ingenuity.

Their courage deserves respect, but resilience cannot become a permanent substitute for responsible government. Citizens should not have to perform extraordinary feats of endurance simply to obtain the necessities of ordinary life.

The approaching heat emergency demands practical action. Public health agencies should inform citizens about the dangers of prolonged exposure to extreme temperatures, hospitals should prepare for heat-related illnesses, and communities need access to safe water.

Employers must protect outdoor workers from avoidable risks, while governments should pay particular attention to older people and those whose living conditions make them especially vulnerable. These measures will not prevent every death, but they could save lives.

Tinubu’s government must also confront the economic circumstances that leave millions of people dangerously exposed. Climate preparedness means little to a family that cannot afford food or electricity. Public warnings cannot cool an overcrowded room, and advice about hydration is of limited value to a person who must pay for the services of a mai ruwa. Emergency planning must recognise the relationship between climate risks and the poverty that magnifies their consequences.

The forecast of 31,400 heat-related deaths is a projection, not a confirmed death toll. It should be treated with the seriousness appropriate to a warning of this magnitude. Hunger and poverty deserve the same attention, even though their mortality figures remain uncertain. A government that waits for every death to be documented before acknowledging a crisis may discover that many of its victims have already disappeared from public view.

The question confronting Nigeria is not simply whether it can withstand Super El Niño, but why so many citizens are struggling to survive ordinary life. The sun may become more punishing in the months ahead, but a hungry Nigerian does not need a climate scientist to explain the meaning of an emergency. For millions, the crisis arrived without an international report, a meteorological bulletin or a warning from the authorities.

Super El Niño may soon descend upon the Sahel. Hunger, however, arrived in Nigeria long before the forecast, and it has already been exacting its own terrible price. The difference is that the poor have been expected to endure it quietly while those entrusted with improving their circumstances continue to promise better days.

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