Zuwaira Hanafi stood outside a healthcare facility in Kaita, in Nigeria’s northern Katsina state, as medical staff hurried into a ward where her eight-month-old daughter lay semiconscious, underscoring the urgency confronting health workers in a region grappling with rising levels of severe malnutrition.

At the entrance, clinicians used colour-coded measuring tapes to assess the mid-upper arm circumference of children, a standard method for diagnosing malnutrition.

A steady flow of mothers, including teenagers, arrived with infants in critical condition, reflecting what humanitarian agencies describe as a deepening hunger crisis affecting large parts of the country.The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies has warned that as many as 33 million Nigerians could face severe hunger in 2026, a record level.

Data from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs indicates that approximately 6.4 million children in Nigeria are expected to be acutely malnourished by the end of the year, with the burden concentrated in northern regions such as Katsina.

Dr Soma Bahonan, head of the Nigeria mission for the Alliance for International Medical Action (Alima), which operates the Kaita facility in partnership with local authorities, said the crisis is expanding beyond children. Increasing numbers of mothers are also presenting with acute malnutrition, compounding the risks to infant health and survival.

Alima has expanded its operations to include mobile clinics designed to reach remote populations unable to travel to fixed facilities. These services include transport support for critical cases from surrounding communities.

However, Bahonan described the scale of need as exceeding operational capacity, particularly in Katsina, which has become a focal point of what aid workers describe as an intergenerational hunger crisis.Longstanding drivers of food insecurity, including climate variability and structural governance challenges, have been intensified by rising insecurity.

Attacks by jihadist groups and other non-state actors have disrupted farming activities and restricted access to agricultural land, further weakening household food production and income stability.The strain on the healthcare system is evident in workforce shortages. Nigeria’s doctor-to-patient ratio is estimated at roughly 1:9,000, significantly below the World Health Organization’s recommended ratio of 1:600.

Medical professionals continue to leave the country, citing delayed salary payments and limited career prospects, further reducing service capacity in already underserved areas.While digital health startups and private-sector partnerships have made progress in urban centres such as Lagos and Abuja, their reach remains limited in rural and conflict-affected regions due to infrastructure deficits and high inflation.

This uneven distribution of innovation has widened disparities in healthcare access.Analysts describe Nigeria’s current situation as a convergence of multiple crises. Joachim MacEbong, a senior analyst at Control Risks in Lagos, said the country faces overlapping economic, security, and human development challenges that reinforce one another.

He noted that these interconnected pressures are contributing to deteriorating health outcomes and weakening institutional response capacity.Humanitarian organisations have begun planning for the annual lean season, typically spanning June to September, when food stocks decline and malnutrition rates tend to rise.

The period is expected to place additional stress on already constrained health and nutrition services.Policy interventions have been introduced, though their impact remains uncertain.

In 2025, the Nigerian government partnered with the World Bank to implement the Accelerating Nutrition Results in Nigeria project, aimed at delivering basic nutrition services to vulnerable households.

A second phase of the programme is currently under way, but experts say broader structural reforms are required to improve food affordability and strengthen social protection systems.Supply chain inefficiencies continue to limit access to essential medicines and equipment.

Peter Bunor Jr, co-founder and head of growth at Field Intelligence, a health technology company focused on pharmaceutical logistics in Africa, said disruptions in global and domestic supply chains are contributing to shortages at the point of care.

Patients often travel long distances only to find that prescribed drugs are unavailable or replaced with alternatives, frequently at higher cost.Bunor said the impact of these shortages is amplified during a hunger crisis, as malnourished individuals are more susceptible to infections and require timely medical intervention.

He emphasised the need for better data integration and forecasting to prevent stockouts.In 2018, Field Intelligence launched the Nigeria Health Logistics Management Information System, a platform designed to track pharmaceutical supply data across public health programmes.

The system, now managed by the federal health ministry, has been expanded with support from UNICEF, and stakeholders are encouraging wider adoption among health agencies to improve coordination and anticipate shortages.Funding constraints remain a central concern.

Nigeria allocated approximately 5.2% of its 47.9 trillion naira national budget to the health sector, well below the 15% target set under the Abuja Declaration by African Union member states. Per capita health spending remains among the lowest on the continent.

In February, Health Minister Muhammad Ali Pate disclosed that of the 218 billion naira allocated for operations and capital projects under the ministry, only 36 million naira had been released. The figure, representing a small fraction of the approved budget, has raised concerns about implementation capacity and fiscal prioritisation.

MacEbong said the funding gap illustrates broader structural challenges in public finance management, noting that limited budget execution undermines service delivery even where allocations exist. He added that the scale of the crisis requires sustained government attention, particularly in sectors directly linked to human capital development.

Aid organisations continue to call for increased domestic investment in health and nutrition, alongside improved coordination with international partners.

As conditions in northern Nigeria worsen, frontline health workers face mounting pressure to manage a growing caseload with limited resources, highlighting systemic vulnerabilities in one of Africa’s largest economies.

This is a question that Muslims themselves must confront honestly and internally, rather than deflecting scrutiny by labelling all inquiry as Islamophobia.

Once again, terror has struck Australia’s Jewish community. In the aftermath, a familiar argument has surfaced in the media: that only a handful of individuals, three people out of hundreds of millions of Muslims worldwide, carried out this act of extreme violence, and that the wider Muslim community has nothing to do with it. This assertion is repeatedly offered as a moral and religious defense and, on the surface, appears valid.

However, what is conveniently overlooked is that celebrations and open approval of this massacre are visible across sections of the Muslim world, particularly on social media and in private conversations. Alongside this, there has also been what can only be described as cosmetic condemnation and performative solidarity, expressed through slogans such as “Islam is against violence” and “Islam condemns this.”

In this process, the victims cease to be those who lost their lives. Instead, Islam, the religion itself is positioned as the primary victim, and the public energy shifts toward defending the religion rather than mourning the dead.

This raises a more uncomfortable but necessary question. Why does this phenomenon recur? Why does violence against Jewish civilians provoke not only silence but, in some quarters, open approval? Unless this question is confronted honestly, beyond politically correct language and defensive posturing, the cycle of denial, hypocrisy, and repetition will continue, costing more lives and deepening hatred across communities.

In the aftermath of this horrific attack on civilians, another familiar narrative has been foregrounded. Considerable emphasis has been placed on the fact that a Muslim saved people during the attack and that another Muslim stood up against the Islamist terrorists. The issue, however, is not whether a Muslim acted humanely in the face of inhuman violence. That is an expectation of any human being.

The more fundamental question is why the first individual was driven to carry out the attack in the first place. Until this question is addressed honestly, there is little meaning in celebrating the second act of resistance against jihadist violence. Acts of courage during terror attacks deserve recognition, but they cannot substitute for a serious examination of the ideological and religious conditioning that produces such violence. Without confronting these roots, such narratives risk becoming distractions rather than pathways to solutions.

Each time such an attack occurs, a familiar defence is invoked: that this is not true Islam, that this is not the Islam followed by the vast majority of Muslims. While this may be factually correct, it leaves a deeper and more unsettling question unanswered.

Why are these acts of terror repeatedly carried out in the name of Islam? This is a question that Muslims themselves must confront honestly and internally, rather than deflecting scrutiny by labelling all inquiry as Islamophobia. Genuine introspection is not an attack on faith. It is a necessary condition for preventing its distortion into an instrument of violence.

Until this question is faced squarely, moral disclaimers will continue to ring hollow and fail to address the root of the problem.

Arfa Khanum Sherwani, described the Bondi Beach attack as Islamist terrorist violence targeting a peaceful gathering. In response, she was subjected to sharp criticism from sections of the Muslim intelligentsia. She was accused of liberal hypocrisy, of playing into the hands of the West, and of immaturity, among other charges.

This reaction is revealing. It shows how even naming and condemning violence carried out in the name of Islam provokes hostility rather than introspection. The focus shifts away from the crime itself and toward discrediting the individual who dares to call it out.

If thirteen or fifteen people are killed in the name of any ideology, that ideology must be subjected to scrutiny. The problem lies not with those who identify and condemn ideological violence, but with the refusal to examine the ideas that legitimize it. The instinct to silence criticism rather than engage with it reflects a deeper discomfort with accountability.

Many argue that such attacks are a consequence of the war in Gaza and Israel’s military actions. However, this particular attack targeted Jews in Australia, was carried out by a man of Pakistani origin, and occurred on Australian soil. It had no direct connection to the conflict in Gaza.

Until recently, some of our left-liberal circles argued that the attack of 7 October was justified, claiming it was inevitable because seventy-five years of history lay behind it. Even if one were to accept the relevance of historical context, a basic question remains unanswered. What had Jews celebrating Hanukkah in Australia done to people living far away in Pakistan to provoke such violence?

Yet the attack exposes something more troubling. The Gaza conflict is increasingly being conflated and weaponised to justify hostility toward Jewish communities across the world. Political anger over a distant war is redirected into hatred against civilians who have no role in that conflict.

This is deeply concerning. Slogans such as “from the river to the sea” can easily be stripped of political context and transformed into rhetoric that legitimises indiscriminate violence. What begins as a political position risks mutating into a justification for collective punishment and terror.

This slippage between protest and violence must be recognized and confronted before it becomes normalized, and the texts that give moral justification to Muslims to carry out such attacks such as Sahih Bukhari’s Hadees in which Prophet Mohammed reported to have said that ‘The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. “O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.”

What it does require is a responsible, contextual explanation of such texts—how they emerged in specific historical circumstances, how classical scholars understood their limits, and why they cannot be mechanically or morally applied to contemporary civilian life.

Islamic history itself offers clear counterpoints to extremist readings. Jewish–Muslim collaboration was not an anomaly but a lived reality: the Jewish physician who served Sultan Salahuddin Ayyubi, or the Jewish neighbour of the great scholar Abdullah bin Mubarak, are reminders that coexistence, trust, and shared civic life were integral to Muslim societies. These realities stand in direct contradiction to modern attempts to universalise selective texts into timeless mandates of violence.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.