Snakes in the Garden: When Nature and Nation Collide in Nigeria
By Ameh Abraham
If you have scrolled through any Nigerian social media feed lately, you might be forgiven for thinking we are in the midst of a national serpentine invasion. Snakes are everywhere in our news, our timelines, our hospitals, and apparently, even in our public coffers.
The past few weeks have delivered a particularly Nigerian cocktail of tragedy, farce, and existential questioning, all wrapped around the slender body of the snake. From the heartbreaking death of a young artist to the bizarre spectacle of a serpent allegedly swallowing millions in public funds, we find ourselves confronting questions that are at once primal and profoundly modern.
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The Serpent as Angel of Death
On January 31, 2026, Abuja-based singer Ifunanya Nwangene, Nanyah to her fans, died after being turned away from two hospitals following a snakebite. The reason? No anti-venom was available. In a city that houses the seat of federal power, in a country that spends billions on recurrent expenditure, a young woman bled out because a vial of medicine was missing from a shelf.
As Hilary Ogbuagu wrote in a searing Vanguard piece, her death was not merely unfortunate, it was “a national indictment.”
Snakebite envenoming is classified by the World Health Organisation as a Neglected Tropical Disease. Nigeria, it seems, has taken that designation as a challenge. While we have made strides against polio and remain vigilant against emerging viruses, the humble snakebite continues to kill quietly, mostly in rural areas, mostly among the poor, and mostly without provoking the sustained outrage that might actually save lives.
The tragedy is that we know what works. Anti-venom exists. Protocols exist. Training exists. What does not exist is the political will to treat snakebite as the predictable, preventable emergency it is. As Ogbuagu rightly argues, we cannot exterminate snakes, they are integral to the ecosystem, controlling rodent populations and maintaining balance. What we can exterminate is the neglect that makes their bites a death sentence.
The Serpent as Auditor-in-Chief
But if the snake as killer is straightforward tragedy, the snake as thief is something else entirely, a phenomenon that sits somewhere between folklore, fraud, and the theatre of the absurd.
In 2018, Nigerians were introduced to what might be the most creative excuse in the annals of public sector accountability. When auditors from the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) came calling for ₦36 million in missing revenue, a staff member explained that the money had been “spiritually” stolen by a snake dispatched through the machinations of a rival colleague’s housemaid.
The story, as Premium Times reported at the time, involved a cast of characters that could have stepped out of a Nollywood script: a sales clerk, a housemaid, a rival employee, and a serpentine accomplice. The JAMB registrar, ever the pragmatist, did not believe the snake. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, ever the opportunist, jocularly tweeted that “an eagle shows no mercy for money-swallowing snakes.” The public, ever the philosopher, reached for something stronger than tea.
As one Twitter user memorably observed at the time: “November 2008: satellite we built for 40 billion disappears. September 2004: Ship laden with 30,000 barrels of oil disappears. August 2017: Rats chase the President out of office. February 2018: Snake swallows 36 million from JAMB. I need a beer.”
The snake, it turned out, was not just a thief. It was a mirror.
The Serpent as Metaphor
What are we to make of a country where animals routinely feature in explanations for missing public funds? Writing in The Conversation, researcher Klaus Gründler offered a sobering analysis: these stories are not reflections of strange evolutionary behaviour. They highlight profound corruption problems and, perhaps more tellingly, the imaginative lengths to which public officials will go to avoid accountability.
When a senator blamed monkeys for carting away ₦70 million from a colleague’s farm, he was not offering a biological explanation. He was testing the limits of public credulity and inadvertently revealing how low the bar for accountability has sunk.
The humour that greeted these reports, Gründler notes, masks a deeper resignation. Nigerians have learned to laugh because crying has proven ineffective. But the laughter is uneasy. It contains within it the recognition that when animals become the default scapegoats for human failures, something has gone terribly wrong with both governance and the public’s relationship to it.
The Serpent as Deliverance Minister
Which brings us to the most recent entry in our national serpent saga, and the one that perhaps best captures the current mood.
On a Facebook group dedicated to the prayers of Apostle Joshua Selman, a post declared with prophetic certainty: “That snake swallowing your finances is arrested.”
Thousands responded with “Amen.” The post, shared widely, has attracted over four thousand reactions and nearly two thousand comments, most of them variations on the same theme: “In the name of Jesus, amen.”
Now, on one level, this is simply the familiar language of Pentecostal deliverance, applied to a timely metaphor. But on another level, it is something more revealing. The snake that was once a literal excuse for missing money has become a spiritual explanation for financial struggle. The leap is not as great as it might seem. If public officials can blame serpents for empty treasuries, why should ordinary citizens not blame serpents for empty pockets?
The danger, of course, is that spiritualising what are essentially structural problems, corruption, mismanagement, inequality, can become its own form of avoidance. If the snake swallowing your finances is arrested, you might feel better. But your bank balance remains unchanged, and the actual mechanisms by which money disappears from public accounts continue to operate, unbothered by prayers.
Between Tragedy and Farce
Karl Marx once observed that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Nigeria’s snake moment contains both elements, sometimes in the same breath.
The tragedy is Nanyah’s death. A young woman with music in her heart and a future ahead of her, dead because two hospitals could not produce a vial of anti-venom. The tragedy is the thousands of rural Nigerians, mostly farmers, mostly poor, who die each year from snakebites that should be treatable. The tragedy is a health system that has normalised the absence of essential medicines.
The farce is the JAMB snake. An imaginary reptile that somehow swallowed ₦36 million without leaving a trace, except in the fertile imagination of a clerk facing an audit. The farce is the senatorial monkey, making off with public funds through the jungles of Benue State. The farce is a public discourse where the line between credible explanation and magical thinking has become so blurred that a Facebook post declaring snakes “arrested” can attract thousands of amens.
But perhaps the deepest truth lies somewhere between these poles. The snake stories that circulate in Nigeria, whether as tragic news, bizarre excuse, or deliverance sermon, are all, in their way, symptoms of a deeper ailment.
We have a health system that cannot provide basic antidotes because snakebite is not a priority for those who allocate resources. We have a governance culture where officials feel emboldened to offer preposterous explanations because accountability is weak and consequences are uncertain. We have a citizenry so accustomed to both failure and impunity that spiritual intervention begins to seem like the only plausible solution.
What the Snake Sees
If snakes could talk and given recent events, perhaps we should not assume they cannot, what might they say about all this?
They might note, with some justification, that they were here first. Long before Lagos was a megacity or Abuja a capital, snakes inhabited this land, fulfilling their ecological role as predators of rodents and prey for larger animals. They might observe that human expansion into their habitats, combined with poor waste management and unchecked rodent populations, has increased encounters that are, from their perspective, entirely accidental.
They might also note, with something resembling indignation, that they have become convenient scapegoats for entirely human failures. Snakes do not embezzle public funds. Snakes do not fail to stock hospitals with anti-venom. Snakes do not create corruption perception indices or rank 148th out of 180 countries, as Nigeria did in Transparency International’s 2017 assessment.
What snakes do is exist, as they have always existed, in the complex web of life that sustains our shared ecosystem. The problem is not their existence. The problem is our response to it.
Toward a Grown-Up Conversation
So where does this leave us? How do we move from tragedy and farce toward something resembling a mature national conversation about snakes, and about what they reveal?
First, we might acknowledge that the snake is not the enemy. The enemy is neglect of health systems, of public health priorities, and of the rural poor who bear the brunt of snakebite mortality. The enemy is corruption that treats public funds as private property, and the culture of impunity that makes preposterous excuses seem worth a try. The enemy is a public discourse that oscillates between outrage and resignation without ever settling on effective action.
Second, we might recognise that solving the snakebite problem is eminently doable. As the Vanguard piece outlines, the steps are clear: recognise snakebite as a public health priority, establish national anti-venom stockpiles, invest in local production, train health workers, improve data collection, and address environmental factors that increase human-snake encounters. None of this is rocket science. All of it requires political will and sustained funding.
Third, we might stop laughing at the absurdities long enough to demand accountability. The JAMB snake was funny in 2018. In 2026, after eight more years of the same patterns, the humour wears thin. We might ask ourselves: why do public officials still think they can get away with such explanations? What would it take for accountability to become real rather than rhetorical?
Fourth, we might hold space for both the spiritual and the structural. It is entirely possible to pray for deliverance from the snakes that swallow finances while also demanding that public funds be properly accounted for. The two are not mutually exclusive. But prayer should not become a substitute for action, nor should spiritual language be allowed to obscure the material causes of suffering.