… Three Northern Regions Record Two-Thirds Of All Reported Deaths Nationwide
… Ogun Emerges As SW Accident Hotspot As Expressway Crashes Persist
Fawas Adebisi
In Nigeria today, the risk of dying violently depends largely on where you live. In some parts of the country, death comes from gunshots and raids; in others, it arrives suddenly on highways packed with speeding vehicles and failing infrastructure. Though the threats differ, the outcome is the same, families shattered, livelihoods cut short, and communities left to absorb yet another loss.
An analysis of 2025 data from Nigeria Watch, a national database that documents incidents and violent deaths from media reports and human-rights sources, shows that Nigeria’s three northern regions continue to account for nearly two-thirds of all reported fatalities nationwide, driven largely by insurgency, banditry and communal violence.
In contrast, the South-West records far fewer conflict-related deaths, but faces a different killer: road accidents, with Ogun State emerging as a regional hotspot due to repeated crashes along major expressway corridors.
Together, the figures expose a country divided by risk, where geography shapes how people die, and where both insecurity and unsafe infrastructure remain deadly in different ways.
The Map of Fatal Risk: North vs South
Across Nigeria, the risk of dying violently remains uneven.
After carefully analyzing and cleaning the data found on the Nigeria Watch website, it was discovered that in 2025, the three northern geopolitical zones, North West, North East and North Central, continued to record a disproportionate share of violent deaths.
According to Nigeria Watch tallies for the year so far, these regions together account for more than two-thirds of all reported fatalities nationwide from killings, insurgency, banditry, and related violent incidents.
From Borno and Zamfara in the North East and North West to Niger and Plateau in the North Central, a handful of northern states repeatedly feature at the top of Nigeria Watch’s fatality rankings — illustrating a persistent pattern where conflict, communal clashes, and criminal violence inflict the highest death tolls.
In towns across these regions, the echoes of gunfire, the charred remains of burnt vehicles, and the bullet-scarred walls of homes form everyday backdrops to lives marked by fear and vulnerability. Many families in these areas live in a state of perpetual anxiety: farmers hesitant to till their fields, traders unwilling to traverse long distances, and children growing up amid soundtracks of violence.
A Different Threat in the South-West: The Daily Danger of the Road
The story in the South-West paints a contrasting picture.
Here, Nigeria Watch’s 2025 data reveal fewer deaths from armed attacks and insurgency, but a significant share of violent fatalities comes from road accidents, a category Nigeria Watch includes under violent deaths because the outcomes, life lost, families shattered, futures ended, are no less abrupt or devastating.
Among South-West states, Ogun stands out as a persistent hotspot for accident deaths.
Road incidents on major highways, in inter-city traffic, and on rural connectors have placed Ogun among the highest South-West contributors to Nigeria’s violent death count, particularly on sections of the Lagos–Ibadan Expressway, one of the country’s busiest road arteries.
Lives Lost on the Roads: A Human Tragedy in Numbers
National road safety data from the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) paints a grim backdrop to this pattern:
From January to September 2025, the FRSC reported over 3,400 road crash deaths nationwide and more than 22,000 injuries in roughly 6,858 crashes recorded, illustrating a rising trend in traffic fatalities.
These figures, while distinct from Nigeria Watch’s violent death counts, underscore a reality many Nigerians already know: daily travel carries risks as real and present as any threat from armed groups.
For families in Ogun, the death of a loved one on the expressway, often breadwinners, parents, or young adults, is not a statistical abstraction but a lived consequence of structural neglect.
Anthony Joshua’s Crash: A Tragic Wake-Up Call
Late in December 2025, international attention turned briefly to Nigeria when former world heavyweight boxing champion Anthony Joshua was involved in a serious crash on the Lagos–Ibadan Expressway in Ogun State.
According to the FRSC, the preliminary cause was excessive speed and wrongful overtaking, behaviours that mirror the leading risk factors in Nigeria’s broader road-safety crisis.
Two of Joshua’s close associates died in the collision; he survived with minor injuries. Their deaths, while highly publicised because of Joshua’s fame, reflect the broader tragedy of Nigerian roads: crashes that kill ordinary citizens every day, many without headline coverage, many unnoticed beyond local mourning.
FRSC Voices: Road Safety Officials Speak
Officials from the FRSC, Nigeria’s primary road-safety agency, have repeatedly spoken about the scale and gravity of the problem in 2025.
Corps Marshal Shehu Mohammed, addressing the press in Abuja, warned that road crashes have been increasing and urged stronger compliance with traffic regulations, especially speed limits and proper vehicle maintenance, measures he said are critical to reducing fatalities.
“Every road crash is not just a number, it is a human tragedy and a national development challenge,” said national safety officials during the rollout of the 2025 Ember Months Road Safety Campaign, emphasising that safer driving culture is a collective responsibility.
This official framing acknowledges the human dimension of the statistics, each crash is a family broken, a future curtailed.
Behind the Numbers: Everyday Lives Shattered
Nigeria Watch’s data bring cold numbers; the human stories make them vivid.
In the North, parents bury children lost to bandit raids, farmers abandon fields laced with danger, and communities externalise grief as a backdrop to subsistence.
In Ogun and other South-West communities, mothers wait at home for husbands who will never return from the market route, students’ uniforms lie unused after crush injuries end schooling prematurely, and siblings grieve at junctions where road collisions have turned asphalt into grief memorials.
For the family of a commuter who might have been returning home from Lagos that afternoon, or a trader whose produce truck never reached Ibadan, the death statistics are not distant figures, they are the final records of lives that once mattered deeply in homes and markets across the country.
A Crisis of Systems, Not Chance
What Nigeria Watch’s 2025 data reveal, and what lived experiences reinforce, is that violent deaths in Nigeria are not random. They are the product of systems stretched thin, infrastructure left to decay, and enforcement that lags behind behaviour on the ground.
In the North, fragile security and fragmented state presence have allowed insurgency and criminal violence to thrive for decades.
In the South, decades of underinvestment in road infrastructure, enforcement gaps, and inadequate emergency response compound the risks of travel.
Fixing this will require not just policing or road construction, but institutional reform, civic education, and sustained political will.
Incomplete Data, Real Lives Lost
The 2025 Nigeria Watch counts reflect violent deaths recorded up to the moment this report started; the year had not yet ended, and subsequent incidents,including crashes, water transport mishaps and security operations, had not been added to the toll. The Anthony Joshua collision, for example, is a high-profile case that had not been published, among many others, when this investigation started.
This means the figures presented here are conservative estimates of a wider mortality burden.
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