Abductions are rife in the north of the country, where armed gangs target schools and colleges with apparent impunity

When his two daughters were abducted from their university dormitories by armed men in April, Friday Sani volunteered to deliver the ransom. In two bags he carried banknotes to the value of more than 40m naira (£70,000), the price to free Victory and Rejoice, and 37 others taken from the Federal College of Forestry Mechanisation in Afaka, Kaduna.

In April and May more than 70 students were abducted from the federal college and the nearby Greenfield University. With little faith that police could help, a group of parents went to the kidnappers, through an intermediary, and paid to get their children back.

More than 40 people have been found dead so far in disaster that has caused outrage in Nigeria

Several people still missing after the collapse of a partly constructed luxury apartment building in Lagos a week ago are now thought by officials clearing the debris to be dead – to the anguish of families at the site still searching for answers.

Only 15 people have survived, with 42 people found dead as of Sunday morning, in yet another deadly building collapse that has caused outrage in Nigeria and calls for recriminations against government and regulatory authorities.

Investment in infrastructure will underpin a stronger economy, improved security and the country’s fight against corruption

• Read more in our Crisis Nigeria series

Nigeria has faced challenges for as long as anyone can remember. But one problem Nigerians don’t talk about is our collective inability to acknowledge where progress is being made.

Fixating only on what is not working robs us of the chance to analyse and replicate our successes, and demoralises a populace in dire need of optimism.

A surgeon dedicated to his patients, Chike Akunyili was on the frontline of people’s suffering. We must address the problems that drove his killers to pull a trigger just because they could

• Failed state? Why Nigeria’s fragile democracy is facing an uncertain future

On the afternoon of 28 September 2021 my father was murdered in broad daylight by Nigeria’s ubiquitous “unknown gunmen”, the name given to unidentified attackers.

His killing, which happened to be on my birthday, was gruesome, cruel and senseless. As he struggled for his life no one helped or comforted him in his hour of need. Worse still, his body was robbed.

In the first in a series on Africa’s most populous state, we look at the effects of widening violence, poverty, crime and corruption as elections approach

• My father’s senseless murder must be a wake-up call for Nigeria

A series of overlapping security, political and economic crises has left Nigeria facing its worst instability since the end of the Biafran war in 1970.

With experts warning that large parts of the country are in effect becoming ungovernable, fears that the conflicts in Africa’s most populous state were bleeding over its borders were underlined last week by claims that armed Igbo secessionists in the country’s south-east were now cooperating with militants fighting for an independent state in the anglophone region of neighbouring Cameroon.