In 2024, mothers carrying malnourished children queued outside a Médecins Sans Frontières clinic in Katsina State, north-west Nigeria. The article’s photograph documents the line directly. Facilities were so overwhelmed that children were treated on mattresses on the floor. An inpatient therapeutic feeding centre in Maiduguri admitted 1,250 children in April, twice the figure a year earlier. Across seven states, more than 52,000 patients were diagnosed with severe acute malnutrition in 2023 and 2,693 died. Food inflation near 30 per cent coincided with farmland abandoned because of kidnapping and killings, while mass displacement further damaged access to food. The clinic queue was not simply a capacity problem at the door; it was where insecurity, prices, failed harvests and acute illness arrived together.