Thirty seven human beings entered the custody of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps alive. They left it dead.
They were taken into state control in Minna following arrests connected to alleged illegal mining. They died while held in an institution whose officers had, by law, assumed total, exclusive responsibility for their physical survival.
I am horrified by these deaths, and I want every individual and institutional actor responsible held fully accountable. I also maintain that the state must never publicly parade or treat detainees as convicted criminals before an exhaustive investigation establishes individual guilt.
There is no contradiction between these positions. In fact, the constitutional disaster that unfolded in Niger State makes holding both simultaneously a moral and legal imperative.
The government initially suspended the NSCDC Niger State Commandant, before detaining 23 additional personnel, bringing the total held in connection with the tragedy to 24.
A 10-member independent investigative committee has been inaugurated, and medical experts are conducting post mortem examinations to determine the precise physical causes of death. That cause has not yet been established.
The detail matters, because an investigation that begins with its conclusion already written is not an inquiry; it is a ritual of public relations.
Yet there is a recurring danger in tragedies involving criminal suspects. The moment a person is labeled an “illegal miner,” an “offender,” or a “security threat,” public empathy retreats.
The public instinctively begins to view the individual through the lens of the allegation rather than through the lens of the constitutional rights that remain inviolable in detention.
An arrest is not a conviction. Custody is not a zone where constitutional protections expire. It is, in fact, the exact point at which the state exercises its most dangerous power over the individual, the power to strip a citizen of liberty.
That distinction is paramount here. These 37 individuals did not perish in a lawless hinterland beyond the reach of the republic.
They died inside a state facility, behind locked doors, under the direct supervision of uniformed officers of the law.
When the state takes a person into custody, it deprives them of self-preservation. A detainee cannot procure their own water, seek emergency medical care, or escape a lethal environment.
Consequently, the state assumes a non-delegable duty of care.
Section 34(1) (a) of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria explicitly guarantees that no citizen shall be subjected to torture, inhuman, or degrading treatment.
This is reinforced by the Administration of Criminal Justice Act (ACJA) 2015 and the Anti-Torture Act of 2017, which explicitly hold supervisory and command officers criminally liable for custodial abuse, neglect, or inhumane holding conditions under their watch.
Furthermore, Section 30 of the ACJA mandates prompt administrative bail or arraignment before a court within 24 to 48 hours for non-capital alleged offences.
Holding dozens of individuals indefinitely in squalid cells is not merely bad practice; it is an explicit statutory violation.
Custody is not a concession granted by security agencies; it is a fiduciary trust governed by strict legal limits.
Therefore, President Bola Tinubu’s directive for a comprehensive inquiry must probe far beyond who was physically present when these men stopped breathing.
The investigation must establish the legality and logistics of the arrests, specifically how many individuals were apprehended, under what statutory authority, and whether their detentions were logged immediately in compliance with Section 15 of the ACJA.
It must determine the facility capacity and cell conditions, directly confronting survivor reports that nearly 70 men were crammed into a single holding space measuring barely five square metres, an environmental furnace engineered for asphyxiation.
Furthermore, it must scrutinise the environmental and medical oversight, probing whether there was adequate ventilation, water, and temperature management, what medical intake screenings were conducted, at what point detainees showed distress, and the exact timeline between the first sign of medical crisis and the response of command staff.
These inquiries do not constitute a defence of the NSCDC. They are precisely what institutional accountability demands.
If an officer acted unlawfully, the evidence should establish it. If there was gross criminal negligence, that should be proven in court.
If custodial arrangements were dangerously inadequate, those responsible should not escape liability merely because the failure was structural rather than personal.
Command failure is not an abstract concept; under our legal framework, authority carries personal criminal consequences.
Conversely, if an officer publicly linked to this tragedy is ultimately shown to have been innocent of wrongdoing, that finding must carry the exact same weight as a finding of culpability.
An investigation is not a mechanism for confirming what public outrage has already decided. It is a search for facts.
We must also confront the operational choices that create over-crowded custodial death traps in the first place.
The state’s campaign against illegal mining has increasingly relied on indiscriminate dragnet arrests, sweeping up scores of artisanal laborers, rural youths, and bystanders in mining sites to project swift action.
Yet, artisanal miners represent the most vulnerable, low end link in a complex economic chain. The political syndicates, corporate fronts, and mineral financiers who organise, fund, and profit from illegal mineral extraction remain largely untouched in distant urban centres.
Confronting illegal mining is a legitimate national priority.
But mass arrests without immediate processing, proper facility staging, or intelligence led targeting transform enforcement into a chaotic dragnet.
A government cannot solve a complex economic crime by packing dozens of low level labourers into small holding cells without basic life support infrastructure.
Condemning illegal mining does not require us to abandon the constitutional rights of detainees.
Even if every one of the 37 individuals were guilty of the administrative or economic offences alleged, the penalty for illegal mining under Nigerian law is not extrajudicial death by custodial neglect.
Nigeria has witnessed this pattern far too often.
A tragedy occurs. Public anger flares. Cameras capture the inauguration of investigative panels, suspensions are announced, and promises are made that “no one will be spared.”
Then, public attention drifts.
The findings disappear into government archives, the families are left with unhealed wounds, and the institutions wait quietly for the next disaster.
If the inquiry into the Minna deaths merely results in removing a few names from the NSCDC payroll, it will have failed.
To ensure this tragedy marks a structural turning point for the Nigerian justice system, three immediate reforms must emerge from this report.
First, the state must enact strict, legally enforceable occupancy limits for all pre-trial detention facilities across the NSCDC, the Nigeria Police Force, and other security agencies, paired with mandatory, neutral medical in-take assessments within two hours of detention.
Second, the government must grant the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) and the legal community unannounced, 24/7 access to all temporary holding facilities nationwide to audit cell conditions and arrest logs.
Third, prosecutors must actively utilise the Anti-Torture Act of 2017 to hold commanding officers criminally accountable when gross overcrowding, illegal detention past statutory bail limits, or reckless neglect leads to injury or loss of life.
The families of the 37 victims deserve more than a press statement expressing official regret.
They deserve absolute clarity.
They deserve to know where their relatives were taken, the conditions in which they were kept, when officials noticed they were in distress, what medical interventions were attempted, and why those interventions failed.
They deserve to know whether their loved ones could have been saved and, if so, who failed to save them.
The state took these men alive because it claimed the sovereign authority to arrest and detain them.
That authority carries a legal duty that does not evaporate because a person is a suspect.
What Nigeria owes these 37 families is not a convenient conclusion or political theater.
It owes them the unvarnished truth, a truth rigorous enough to convict the guilty, exonerate the innocent, reform a broken custodial system, and finally answer how human beings entered the State’s care alive and emerged from it dead.
Shaakaa can be reached on: shaakaastephanie@yahoo.com
