46 years after Black Maria, Minna - THISDAYLIVE

This weekend was Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corp’s [NSCDC] worst hour since the Oga at the Top saga nearly ten years ago, when its state commandant in [I think] Ogun State was asked to name his organisation’s website. He said only his “Oga at the Top,” the Commandant General, will know it. The episode made the Corp’s analogue-age officers a laughing stock among digital-age Nigerian youths.

What happened in Minna, Niger State at the weekend however made NSCDC not an analogue joke but a monumental national tragedy. It was the worst such tragedy in official custodial hands in Nigeria since March 1980, when fifty suspects suffocated to death in the back of a police Black Maria van, in the premises of a Lagos magistrate’s court. They had been brought to the court to be arraigned for various offences, but there was delay, so the policemen left them in the van, in the hot sun, for three hours, ignored their shouts, bangs and cries for help, until fifty of them suffocated to death.

According to NSDC’s Niger State Command, “In its renewed efforts to rid the state of illegal mining activities, conducted a ‘burst operation’ on 15th and 16th September, 2026, leading to the arrest of suspected illegal miners and the recovery of exhibits.” The operation, it said, “yielded significant results, with scores of suspected illegal miners arrested and various exhibits recovered.” Significant results! In the wake of the death in its men’s hands of 37 very young persons, it was a wonder indeed that anyone will say “significant results” were yielded from the Corps’ so-called burst operation at the M.I. Wushishi and Lukoto areas of Niger State.

The statement, signed by NSCDC’s Niger State Commandant Suberu Siyaka Aniviye, said, tongue-in-cheek, “However, in the early hours of 17th September, 2026, scores of the detained suspects were found dead, following a suspected outbreak of disease.” If ever there was an insulting statement by a public officer, this was it. Scores of the detained suspects were found dead! People were in your custody; you herded them into a dungeon fit for a Nazi extermination chamber, you apparently went home and slept soundly with your family, and the men you posted on guard duty apparently disappeared too because they didn’t hear the shouts and pleas for help from the detainees who cried out that they were suffocating, only for you to return the following day [or perhaps, for your officers to report to you at home the following day] that scores of the detainees had been found dead.

Mr. Aniviye also jumped to a conclusion, far ahead of the Presidency and the Interior Ministry’s pledge to conduct an open, thorough and impartial probe, by saying the boys died “following a suspected outbreak of disease.” I see. I flipped through the NSCDC’s enabling Act to see if it is a secret Medical agency capable of carrying out autopsies. If so, it must have more capacity in that regard than all the Teaching Hospitals combined, because they normally take days to assemble a team of pathologists, examine medical records and conduct an autopsy to determine the cause of death, but NSCDC’s Niger State Command did all of that in record time and with apparent great skill.

Mr. Aniviye, your men raided what you said were illegal mining sites. A mining site in Nigeria, whether legal or illegal, is not exactly a five-star hotel. There you find mostly able-bodied young men, stripped down to their pants, in the hot sun, drenched in sweat, covered in dust and soot, walking barefooted among sharp rocks and crevices, wielding heavy diggers and shovels, having eaten only groundnuts, mangoes and the occasional gari bought on credit from young girl hawkers who come in from nearby villages, digging for days and weeks and months hoping and praying to dig up a precious stone that will turn their lives around, mostly without success. Yet, they were mostly in tolerable good health and in good physical conviction, but within hours of being taken to an NSCDC cell they died, and the Commandant says it was due to a disease outbreak, which was absent at the mining site.

The Federal Government of Nigeria, which these days is earnestly looking for money from every pocket, every dingy shop and under every rock crevice, has been fighting to stamp out illegal mining, which it says robs the public till of billions if not trillions of naira. The question to ask however is, has illegal mining been designated in law as a capital offence punishable with death, alongside armed robbery, insurgency, ritual murder and coup plotting? Even kidnapping, banditry, pipeline vandalism and baby factories are not yet capital offences, except in some forward-looking states. In any case, even a suspected capital offender must first be placed through the custodial, investigative and then the judicial process, not just ferried post-haste into an overcrowded den with poor ventilation.

The story got worse than that. One survivor said a NSCDC officer sprayed a chemical, possibly a disinfectant, in the crowded cell. Pray, do you spray Shelltox or Mobil insecticide to kill pests when people are inside a room? Another survivor of the sordid episode said they were so thirsty that they drank their own urine in the cell. The last time I read about anyone drinking his own urine, during our school days, was then Prime Minister of India Morarji Desai in 1977. He did so willingly, as some sort of therapeutic medicine, being a Hindu mystic, but the Minna detainees were drinking urine out of necessity. Niger State Governor Mohammed Umaru Bago said blood and bruises were found on some of the corpses; doctors may later determine that that is consistent with suffocation and banging of heads against the wall by men who struggled, cried, fainted, then collapsed and died.

Mr. Aniveye concluded his insulting statement by saying, “The Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps, Niger State Command, remains fully committed to the enforcement of human rights and subscribes to international human rights charters, while remaining steadfast in the enforcement of its core mandates, including the protection of lives and property, as well as critical national assets.”

Wonderful. Enforcement of human rights, by herding suspects into a crowded den to die well before any judge got to examine the evidence against them? Which international human rights charters? Those subscribed to by Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Benito Mussolini’s Italy, Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot, Ratko Mlajic’s Bosnian Serb Army or more recently, the Israeli Army in Gaza?  Enforcement of NSCDC’s core mandates, which include usurping the powers of the police and judiciary and sidestepping constitutional rights of suspects to presumption of innocence and fair hearing? Protection of critical national assets? Which national assets are more critical than human lives? If youths can be killed in this way, who is left to benefit from oil refineries and pipelines, power stations, GSM masts, rare earth minerals or coastal roads?

Riots broke out in Minna when parents and relatives gathered at the general hospital and could not obtain the remains of their boys for burial. Hoodlums then attacked some public property, including policemen and vehicles of the Niger State Transport Authority, both of whom had nothing to do with the tragedy, and Governor Bago had to declare a 12-hour curfew.

The Presidency and the Interior Ministry responded with unusual speed to this tragedy, with Interior Minister Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo paying a quick visit to Minna, condoling with the people and government of Niger State. A probe panel headed by retired DSS Deputy Director General Jonathan Kure, with a Professor of Histopathology, a former Law School director general and activist Deji Adeyanju as members, was instituted at the weekend and given two weeks to submit its findings. Another probe was began by the National Human Rights Commission. Tunji-Ojo also suspended Commandant Aniviye and nineteen of his fellow officers and men. Among those suspended were the Niger State Command’s Officer in Charge of Station Guard; Arresting Officer/Officer in Charge, Investigation; Head, Intelligence/Investigation; Officer in Charge, Legal; Night Duty Officer and many guards. Only a thorough investigation will exonerate some of them, if any.

I am not sure mere suspension will send enough message to their colleagues all over the country. I have a suggestion, Mr. Tunji-Ojo. Why not lock them up at least for a night in the same cell where they held the hapless illegal miners? Not to die, no, but just to get a little taste of it.

Sending a message is important because there is reason to believe that similar tragedies could yet unfold in some other parts of the country. At the weekend, a long feature article in Punch reported how officials of the Lagos State Ministry of Environment and Water Resources, Lagos State Environmental Sanitation Corps and agents of the Kick Against Indiscipline, while enforcing a state government order to rid the state of beggars and hawkers, conducted mass arrests and herded suspects, including under-aged ones, into Back Maria trucks [though they have repainted them green]. Someone should step in before we have a third Black Maria moment in Nigeria soon.

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