The death of 37 suspected illegal miners in horrendous circumstances in Minna, Niger State, in the custody of the state chapter of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) is indecorous, incautious and iniquitous outright.
If the the accusations against the NSCDC operatives who took custody of the victims after their arrest are eventually established by the probes that have already been instituted into the mind-boggling incident, then the heartless men deserve the maximum hammer of the law. Whatever happened to their humanity!
Although the paramilitary organization attempted to weave a canard around the incident by claiming that the victims died of an outbreak of a disease, it came to light that they might have died of suffocation due to overcrowding and poor ventilation in a NSCDC detention cell between September 15 and 17, 2026. That was after they were arrested during anti-mining raids in the Wushishi-Lukoto area west of Minna.
According to some of the survivors, 65 detainees were clamped into a single, poorly ventilated cell. They alleged that security personnel also sprayed an unidentified chemical substance into the locked cell, causing severe panic, choking, coughing and difficulty in breathing.
The detainees suffered intense heat and asphyxiation, with some losing consciousness or exhibiting signs of distress such as foaming at the mouth and vomiting blood before 37 of them died.
A survivor told newsmen on hospital bed: “We were jam-packed in the cell; no ventilation for us to breathe well. All of a sudden, we realised that we could not breathe and we were all scampering for where to get fresh air. We even appealed to them several times and banged the cell door, but they refused to answer us.”
Another survivor said he was lucky to stay alive because he was near the cell’s entrance, where he could breathe better. “We were screaming for help,” he recalled. He said they were telling the guards that “people are dying one after the other. They did not believe us.”
Some of the survivors rued their fate. They said they would have resisted arrest had they known it was going to end in a grisly experience, leaving families and relatives to mourn their deceased colleagues, many of whom were teenagers working to fend for impoverished households or pay school fees.
The backlash was momentary. First, the Federal Government and the NSCDC Headquarters in Abuja suspended the Niger State NSCDC Commandant, Suberu Siyaka Aniviye, along 20 other possibly culpable personnel. President Bola Tinubu then ordered a transparent inquiry.
While the Federal Government was putting finishing touches to the composition of the federal probe panel ordered by the President, the Niger State Governor, Mohammed Umaru Bago, announced his own 10-member investigative committee alongside medical and forensic examinations (autopsies) to determine the exact cause of death.
Violent protests then broke out in the evening of Thursday, September 17, in the capital of the mineral-rich state. The survivors’ heart-rending tales detailing their insufferable ordeal in the hands of the NSCDC operatives, did much to incense the protesters.
The following day, the protests intensified as dozens of young people, including miners and their relatives, gathered menacingly near the NSCDC’s office in the city. Police cordoned off the area and attempted to disperse the protesters and quell the obstreperous outbursts by firing teargas.
Security forces at a point allegedly fired live rounds as protesters, some armed with sticks, machetes and traditional hunting rifles, became unruly, calling for justice. Some protesters tried to raze government buildings in the Tunga neighbourhood, but the attempt was stymied by security forces. Soldiers and police officers patrolled the streets of Minna to try to restore order.
The street protests and civil unrest impelled the state government to impose a temporary dusk-to-dawn curfew to contain the mayhem.
The Federal Government eventually inaugurated its own independent investigative committee a week after, precisely last Tuesday, to probe the deaths of the illegal miners as ordered by the President.
The Minister of Interior, Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, who inaugurated the committee, said the panel was constituted to establish the circumstances surrounding the miners’ deaths and recommend appropriate actions.
According to the minister, the committee would identify the deceased and establish the immediate and remote causes, as well as the time and place of their deaths.
He also said the committee would investigate the circumstances leading to their arrest and detention, examine the legality and conditions of the detention facility. It will also determine whether relevant laws, detention procedures and human rights standards were complied with.
The responsiveness of the federal and state authorities to the tragedy is laudable. The steps taken so far are also in order. Let the probes ravel out the exact cause of the miners’ death, the circumstances surrounding their tragic fate and the culpability of those involved. Anyone found derelict in his duty or who acted ultra vires concerning the detainees should be publicly prosecuted and dealt with according to the law.
More importantly, whoever took the decision to lump 65 human beings, not chickens, into a small, poorly ventilated cell, locked them in and consequently ignored the yelps from the victims as life was ebbing from them belongs in the lair. He or she deserves no mercy. The law must take its course to redress the mindless waste of precious lives.
Besides, families of the victims must be properly identified and heavily compensated. Let the federal and governments of mineral-rich states also put up a robust regime of incentives that will discourage school age children from dropping out of school for a gnarly daily grind in illegal mining pits.
This tragedy has, however, thrown off an undercurrent that must be addressed by the authorities. Niger, one of the largest states in Nigeria, is rich in gold and also sits on deposits of other minerals such as tantalite, copper and lithium, which are in strong demand for use in electric vehicles and clean energy technology. Those resources thus attract thousands of artisanal miners.
The intractable problem of banditry in Niger and other states like Zamfara and Katsina is believed to be partly linked to the scramble for gold reserves dug up in illegal mines in these areas.
The development, according to a foreign agency report, is fuelling violence by criminal gangs, who allegedly tax the miners and demand a cut from the extracted ore as a levy to allow them access to the pits.
Most of the illegally mined gold, the report said, quoting a 2024 Swissaid report, is smuggled to the United Arab Emirates, where it is laundered into the global supply chain in Europe, the US, Asia and South Africa.
However, the so-called illegal miners being hounded by security agents are mere minions working for big shots who are the shadowy but powerful forces behind most of these illegal pits. Those whose lives are daily being imperiled at the illegal mining pits are mostly teenagers merely eking out a living. Some are fending for their poverty-stricken families. Many of them are school dropouts.
Rueing the Minna tragedy, the Niger State Governor, Bago, lamented that many of those who lost their lives in the Minna tragedy were children, aged between 14 and 18, who had abandoned school to work in the mines. “There are issues of illegal mining and it is taking a toll on our children,” he lamented.
Let the authorities go after the big ‘masquerades’ behind the illegal mining activities in these mineral-rich states who are in cahoots with foreign cartels to plunder the nation’s mineral resources.
They should put them out of business or better still, compel them to legitimize their operations by joining the league of those who have obtained proper mining licences from the Federal Ministry of Solid Minerals and pay appropriate taxes to the government.
That way, a sizeable portion of the prodigious foreign exchange being lost to non-state actors through smuggling will find its way into the government’s kitty.