By Ibrahim Maigida Shehu
Thirty-seven young people arrested in an operation against suspected illegal mining at M.I. Wushishi/Lukoto later died in NSCDC custody. The state has ordered inquiries and autopsies, the police is to do an investigation, the other security agencies also launched investigations.
The Niger State NSCDC Commandant has been suspended. That is procedure. It is not yet truth.
These were not charged as bandits or terrorists. Many appear to have been seeking a living from artisanal work to feed their families, help their parents and get themselves daily earnings, but the state has failed to regularise.
The question on the lips of every right-thinking citizen is who ordered the arrest? Until forensic findings are published, breakout of disease, poisoning, overcrowding and suffocation remain allegations that must be tested, not assumed.
The site itself cannot be left outside the inquiry. There are allegations that some powerful individuals linked and connected in the state have, for some time, sought to take over or gain control of this particular ground because of its mineral potential though those claims remain to be proven.
In Minna those claims now have a sharper name attached to them. Side talk in the city is that the State Governor has a personal interest just as it happened in Zamfara in taking over the mining location, and that a proposal is in the offing to relocate M.I. Wushishi residents under the excuse of environmental cleanup.
It is also said, as a matter of local certainty rather than published record, that he is in many gold sites and that a weekly gold return is made to him a boast he is alleged to have made, at one time, to people around him. Those are grave assertions. They are not proof.
They are precisely the sort of talk that an inquiry which stops at cells and commandants will leave hanging over the thirty-seven dead.
They are serious enough to require answers on the record: who is interested in the mining rights; who has applied for licences or concessions of that same location; whether earlier attempts or proposals were made to takeover the site; whether any application or commercial interest was pending before the arrests; whether any relocation or “cleanup” plan for M.I. Wushishi existed before the raid; and whether any such interest is connected to the operation. Let the documents speak.
Let us also invite the Code of Conduct Bureua and its Tribunal to look into asset declarations, licence files, task-force minutes and gold-market inventories speak.
Gossip in Minna is not a substitute for paper, mining in Niger State is not an orphan file. Licences are federal. Administration on the ground is state.
The Director-General of Mineral Resources is by name Ademola Banjo, appointed in March 2024 by the Governor. From the fact check it is confirmed he was a banker and businessman; he was formerly a staff of First City Monument Bank.
His brief is not to grant mining leases. It is to profile operators, and sit on enforcement structures, including the 2024 illegal-mining task force. A lot of questions here to ask.
That architecture makes the silence on output indefensible. Who holds the statistics on gold leaving Niger State by licensed concession and by informal routes?
If influential interests wanted this site including, if the talk in Minna is ever to be retired, interests at the very top of the state, the public is entitled to see the paper trail, not a body count.
No one should hide behind informal mining to escape the law; proven offences must go to court. Being locked up is not a licence to die, and earning a living from the pits is not the same as waging war.
The inquiry should set out, in public, the government’s decision at it State Security Council meeting, the officer who authorised the raid, the unit that executed it, the conditions of detention, and the official record of what the ground has yielded including who benefits when the ground is cleared.
That accounting is due to the thirty-seven families. It is due to Niger State as it due to citizens of Nigeria as well.
Ibrahim Maigida Shehu, Esq, Writes from Maitumbi Minna.