Thirty-seven Nigerians entered government custody alive. None came out. Now someone must explain why.
Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has placed responsibility for those deaths squarely on three men: President Bola Tinubu, Minister of Solid Minerals Development Dele Alake, and Minister of Interior Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo. In a statement issued on Saturday, 19 September 2026, through his Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication, Phrank Shaibu, Atiku argued that suspending junior officers — as the government has already done with twenty NSCDC personnel — cannot substitute for accountability at the top of the chain of command.
The victims, many of them teenagers, were arrested by agents of the Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps during an operation targeting alleged illegal mining in Niger State. They were transported to and confined in an NSCDC detention facility, where survivors later told authorities that the cell was so badly overcrowded and poorly ventilated that breathing became a struggle. By Thursday, 17 September 2026, all thirty-seven were dead.
Why does Atiku hold these three men responsible?
The logic of ministerial accountability is not complicated, and Atiku did not treat it as such. Tunji-Ojo superintends the Interior Ministry, which oversees the NSCDC — the very agency whose facility became a death chamber. Alake’s Ministry of Solid Minerals is directly connected to the enforcement operation that produced the arrests. As for President Tinubu, Atiku’s position is that the buck stops at the presidency, and that a government which cannot prevent thirty-seven custodial deaths has no business offering press releases as consolation.
Atiku drew a pointed comparison to the 2014 Nigeria Immigration Service recruitment disaster, in which at least sixteen young Nigerians died and the then supervising minister, Abba Moro, faced investigation and prosecution. He asked, with considerable force, why that standard should not apply now. “Thirty-seven Nigerians, many of them teenagers, entered government custody alive. Thirty-seven of them died there. The Tinubu administration cannot explain away 37 bodies with press releases, suspensions and bureaucratic excuses,” the statement read.
His demands are specific and unambiguous: an independent criminal investigation — not an internal inquiry in which government officials examine themselves — with all detention records, communication logs, medical reports and available surveillance footage secured immediately, independent autopsies conducted, and the victims’ families granted representation throughout the process. Investigators, he insisted, must establish who authorised the operation, how many detainees were held in the cell, who bore responsibility for their welfare, and crucially, at what point officials first became aware that people in their custody were in distress.
Atiku also situated the broader tragedy within the economic conditions he attributes to the current administration. He argued that unemployment and poverty had pushed young Nigerians into illegal mining as a matter of survival, and that the state’s response — mass arrest and detention in inadequate facilities — compounded a crisis of its own making. “An allegation is not a death sentence. An arrest warrant is not a warrant to kill. Government custody must never become a gateway to the mortuary,” he said.
The government’s own response so far has been to constitute a ten-member committee, announced by Tunji-Ojo on the same day as Atiku’s statement, acting on a directive from President Tinubu for what the presidency described as a full, transparent and unobstructed inquiry. Whether that committee qualifies as independent — given that it was assembled by one of the very officials Atiku holds accountable — is precisely the question that will define whether this case ends in justice or in managed silence. Atiku’s answer is already clear: the findings must be made public, and those found responsible must face the law regardless of rank or political connection.