Teslim Adebayo

OPINION: A Report That Indicts Itself — The Contradiction at the Heart of the Minna Detainee Deaths Probe Dr Bukura Ahmed Let me begin by acknowledging the diligence of the committee that investigated the deaths of thirty-three detainees in Niger State. The work was painstaking, the findings are damning and the document they produced is one that every Nigerian who cares about accountability should read. Thirty-three dead. Fourteen of them minors. Fifty men and boys crammed into a twenty-square-metre cell, banging on the doors and begging for water while officers stood by and did nothing. The executive summary attributes the deaths to environmental asphyxia; a phrase that reads less like a medical finding and more like a verdict on the Nigerian state itself. For all of that, the committee deserves credit. But for all of that, the report also trips over its own feet in a way that should trouble every Nigerian who believes accountability means something. Here is the contradiction and it is not a small one. The same report that recommends a total overhaul and restructuring of the NSCDC leadership also finds in its own words that the arrest operation was carried out without the requisite approval from NSCDC National Headquarters. No proper planning, no involvement of the mining authorities, no involvement of the NSCDC leadership in Abuja or its Zonal Headquarters. The operation was conceived, executed and concealed at command level, far from the eyes of the Corps' leadership in Abuja. The commandant who ordered it has admitted as much; the operation was hidden from the leadership that would ordinarily have ordered t thorough investigation, profiled the suspects, shared intelligence, advised on the mode of operation and brought in sister agencies had the scale of the operation warranted it. None of that happened. The now suspended commandant acted on his own operational discretion and that discretion boomeranged with catastrophic consequences. If the report's own findings are true, then the National Headquarters is not the architect of this tragedy. It is a victim of its own subordinates. So why, then, does the same report call for the decapitation of that leadership? Why should the National Headquarters take the fall for an operation it was never told about? There are over thirty-six state commands, plus the FCT and the zonal structures and one of them chose to go rogue to bypass every laid-down channel, to conceal an operation from the very leadership that exists to supervise it and the remedy the committee proposes is to overhaul the leadership? What of the Niger command that failed to consult the proper channel before mounting such an operation? What of the officers who planned the raid, who crammed fifty human beings into a cell, who ignored their cries for help? What should their fate be, if the leadership that knew nothing is to be overhauled? The report rightly recommends murder charges against those officers. It should have stopped there or at least been honest that the two recommendations cannot comfortably coexist. You cannot have it both ways. Either the leadership knew in which case "gross leadership failure" is a euphemism for complicity and overhaul is the minimum consequence or the leadership did not know, in which case the failure is one of supervision and systems and the remedy is targeted reform not decapitation. The committee wants to absolve the top of knowledge while punishing it for sins it knew nothing about. Consider what this means in practice. The NSCDC has, over the years, done real and often unacknowledged work; reforming its operations, fighting saboteurs of critical national assets, protecting pipelines, deploying the Mining Marshals, coordinating smoothly with sister agencies to fight crime. The report does not commend any of this. It does not weigh it. It simply arrives at the easiest recommendation in any Nigerian probe report overhaul the leadership a recommendation that is vague, ...