Jeff Godwin Doki Ph.D
Let me begin today’s dialogue with the proverbial wisdom of our ancestors: “if you must blame the hawk for wickedness, first blame mother hen for exposing her children to danger”. Take it that mother hen is Nigeria our country, or better still, our rulers and, indeed, those charged with the responsibility of guarding or protecting our patrimony. Take it also that the hawk, on other hand, are the 37 hungry Nigerian young miners who went to dig gold and were arrested by the State, for the crime of daring to look for their daily bread, and who died in a congested security cell in Minna. If we accept these two control statements, then it becomes apparent that the Nigerian state takes all the blame for exposing these young miners to danger by its willful refusal to provide food, employment or other basic amenities for them.
Let me speak very plainly now. On September 15 and16, 2026, the Nigerian Security and Civil Defense Corps (NSCDC) raided some mining sites at Wushishi and Lukoto area of Minna, Niger State. In the course of the raid, the NSCDC arrested scores of artisanal miners and locked them up in a single cell where they died of suffocation. Presently, their death is still shrouded in mystery and controversy as there are several conflicting reports surrounding the whole tragedy. But let us be clear on this: the death of 37 young miners who have refused to swell the ranks of the dagger-and- bullet profession of desperate robbers and who have chosen to live by very honest means, is to say the least, a tragedy of the greatest magnitude and embarrassing proportions.
Every day I wake up it seems clear to me that ours is a nation of short memories. Let me take you through a few more of these tragedies. On September 3, 2026, we also lost the same number (37) of young Nigerians at Okari Jetty, Okrika Mainland in Rivers State. On midnight of that day, over 200 young men in wooden boats paddled gallantly to siphon petrol from a vessel that was loading Indorama fuel(Crack C5). The product was pumping at high pressure and the fumes had saturated the area. 37 of these young men choked to death, 6 were missing and about 43 feared dead. In the same Rivers State, a bus carrying crude oil had exploded at Emuoha in 2023 killing over hundred Nigerians travelling in about five vehicles. Recall also that on October, 17,1998 a leaked NNPC pipeline went up in flames from a spark in Jesse, Delta State killing over 1000 villagers who had rushed to scoop petrol with buckets. And in April, 2022 an illegal refinery explosion around the border of Imo and Rivers State burnt over 100 young Nigerians beyond recognition. The list of tragedies that claimed Nigerian citizens in recent times is as long as a railway line.
In my school days, I took a Course of Political theory at the University, where I learnt that the State exists because citizens surrender their rights to personal violence in exchange for protection. But from all available evidence, it seems clear that in Nigeria everything about this political logic is completely topsy turvy. Nigeria, is a state that kills its own citizens. Frantz Fanon that Africana apostle of violence had anticipated this kind of state violence a very long time ago when he hinted that the national bourgeoisie shall turn its back on the people by unleashing violence against its own people. But it was, Johan Galtung, that famed Norwegian Peace researcher who provided a more perceptible insight by drawing attention to what he grandly calls ‘structural violence’.
According to Galtung, we experience on a daily basis, some form of violence that is not direct or palpable like war. This kind of structural violence has to do with the social conditions such as pervasive poverty, oppression of the poor by the rich, exclusion, want, fear, disease, police brutality (and note: that the police also include NSCDC), intimidation of ordinary people by those in power, monopolization of resources and power by some sections of the society. It goes without saying that in Minna, as in many other parts of Nigeria, citizens experience structural violence on a daily basis.
So, here again are we confronted with another round of structural violence. When NSCDC detain and kill young miners in detention, when hungry young Nigerians dare fumes of toxic to siphon fuel on the sea in order to get food for their bellies and they get arrested by the police, that is not security. In a similar manner, when police shoot protesters, when the government demolishes poor communities in Lagos without alternative housing, when the army attack villages raping women, that is not security.
The sum of reflection behind it all is the failure of the state to provide and protect its citizens. The young 37 miners in Minna are hungry and poor citizens trying to survive in a mineral-rich state like Niger. These 37 miners were killed not by bandits but in the custody of the state whose duty is to protect. The deeper implication is that the Nigerian state is simply revealing its class character. When poor citizens are honestly and desperately trying to access their means of livelihood (mine gold), the state which has abandoned them to misery and penury turns around to criminalize them and kill them. There is a queer irony here at work: the state that should protect has become the killer. But more irksome is the fact that these 37 young men were digging gold with crude implements like shovels and hoes and for that reason were labelled ‘illegal,’ while the politically connected cartels who smuggle tons of gold with excavators are called investors.
It is quite simple: the artisanal miner is criminalized for being poor while the elite is protected for being rich. Watch it: there are more obvious parallels. In Minna, the young 37 were digging gold to survive, in Okrika they were scooping fuel for the same reason, survival. At this point, it is necessary to remind ourselves that whether in Minna or Okrika, the 37 young men were both engaged in artisanal extraction in their own country where oil and gold wealth is stolen yearly in Billions of Dollars by the ruling class.
Again, in both instances, the State has given them a label: in Minna, the 37 are called ‘illegal miners’, in Okrika, they are called ‘oil thieves’. Let us be clear on this: the Nigerian state has moved from neglect to active criminalization. The natural resources may change, say, from petrol to gold, but the class character remains the same: the poor scoop to survive while the elite smuggle to accumulate. So, we find ourselves in a situation where the ruling elite privatizes the nation’s resources and legalizes its own theft. The poor try to access the same resources in order to eat and they get killed either through explosion, by fumes or by suffocation in an NSCDC cell. It is a sad reality that the Nigerian poor die every day for trying to extract or scoop what is legitimately their own.
Before I pass my verdict, let me state that in the midst of these calamites we can still hear some statesman-like voices that have rebuked and stoutly denounced theses acts of insanity. And one of such patriotic and clamorous voices is Femi Falana.
Finally, it should be clear to anybody with two eyes that we live in a lawless nation and if anyone is in doubt about it, the Minna 37 should have settled such doubts by now. We, the people, call for an independent forensic autopsy to be made public and not just a committee report chaired by a politician which shall be buried in one office in either Minna or Abuja. In other words, the families of the 37 young miners deserve to know how their children died: was it suffocation, chemical, spray or poison? More than that, artisanal mining should be decriminalized and formalized not just in Niger State but in other states of the federation especially Plateau. Give the poor licenses to mine, provide them with safety kits and other logistics. Most of these young miners are graduates from universities and they have no jobs. Poverty cannot be eradicated by locking young men up in a cell. Mining should be made more attractive and accessible to Nigerian youth.
I am done: it remains for me to emphasize that the 37 dispossessed miners in Minna have committed no crime in that they have only attempted to re-appropriate a fraction of the nation’s resources for their survival. This is not theft at all. It is a spontaneous resistance or better still constructive survival. For the state to consider them as wrongdoers is tantamount to the criminalization of poverty. After all, the state could not give them a means of livelihood.
But go home with this: their death in the hands of NSCDC at a time when Nigerians are not actually living but merely existing, at a time when most Nigerians are dazed and downcast, at a time when most citizens prefer to whisper their misery and misgivings in the sanctuary of their hearts or bedrooms, is a loud warning that the nation is relapsing into a more horrendous barbarism; it is also a loud warning that the nation is on a slippery slope or that we are fast receding to that dark and dismal era of Sorrow, Tears and Blood, to use Fela’s phraseology.
Minna 37: I lament your passing with tears as sovereign as the blood from the heart.
*Jeff Godwin Doki is a Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Jos (UNIJOS), Nigeria