By Dr Umar Sa’ad Aliyu
Twice in twelve years, under two different ministers and two different agencies, the ministry charged with securing Nigerians has instead presided over their deaths. The pattern is worth naming plainly, because it keeps recurring.
In March 2014, an estimated 6.5 million Nigerians converged on stadiums nationwide chasing just 4,000 vacancies in the Nigeria Immigration Service. There was no crowd-control infrastructure and no medical planning. Stampedes killed at least 16 people, some tallies put it higher, including pregnant women. Then Interior Minister first blamed applicant impatience before eventually accepting responsibility. He was later charged with fraud tied to the N677 million recruitment exercise. What the tragedy exposed was a ministry that had outsourced a mass event to a contractor without the basic safeguards to keep applicants alive.
A decade later, a strikingly similar reckoning has arrived. On September 17, 2026, 37 detainees arrested by the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps over suspected illegal mining in Niger State’s Wushishi-Lukoto area were found dead in custody, days after being picked up in enforcement raids on September 15 and 16. The NSCDC’s initial explanation, a suspected disease outbreak, satisfied no one. President Tinubu ordered an investigation. Interior Minister Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo suspended the Niger State commandant and twenty other officers and empanelled a ten-member independent committee, including a retired DSS deputy director-general, to determine whether the detainees were mistreated, tortured, or simply denied medical care. Some reports suggest several of the dead were teenagers, a detail the committee’s forensic work should confirm or rule out rather than leave to speculation.
The deaths came from an enforcement mandate the ministry itself has been rapidly expanding. Mr. Tunji-Ojo, a trained engineer who has made technology the centrepiece of his tenure, has rolled out centralised passport processing, e-gates, biometric tracking in correctional facilities, and the Mining Marshal Corps, a specialised NSCDC unit created in 2024 to police illegal mining sites nationwide. That unit is the same one whose Niger State operation ended in 37 deaths.
None of this is to dismiss the ministry’s genuine gains: cleared passport backlogs, faster diaspora services, real decongestion in correctional facilities. But critics increasingly argue that the pace of reform has outrun the ministry’s capacity to assess what it is doing. New enforcement units have absorbed expanded arrest powers without a matching investment in custodial infrastructure, medical oversight, or the basic welfare systems needed to safely hold the people those units detain. Technology and enforcement have moved ahead of the regulatory scaffolding built to make their use safe, in a ministry where getting that sequence wrong costs lives.
The common thread linking 2014 and 2026 is not the mechanics, a crowd crush at a recruitment ground versus deaths inside a detention facility, but the underlying failure: authority and capacity keep expanding, over job applicants then, over detainees now, without the safeguards to manage that expansion responsibly. In 2014, nobody had planned for millions of desperate applicants converging on unprepared stadiums. In 2026, nobody appears to have adequately monitored conditions inside a facility holding three dozen detainees, even as the ministry poured resources into e-gates and data centres.
Until the ministry adopts a genuinely risk-based approach, assessing the human consequences of new powers before rollout rather than investigating them after citizens die, it will keep producing the same headline: Nigeria’s internal security ministry, once again, on trial for deaths it existed to prevent.
Dr. Umar Sa’ad Aliyu is a lecturer in the Department of physics , Federal University of Lafia, Gandu, Lafia, Nasarawa State, Nigeria
