In recent weeks, I have had the privilege of walking the streets of Congo-Russia—the go-to-place for all manner of vices (illicit sex, drugs, guns, etc.)—in Jos North Local Government area. I have also been at numerous meetings with Fulani Ardos and leaders, including inside the much-dreaded Mahanga enclave in Riyom local government. These experiences have been quite revealing for me as a member of the facts-finding panel on the killings in Plateau State. (On the Trail of Plateau Killers – THISDAYLIVE).

Paired with retired Justice Esther Amina Lolo of the Kaduna High court in the same vehicle has afforded me a considerable education about life and our country. Just as I have learnt a lot from other members: Mr. Jonathan Kure, AVM Ibrahim Shafii (rtd), Alhaji Lawal Usman Safana, Mr. Yakubu Bawa, Dr. Peter Gad Shamaki, Hajiya Amina Elelu Ahmed and the secretary and only Plateau State indigene, Mr. Timothy Baba Parlong. But perhaps the greatest education has come from Ben who, like most drivers, is a purveyor of information.

Our chairman, Major General Rogers Nicolas (rtd) has led us to traverse the state on a delicate assignment that is almost concluded. And there was hardly a local government visited where we did not witness throngs of people scavenging at mining sites. But something jolted me last month. Driving through a community where hundreds of people were massed at a mining site, Ben said casually, “Three people were buried alive at that mining site some weeks ago,” pointing to one of the countless informal excavations that dot the landscape like open wounds. ‘Buried alive’! The words hung in the air with the weight of an epitaph nobody would ever read and for days, it haunted me.

When I returned to Abuja and began researching this phenomenon, I discovered that Ben might have been nonchalant about the information because it has become a normalized tragedy. Mining-related deaths, particularly from site collapses that bury workers alive, occur with alarming regularity across Nigeria. In Plateau, Zamfara, Kebbi, and other states where desperate citizens scratch at the earth for tin, gold, and other minerals, this cheap death has become no more than an occupational hazard. Yet, the deafening silence about their fate speaks to a troubling reality about the people we consider to be expendable in our national discourse.

In Plateau State last November, a group of women were at a mining site on Fan Road, in Barkin-Ladi Local Government Area when tragedy struck. “While they were standing, the ground just sank under them,” recounted Sunday Davou Gyang, a native of Kassa in Barkin-Ladi, who lost his son—a 400-level civil engineering student at the University of Jos—in a similar incident some weeks earlier. “One of them was a breastfeeding mother and they took her baby there for her to breast-feed. As she was just feeding the baby, the ground swallowed them all.”

Even if we argue that most Nigerians were not aware of that incident, what about the tragedy that made the front page of practically all newspapers last year? For more than a month after the collapse of a mining pit in Galkogo Community, Shiroro Local Government Area of Niger State on 3rd June 2024, dozens of labourers were still buried beneath the 400-metre dig hole. Although the company, African Minerals and Logistics Limited, and government made rescue efforts, they eventually abandoned the idea, leaving families of the trapped victims to conduct prayers for the repose of souls of their loved ones without seeing their dead bodies. And that was the end of the matter! A few months before then, nine people were buried beneath the earth when a mine pit collapsed on them at Dogon Daji village in Maru Local Government Area of Zamfara State. It became their cemetery.

That repeated funerals for bodies that cannot be accounted for in many of these mining communities has not provoked outrage is essentially due to the class dimension. Make no mistake: this is not an equal-opportunity tragedy. The men and women who die in these collapsing mines are not the children of politicians, heads of agencies or bureaucrats. They are not the relatives of bankers or oil executives or tech entrepreneurs either. They are the desperately poor. Farmers driven from their lands by insecurity. Young men and women with no formal education and fewer opportunities. Children gambling their lives against starvation. These are survival miners. People who descend into hand-dug pits with no engineering support, no safety equipment, and no regulatory oversight. That then explains why these mining fatalities are treated as statistical footnotes rather than human tragedies demanding systemic intervention. Yet, these people die not because they are reckless, but rather because they are poor. And there are also larger issues at play.

From crude oil to solid minerals, we have consistently approached natural resources as something to be grabbed by individuals rather than systematically developed for the good of the collective. The informal mining sector that claims these lives is therefore a symptom of this larger dysfunction. And we must come to terms with the fact that our people cannot dig their way to prosperity. Not like this. True mineral wealth development requires infrastructure, technology, regulation, and most importantly, a vision that sees beyond the immediate extraction to long-term value creation. What we have instead are thousands of individual survival operations that create neither sustainable livelihoods nor meaningful economic growth.

The irony is that Nigeria possesses some of the world’s most diverse mineral deposits. With proper development, our mining sector could provide legitimate employment, generate substantial revenue, and contribute meaningfully to economic diversification. Instead, we have created a wild-west scenario where desperation meets opportunity in the most dangerous possible way. Perhaps more disturbing is our collective amnesia about these deaths. When three people are buried alive in a mine collapse, it doesn’t merit national headlines. No safety inspectors rush to other sites. No emergency protocols are activated. No government officials demand explanation. The machinery of state that springs into action for lesser tragedies involving the connected of our society remains conspicuously silent.

This normalized indifference extends beyond mining. In a country where we have created a hierarchy of grief, proximity to power determines the volume of outrage. Celebrity scandals dominate our discourse while hundreds die in preventable accidents. The absence of sustained media attention also reveals uncomfortable truths about whose stories we consider worth telling and whose death is worth mourning. Yet, these deaths represent a triple failure: of governance that permits unregulated mining; of an economy that offers no alternatives to desperation; and of a society that has learned to look away.

We need immediate intervention in the mining sector: Safety inspections. Basic training. Emergency protocols. But the deeper challenge is addressing the economic hopelessness that drives people into these death traps. Until we create an economy that values all citizens equally, this stream of preventable deaths will continue to flow.

Echoes of Abiola’s Failed Media Dream

In November 1985, the Obafemi Awolowo University (then University of Ife) hosted the trio of the late Dele Giwa, Yakubu Mohammed and Ray Ekpu. On that day, the entire campus was in a frenzy as the celebrated journalists fielded questions from members of the association of campus journalists inside Oduduwa Hall. With Professor Wande Abimbola (‘Babalawo’) as our Vice Chancellor at that period, Ife was a place to dream. And if there was anything that the trio did that day, it was to inspire many of us into believing that journalism is a calling that can be both professionally fulfilling and financially rewarding if done the right way.

Going through the memoir of Mr. Yakubu Mohammed, ‘Beyond Expectations’, a copy of which he graciously sent to me two weeks ago, I cannot but reflect on my own journey as a reporter and how people like him contributed in no small way to fire our imaginations.

With a Bachelor of Science degree in Mass Communication from the University of Lagos in 1975, Mohammed started his career at the ‘New Nigerian’ newspaper (which he had been freelancing for right from campus and had requested him for the NYSC primary assignment) same year. And he rose quickly to become the acting editor of one of the most influential newspapers in the country (if not the continent) at the time. While Mohammed heaps accolades on Mallams Turi Mohammed and Mamman Daura and a few others who helped to nurture his career progression, he also revealed the usual newsroom politics, including the one involving Mr. Mohammed Haruna “who, much later, after intensive trials and tribulations powered by intrigue, rose to become managing director” of the newspaper. Mohammed had proposed Haruna to be his deputy, but it was Mallam Abba Dabo that was elevated instead.

At age 29 in February 1980, something fortuitous happened to Mohammed who was then Associate Editor, operating from Lagos (where the New Nigerian newspaper printed the southern edition). The late Bashorun M.K.O. Abiola visited his (Mohammed’s) Shomolu residence a week after Concord was launched to seek help. The printing press of National Concord had broken down in what Abiola suspected to be a deliberate act of sabotage by opponents. That night, Abiola asked whether Mohammed could get the New Nigerian press to publish for Concord at such short notice. “After hearing the publisher (Abiola) out, I jumped into one of their cars and led them to the Ijora office of the New Nigerian where, for five days in a row, the press staff printed National Concord,” Mohammed recounted. “The ease with which I mobilised the staff back to work that night, after they had closed and gone home to the warm embrace of their families, did not go unnoticed by the influential publisher and international business mogul.” Nine months later, Abiola returned to Mohammed’s apartment, again at night, to ask him to come and work for Concord.

At National Concord, Mohammed began as deputy to Mrs. Doyin Abiola (nee Aboaba who died last month) before succeeding her when she was elevated to the position of Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief. The late Chief Duro Onabule (who would later be Chief Press Secretary to General Ibrahim Babangida) was appointed as Mohammed’s deputy. Although Mohammed, Dele Giwa (editor of Sunday Concord at the time) as well as Ray Ekpu (who joined the Concord editorial board from Sunday Times where he was editor) would later leave to found NEWSWATCH magazine, he paints a vivid picture of what Concord meant to Abiola as well as the intrigues of the early days.

The late Abiola, who would have been 88 last Sunday had he been alive, invested so much time and resources in Concord and the journalists who worked for him. In the process, he elevated the status of Nigerian journalists. But like his other businesses, Concord did not survive Abiola’s political ordeal. And that is a tragic story on its own. Even as a latter-day employee of the media house that is now defunct, I can recall the late Abiola once saying, “of all the ways people describe me, the title I love the most is ‘Concord publisher.’”

But back to ‘Beyond Expectations’. Mohammed has written a most enjoyable and insightful memoir that is easy to read. The dramatic way he was arrested inside the government house in Lokoja by the late General Sani Abacha goons, the controversy arising from the death by letter bomb of Dele Giwa are a few of the interesting recalls. Just as he takes readers behind-the-scenes to the stories that defined a certain era in Nigeria. And not surprisingly, Mohammed offers insights into how NEWSWATCH magazine died. “When Ray (Ekpu), Dan (Agbese), Soji (Akinrinade) and I walked into the warm embrace of Barrister Jimoh Ibrahim, there was nothing to indicate to us that we were about to sign the death warrant of our company, NEWSWATCH Communications Limited,” Yakubu wrote in an account that reveals he still doesn’t understand why the man who is now a Senator from Ondo State acquired a newsmagazine he obviously did not need. “We did not anticipate that any fate worse than our 13-day ordeal in Abacha’s gulag would come our way again. But the calamity that befell us after a handshake with Jimoh Ibrahim was as painful as death.”

As to be expected from a veteran journalist, Mohammed’s memoir is a unique blend of personal narrative and professional experience. Simply by telling his own story, Mohammed provides a unique perspective on the challenges and rewards of being a journalist in Nigeria, especially up to the end of the 20th century. He also provides insights and reflections on some important stories he and colleagues covered, pivotal moments in the country, the people he met along the way, and the impact of his work not only at Concord but also at NEWSWATCH magazine. It is an interesting and informative read.

Well done, Oga Yakubu Mohammed.

• Originally published under a different headline in Segun Adeniyi’s THISDAY column. You can follow him on his X (formerly Twitter) handle @Olusegunverdict and on www.olusegunadeniyi.com