The Minna tragedy: Necropolitics and the Nigerian state
By Promise Adiele
When Cameroonian theorist and philosopher Achille Mbembe coined the term necropolitics in 2003, he had slavery, apartheid, cultural erasure, and brutal racism in mind, conditions in which the state utilized power to decide who lives and dies. Through necropolitics, the state mindlessly inflicts physical, psychological, and economic death on the citizens. Killing the citizens becomes habitual for the state. It strengthens the state’s inclination to savagery, and the lives of the citizens become commonplace. As Shakespeare remarks, “as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport”. Through the sadistic devices of necropolitics, the lives of innocent citizens in Nigeria have become like the lives of flies which the state harvests for fun and sport. There is no slavery in Nigeria, no apartheid, and no racial policies that demarcate communities where death is unleashed on citizens. However, physical, psychological, and economic death have become routine in the country, and inexplicably, the state relishes these orgies.
Nigerians love to play politics with everything. That is how low we have fallen. Every development in the country is interpreted through a political lens, and gradually, our humanity is consequently eroded. Ordinarily, the death of 37 miners in Minna, Niger State, should provoke Nigerians irrespective of ethnicity or political orientation. It should embarrass the government before the international community. But because death has become normal in the country, Mr President can, without shame or any modicum of honour, extend his vacation in Europe while 37 of his citizens lay dead. The President of France, Emmanuel Macron, has abandoned him in France and travelled to the US for the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) meeting. But instead of returning to his country, he has stayed back in France for inscrutable, undisclosed reasons. Nigerians have also become impervious to death or tragic news as long as it does not concern them. But if we continue to look away when tragedy strikes in far-flung places, assuredly, the geography of victims will extend to all those who think they are insulated from harm.
Recently, 37 suspected illegal miners died in the custody of the Nigerian Security and Defence Corps (NSDC) in Minna, Niger State. We are talking about brothers, sisters, uncles, sons, daughters, and breadwinners. They were arrested and detained as suspects. No court of competent jurisdiction pronounced them guilty. Even if they were pronounced guilty, the death penalty was far from their punishment. Yet, they were not guilty but died in the most horrendous circumstances. What did the government do? To feebly suspend some NSDC officials and issue sterile statements with a lame assurance to investigate the cause of the deaths. Case closed. We move on. The chilling, official silence from the government exposes a deeper political complicity. Expectedly, the government unleashed its instruments of force to suppress protests against the deaths of these innocent citizens. Next chapter, please.
While families mourn, the political elite and the administration of President Bola Tinubu remain entirely consumed by political manoeuvring for the 2027 general elections. This stark indifference reveals that human life in Nigeria is no longer a sacred entity to be protected, but a disposable commodity. This structural devaluation of life in the country captures the tenets of necropolitics, which posits that sovereign power is ultimately defined by the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. In Tinubu’s Nigeria, necropolitics has manifested as a brutal mechanism where large segments of the population are subjected to both immediate physical destruction and a slow, agonizing economic death. In the current dispensation, Nigerians are daily led into a darker realm where the state’s primary exercise of sovereignty is the manufacture of death. Under this framework, the state creates death worlds, unique social forms where vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of the living dead.
The mining disaster is not an isolated accident; it is a direct consequence of a necropolitical arrangement. The fate of the arrested 37 illegal miners represents the fate of many innocent people languishing in detention across the country. Many of these people die daily without a voice raised in protest. Security operatives, the police, the army, NSDC and others subject Nigerians to dreadful experiences and many times kill them. These security operatives work on behalf of the state, and therefore represent the state. There are no mechanisms to check their excesses. When 37 miners die, and the state moves on without declaring a national period of mourning, launching a rigorous investigation, or holding corporate actors accountable, it sends a clear sovereign signal – these lives do not matter. Their deaths are treated as acceptable collateral damage in the pursuit of law maintenance. The Tinubu administration’s silence is a performative exercise of necropolitics, a demonstration that the state reserves the right to look away, letting the marginalized die in the shadows while the machinery of power grinds on toward the 2027 ballot boxes.
The contrast between the silence over the mining tragedy and the loud, frenzied preoccupation with the 2027 elections highlights the bleeding alienation of the Nigerian ruling class. In Mbembe’s analysis, necropolitics thrives when the state completely dissociates itself from the organic well-being of its populace. The upcoming election has become a macabre spectacle that sucks all the oxygen out of public discourse. The state’s focus on 2027, while citizens die in the present, reflects a temporal distortion typical of necropolitical regimes. The future survival of the current government is prioritized over the immediate survival of the people. By treating the governance of the country as a perpetual campaign rather than a sacred duty to protect life, the Tinubu administration reduces the citizenry to mere statistics or, worse, voting livestock whose relevance is restricted to a single day every four years.
While the mining tragedy represents sudden, physical death, necropolitics also operates through the gradual creation of conditions that make life unsustainable. In Nigeria today, this is happening via a relentless economic warfare waged against the poor through drastic policy shifts, which unleash suffering on the people. This economic necropolitics manifests as a slow, structural violence that erodes the boundary between life and death. Skyrocketing food inflation has rendered basic sustenance unaffordable for millions, forcing families into a state of chronic malnutrition, which is itself a slow form of physical termination. As the cost of living surges, medical care has become an unattainable luxury. Citizens are dying of preventable illnesses and manageable chronic conditions because they cannot afford drugs or hospital fees. The sheer weight of economic deprivation inflicts severe mental and psychological trauma, crushing the human spirit long before the body physically gives out.
Under Tinubu’s administration, the market has been weaponized. The state delegates the power of life and death to economic forces, knowing full well that the poorest segments of the population lack the resilience to survive these shocks. When a government implements policies that predictably plunge millions into extreme poverty and stands by as hunger spreads, it is practicing a form of economic necropolitics. It is actively deciding that the economic survival of a state apparatus – and the satisfaction of international financial institutions-is worth the slow liquidation of its own people.
The ultimate triumph of necropolitics is the normalization of violence and death. Human life in Nigeria has become so commonplace, so cheapened, that the news of dozens of citizens dying in a mine or being killed by insecurity barely registers in the national consciousness. Mbembe describes this as the normalization of the state of exception, where the suspension of the right to life becomes the rule. When the state refuses to grieve its dead, it robs them of their humanity even in demise. The 37 miners are denied the dignity of being remembered, or avenged by the law. They are pushed into mass graves, both literal and metaphorical, while the political discourse remains fixated on political party alliances, and electoral mathematics for 2027. This lack of collective grief is a symptom of a traumatized and desensitized society, engineered by a state that treats death as an ordinary administrative background noise.
The current trajectory of Nigeria under the Tinubu administration demands an urgent, radical critique. Necropolitics allows us to see past the rhetoric of renewed hope and confront the grim reality. Nigeria is functioning as a state where sovereignty is expressed through the management of death rather than the nurturing of life. The tragedy of the 37 miners must serve as a breaking point. Condemning the government is not merely about pointing out policy failures. It is about challenging a fundamental, existential philosophy that treats Nigerian lives as disposable. The citizenry must refuse to be seduced or distracted by the political theatre of the 2027 elections. To accept this distraction is to completely agree to our own subjugation and slow erasure. It is time to dismantle this necropolitical framework and demand a governance structure that validates the sanctity of human life, recognizing that no economic policy or electoral ambition is worth the physical and economic starvation of the people
