While the public is advised to eschew guilty conclusions against the minister, people must also distance themselves from patronizing comments that vindicate the minister. It surely collapses the boundaries of reason to exculpate an elite minister following the death of a young lady in his house while the family of the lady despairs. Those who want to attract David Umahi’s compliments should do so by other means and not by shamelessly desecrating the spirit of the dead Mary Habila publicly.
By Promise Adiele
Many people argue that government officials in Nigeria wield metal shields to protect themselves from justice after willfully breaking the law. Proponents of this thought process insist that there is always an escape route for government officials after indulging in illegalities. It officially endorses the often-quoted mantra “above the law”. While laws made by the government protect government officials and their cronies, the same laws expose and implicate ordinary citizens. The scenario aptly captures Nigeria’s contradictory social and political spaces, which reminds one of that Orwellian irreducible class maxim “all animals are equal but some are more equal than others”.
If a lady dies in the house of an ordinary citizen and her body is found naked with blood stains around her mouth and nose, that citizen will have a tough time with the law. The ordinary citizen will be detained and only released on bail after preliminary investigations, depending on social status. Death is a serious issue. In other climes, a government official will voluntarily resign from office before police investigation. But in Nigeria, a government official will grandstand and use government apparatus of force to intimidate anyone connected to the case. The exercise of unbridled political power and gender-based abuse is never far from Nigeria’s political corridors. Many women have fallen victim to this brutal exercise of power. While some women die in the process, some remain maimed and psychologically impaired for the rest of their lives. Silence, no one speaks, and the man of power goes scot-free.
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Political power and gender-based violence have once again thrown Nigeria’s political elite into a familiar but unpleasant limelight. Recently, Nigeria’s Minister of Works and former Ebonyi State Governor, Senator David Umahi, found himself at the centre of consecutive, extremely troubling scandals associating his public office with allegations of sexual misconduct. First, was the sensitive public accusations by Abuja-based businesswoman Tracynither Ohiri regarding an unpaid N200 million campaign debt and alleged sexual advances. This was rapidly followed by the tragic, mysterious death of 26-year-old medical professional, Mary Habila within Umahi’s country home in Uburu, Ebonyi State. It collapses the boundaries of reason when an otherwise respected government official is simultaneously enmeshed in sex scandals. Call it coincidence or happenstance, it still challenges the margins of reasonable cognition.
The chaos started when Tracynither Ohiri took to social media, alleging that the Minister withheld hundreds of millions of naira owed her for promotional materials supplied during his 2014 gubernatorial campaign. According to Ohiri as reported by various media outlets, the minister’s refusal to pay was because she refused to submit to his predatory sexual advances, creating an intimidating scenario where business capital was withheld due to carnal demands. The reaction to her public outcry followed a predictably oppressive script. Rather than an independent investigation into the financial breach or the sexual harassment claims, the state shifted its apparatus against the victim.
Ohiri was swiftly arrested by the police, flown from Lagos to Abuja, and arraigned before a Wuse Magistrate Court on defamation charges. Human rights activists, including Omoyele Sowore, loudly criticized this state-backed bullying, pointing out how the police were weaponized to turn a commercial and ethical dispute into a criminal persecution. This highlights a disturbing pattern in Nigeria’s power corridors – the evident weaponization of state apparatus to silence accusers and shield the powerful from transparent scrutiny. It will continue to grate on Nigeria’s collective moral canvas – state instrumentality of force is effectively utilized to squash reactionary voices of victims.
The script followed a familiar Nigerian pattern. Ohiri later issued a highly publicized apology and retracted her specific claims, with reports inferring an out-of-court settlement. The incident added to our repository of obscenity maintained by subsisting political power structures. In a country where the legal system routinely grinds ordinary citizens into dust, the lightning-fast deployment of courts and police to protect a minister’s reputation feels less like justice and more like coerced submission. The argument that the public must keep quiet because Umahi is a government official collapses the boundaries of reason while ushering in the frontiers of scrabbled consciences.
While the dust was still settling on the Ohiri affair, a graver scandal surfaced from Umahi’s palatial country home in Ebonyi State. According to reports, on June 26, 2026, Mary Habila, a community health worker attached to the minister’s medical team, was found dead inside his residential compound. Complicating the tragedy, a second woman who travelled with her, Mary Baski, reportedly vanished from public view, leaving behind a disturbing silence.
Strangely, the news of a suspicious death within a serving minister’s home was kept under wraps for over two weeks until independent investigative journalism blew it open. Umahi’s response has been defensive, threatening legal fire and brimstone against anyone accusing him of foul play, dismissing the uproar as politicization, and insisting that the deceased was “like a daughter” to him. Reports indicate that Mary Habila was a Community Health Extension Worker (CHEW) at the David Umahi Federal University of Health Sciences (DUFUHS), not a physiotherapist as claimed by Umahi’s media team. Additionally, the Nigerian Society of Physiotherapy (NSP) has run an exhaustive database check and formally announced that Mary Habila was never registered or licensed as a physiotherapist in Nigeria. So, what was a community health worker doing in a Minister’s home? Again, another question that collapses the boundaries of reason.
While it is legally and ethically essential to avoid conclusions and premature declarations of guilt, the institutional handling of Mary Habila’s death is deeply concerning. Activists from groups like the Nigerian Women International Alliance (NWIA) have rightly demanded a totally transparent, independent investigation. In any functioning democracy, an unexplained death inside a public official’s private quarters would result in immediate, neutral forensic sealing and exhaustive interrogations. Instead, the public watches a powerful official dominate the narrative via press conferences while the victim’s grieving family faces intense pressure.
More disturbingly, some otherwise enlightened people have taken sides with the minister, publicly exonerating him of any wrongdoing. While the public is advised to eschew guilty conclusions against the minister, people must also distance themselves from patronizing comments that vindicate the minister. It surely collapses the boundaries of reason to exculpate an elite minister following the death of a young lady in his house while the family of the lady despairs. Those who want to attract Umahi’s compliments should do so by other means and not by shamelessly desecrating the spirit of the dead Mary Habila publicly.
These sex-related controversies involving David Umahi are not isolated incidents, they are symptomatic of a broader culture of impunity embedded within Nigeria’s ruling class. When women in business or public service enter spaces occupied by powerful men, they are too often viewed through a lens of entitlement and subjugation. If they speak out, the very institutions funded by taxpayers to protect them – the police and the judiciary – are frequently subverted to intimidate them into silence.
Furthermore, the Minister’s dismissive rhetoric during these crises exposes a disturbing elitism. Dismissing public concern over a citizen’s death or a businesswoman’s grievance as mere social media mischief or political attacks demonstrates a severe lack of accountability and responsibility. Public officials hold their positions as a sacred trust, meaning their private conduct and the events occurring within their estates are subject to public scrutiny. The Bola Tinubu administration must react by ensuring that David Umahi faces the law until he is proved innocent. Although some people have argued that anyone can escape with blue murder as long as the person identifies with or works for Tinubu, the president has a responsibility to Nigerians to defend the constitution.
Mary Habila’s father and family must allow the law to take its full course. For the father to quickly procure an affidavit and demand that the body of the dead daughter be given to him for burial is in bad faith. Nigeria cannot continue to treat allegations of suspicious deaths as passing social media trends that legal threats or backroom settlements can bury. President Bola Tinubu’s administration must recognize that the conduct of his government officials directly reflects the moral integrity of the state. True justice requires a departure from the standard playbook of institutional cover-ups. There must be an uncompromising, independent judicial inquiry into the circumstances surrounding Mary Habila’s tragic end, completely free from the influence of the Ministry of Works or political networks.
Until Nigeria’s legal system and the police demonstrate that an elite government official can be investigated with the same rigour as an ordinary citizen, the public’s trust in governance will continue to erode. True strength does not lie in a politician’s ability to weather scandals through intimidation, it lies in their willingness to stand before the law, transparent and unshielded, to let the unvarnished truth speak for itself. Nigerians must secure the boundaries of reason instead of collapsing it through conduct and arguments that destabilize our collective ethos.
