REPORTS of thousands of Africans going missing, with Nigeria accounting for almost 40 per cent, add to the endless stream of misery afflicting the continent. The recent unfurling of a plan by the Federal Government through the National Human Rights Commission to create a database of the victims is welcome. But it underscores the sad reality that the country had hitherto failed to keep track of its disappeared citizens, and is waking up late to its responsibility to locate and recover them. There should be a renewed commitment, new policies, and a dogged resolve to undertake preventive and remedial measures.
Tony Ojukwu, the NHRC Executive Secretary, at a forum of stakeholders in Abuja, had acknowledged the problem and the impact of missing persons in Nigeria. As part of remedies, he said a database would be created that would comprehensively capture the details of all missing persons in the country.
This and other actions are long overdue. Statistics from the International Committee of the Red Cross showed that 64,000 persons are currently reported missing in Africa. Of this, Nigeria has as many as 25,000 persons unaccounted for, including over 14,000 children. This number was 24,000 in October 2022, meaning that in less than four months, another 1,000 persons disappeared in Nigeria. The ICRC adds that no fewer than 13,000 Nigerian families are desperately seeking their missing loved ones.
This is heart-breaking. Experts cite factors such as insecurity, armed conflict, and irregular migration such as the desperate journeys of many seeking a better future and making the hazardous journey through the Sahara Desert, poverty, discrimination, and political instability. There were 35 active armed conflicts in Africa by mid-2002, according to the ICRC, while thousands of adults and children traversing the Sahara, and the Mediterranean Sea in search of safety “entail great risk, including the risk of disappearance.” Some are victims of kidnapping. Some 82 per cent of the missing in Africa are from just seven countries, including Nigeria, experiencing armed conflict.
Insecurity is creating many missing persons in Nigeria. The Tony Blair Institute for Social Change found that over 55,000 persons went missing in the country between 2015 and 2022, arising from Islamic terrorism/insurgency, banditry, Fulani herdsmen rapine, and communal strife. Kidnapping, now a thriving industry, is creating more disappeared persons.
Undoubtedly, Nigeria’s national and sub-national governments have not devoted adequate attention to the problem. It is even more disappointing that the Federal Government is just waking up to the need for a database.
A report by MissingInNG in November 2021 indicated that about 630 people were declared missing between January and June that year. Three hundred and eighty-eight were eventually found, while five had died. The government and security agencies have an obligation to provide information and assist efforts to put families back together.
Nigeria is not the only country afflicted by the vanished persons’ scourge. The Missing Persons Statistics 2023 prepared by The Healthy Journal lists the United States as having the highest number of missing persons in the world with 521,705 missing by 2021. It has been overtaken by India, where about 2,130 disappear each week; the United Kingdom follows with 353,000 files of missing persons opened every year, and Syria with 100,000 missing due to its 13-year-old conflict.
Uncomfortably, Nigeria comes in at seventh position where 571 persons were reported kidnapped in January 2022. The publication also cited banditry and ritual killings as triggers.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees disclosed that in 2022, over 2,602 migrants died while crossing the Mediterranean Sea. Although not all deaths on the sea can be ascertained, as many as 3,231 were recorded as dead or missing in the Mediterranean and on the North-West African routes.
Bad governance and an uncertain economic future have been two of the leading causes of illegal migration. The government needs to renew hope in the Nigerian dream and adopt economic policies that can enable young people to thrive in the country of their birth. It should embrace policies to stimulate production, job creation and exports, while taming insecurity.
It should destroy the lucrative kidnapping-for-ransom industry. It thrived first in the South but has since gained ground in the North where Islamic terrorists, bandits and Fulani herdsmen, sometimes working separately and sometimes collaborating, have perfected the evil act of mass kidnapping of children, girls and women.
Nigeria’s government must be more responsible. To tackle its huge missing persons’ problem, US police formations open a report on each reported case, undertake intense investigations and assign officers to follow up every lead. At the federal level, the Federal Bureau of Investigations maintains a massive database on the Missing Persons and Unidentified Persons Files of its National Crime Information Centre that all the country’s 17,985 police forces can access. The UK government devised a Missing Children and Adults Strategy focused on vulnerable people that go missing with a three-fold objective: prevention, protection, and provision of support and advice to persons and families of victims.
Nigeria should weave its agencies together, involve the states and design a coherent and active policy to tackle the missing persons problem as recommended by the UN, which in conjunction with other bodies, set aside August 30 every year as the International Day of the Disappeared to draw attention to individuals imprisoned without the knowledge of their relatives.
The Nigeria Police Force should set up special units on missing persons at the national, state and zonal command levels and collaborate closely with the domestic and external foreign intelligence agencies, the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons, Interpol and the immigration service.
Governments, especially at the state level, should set up support and counselling mechanisms for the families of missing persons. The federal and state governments should muster the strong will and commitment to ending this menace.
