Nigeria’s losing citizens to find those missing

Victims of forced disappearance grab all the eyeballs. Does anyone give a fig when others just lose their bearings?

Elijah Olusegun.

Emmanuel Nwachi had no idea why he sat at the reception of a mental health hospital in the Yaba area of Lagos. His son Isaac who brought him just dashed home for a document consultants requested as part of his father’s medical history.

Later Nwachi stood up, stepped out, came back in, and sat down again. People around, whom Isaac begged to keep an eye on his father, were saying something to him while his son was away. Nwachi never understood they were asking him to sit still.

Finally, he stood up, and, as much as a 73-year-old body could propel him, he tottered out—out of the facility, and out and out and away to nowhere.

Nwachi is one of the over 23,000 persons the International Committee of Red Cross claims are missing in Nigeria.

Or maybe he isn’t. Because in Nigeria, there are levels of missing persons.

The ICRC says most of those it found missing are from the north: the northeast where terrorism has been raging since 2011, and the north-central in the ferment of farmer-herder crisis. Then there are those state actors disappear and keep incommunicado.

The sheer weight of the figure, the constant protest by rights groups fighting for victims of forced disappearance, and the global shame of the whole shebang made Nigeria set up a missing person register last year.

At the launch, the Nigeria Human Rights Commission Executive Secretary Tony Ojukwu confirmed the levels. Somehow.

“This day gives us an opportunity to acknowledge the number of persons who go missing on account of armed conflict or related violence, natural disasters, migration, abduction or kidnapping, trafficking, accidents, detention, crimes or any other situation,” he said in Borno on September 1, the International Day of Missing Persons.

That was six years after the NHRC Nigeria first promised it would see to it.

About the same year the federal government launched the register, civil society organisations and social entrepreneurs did the same.

Their goals: to raise awareness, protect the rights of missing persons, and help families cope with the incidents. All these derive from the Constitution, which ensures the police respond after 48 hours.

In response, however, the federal government has showed little concern. A gap thus opens up for those CSOs and corporates to plug. And its easier to say the more the merrier.

A tech company, Primly Premium Solution (PPS), made headlines last year when it partnered the Nigerian police, and launched the Missing Person Platform. Another NGO, EiE, launched Missing in Nigeria, another database for missing people.

The human rights units in most police stations also have the mandate to cater to reports of missing persons.

But none of the avenues and platforms is doing much by way of tracking and retrieving missing persons, and offering emotional assistance to the families of the victims. The national register hasn’t given any update since its launch. Many aren’t even aware of it.

If they ever do anything that gets attention, it’s not for the likes of Nwachi and his family.

“The policewoman we reported to collected N8000, and after I called her for a while, she stopped taking my calls,” Isaac told the National Daily about his father.

It is not like the platforms don’t have numbers to flaunt. EiE’s Missing in Nigeria in its 2021 report said no fewer than 630 people were declared missing between January and June that year.

According to the report, Zamfara had the highest number of missing persons, 317; it was followed by Kano, two; Kaduna, 72; Niger, 178; Bauchi, one; FCT one; Plateau, six; Ekiti, one; Benue, one; Oyo, one; Osun, one; Edo, three; Imo, three; Delta, one; Ondo, one; Lagos, 23; Ogun, 14; Rivers, two; Akwa Ibom, one; Cross River one.

But its database boasts just 15 names of missing persons, with snippets of information their relatives supply.

“We ask certain questions that help verify the said person is missing indeed,” EiE’s contact person told the National Daily in WhatsApp conversations on Feb 3.

“For those who are able to provide us with this information we create flyers first, and amplify it on social media.”

EiE promised to check their internal data to answer some of the questions the newspaper asked: achievements and success stories. As of the time of publishing the report, the promoters of the initiative could not provide the details.  Nor could they pinpoint what they have done by way of legwork and collaboration with the police and other rights groups in search of missing persons and their families.

All they do now is amp things up  on social media. But that never helped Nwachi; Isaac as well as his sisters searched high and low, online and offline for their father; and the police kept to dodging his calls.

For the Missing Person Platform, the joint effort of PPS and the police is on the fritz for now. Static figures of missing persons (969 total, 916 resolved), unclaimed persons, unidentified persons (1,879 total, 672 resolved), and others are merely splashed across the website.

The figures stack up, considering the reach and expertise of those who launched the platform last November.  But the numbers are not accessible on the website, offering no opportunity for further analysis and claim verification. The promoters would not even provide their contacts.

But PPS, contacted separately, said there was a web security issue it was trying to fix.

‘Hopefully by the first week of March, everything will be ready,” a contact person at PPS told the National Daily by phone Feb 8.

EiE’s Missing in Nigeria didn’t complain of platform security. But it’s not without its own headache. “The project is currently not funded and it is only being executed by the organization,” the spokesperson said.

An analysis of the file available on the database reveals most of the missing persons are old men and women. And they don’t essentially live up north. It’s only their old age that predisposes them to getting lost. For instance, Nwachi, Isaac told the National Daily, suffered from partial memory loss.

How much of a right senior citizens in this category have, to demand the federal government or NGOs look for them, poses a big concern. Nobody kidnaps them. Thanks to fugue and an addled mind, they just, on their own, ramble down the rabbit hole, and no one knows their whereabouts.

Nwachi hasn’t returned since April 2021.

The government and all the do-gooders who falling over one another in search of missing persons will insist those like Nwachi (or worse than he) have a place in the registers.

That place, it’s certain, will be the lowest of places.