Nigeria’s Disappeared Are Not Gone. They Are Simply Unaccounted For, And That Is The Point -By Damian Ugwu

On the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, the silence around Nigeria’s missing is not an accident. It is a policy.

There is a particular kind of grief that never resolves into mourning. It has no funeral, no grave, no date to mark. It belongs to the mother in Anambra who still asks, seven years on, what happened to the young men swept up from the old SARS barracks at Awkuzu. It belongs to the wife in Kaduna who has spent six years telling her children she has no answer to the only question they ask her: where is their father. Her husband, the activist and lecturer Abduljelili Hamzat, better known as Dadiyata, vanished from outside his home in August 2019 and has not been seen since. Nobody has been charged. Nobody has explained. The state that almost certainly holds the answer has instead offered years of what his family’s lawyers call, simply, silence.

This Sunday marks the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, an observance the United Nations set on 30 August to force a reckoning that governments would rather avoid. This year carries particular weight: it is the 20th anniversary of the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, the one treaty in existence built specifically to stop states from doing exactly this. Its anniversary theme is blunt, “Victims first. Actions now” ,  precisely because two decades of ratifications and resolutions have not stopped the practice. Nigeria has not even ratified the Convention.

That absence is not a technicality. It is a choice, and it has consequences that ripple through families in Enugu, Rivers, Borno and beyond.

Enforced disappearance is often spoken of as though it belongs to history, to the juntas of Latin America, the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo circling with photographs of children the state pretended never existed. But the practice did not stay in the twentieth century, and it did not stay in the Southern Cone. It lives in Nigeria now, in a specific and recognisable shape: a person is taken by officers who decline to identify themselves, held in a location that is never confirmed, and denied access to family or lawyers for a period the authorities refuse to disclose,  if they acknowledge holding the person at all. What distinguishes it from a normal, if unlawful, arrest is precisely this: the state’s silence is the mechanism of harm, not a side effect of it. The not knowing is not an administrative failure. It is what makes the tactic effective.

Nigeria’s record supplies no shortage of cases. Human rights defenders and organisations in Nigeria  has spent  a decade documenting what they  describe as thousands killed and hundreds forcibly disappeared in the wave of security operations against pro-Biafra activism across the  South-East,  a region I know well, and where the fear runs quietly through conversations that never make it into a police report. Families there have learned, often at cost, that formally reporting a disappearance can invite further scrutiny rather than answers. Elsewhere, journalists have not been spared: this year alone brought fresh controversy over a Lagos-based journalist reported missing amid claims linking his disappearance to a security-agency detention that the institutions involved declined to confirm. Rights groups counting media professionals disappeared worldwide over the past decade have had reason to include Nigerian names on that list, not merely journalists imprisoned in the ordinary, documented sense, but journalists who simply stopped being reachable.

None of this is unknown to Nigeria’s own institutions. As  a human rights researcher, I have sat with case files where the paper trail simply stops,  a detention logged, then nothing; a family’s petition, then silence from the agency named in it. Human rights defenders has, to their credit, spoken plainly about the scale of the problem, describing enforced disappearances and mass abductions as symptoms of the wider insecurity gripping the country, from insurgency and banditry to herder-farmer violence. But naming a crisis is not the same as ending it, and a country cannot investigate its way out of disappearances while its own security architecture retains both the power to detain in secret and near-total immunity from the consequences of doing so.

That immunity is the second half of the story, and the harder half to fix. Ratifying the Convention would matter,  it would give families a forum beyond a domestic system that too often treats them as the problem rather than the petitioner. But ratification without reform is a plaque on a wall. Nigeria needs a domestic definition of enforced disappearance that actually appears in its criminal law, so that prosecutors are not left improvising with statutes written for ordinary kidnapping. It needs an independent mechanism, not the agency accused of the disappearance, empowered to search detention facilities, formal and informal, on a family’s word alone. And it needs consequences: not one more command to “investigate”, but actual prosecutions of officers who hold people incommunicado, of the kind that has essentially never happened in the Dadiyata case or in the Awkuzu allegations, six and seven years apart, running in parallel through the same silence.

There is a reason survivors’ families organise vigils and read names aloud on days like this one. It began, decades ago, with mothers in Latin America who understood that the state’s strategy depended on erasure, and that the antidote to erasure is to keep saying a name until it cannot be un-said. Nigerian families are doing the same thing now, in Kaduna, in Anambra, in Rivers, in Enugu,  reciting names into a silence their government has shown no urgency to break.

Twenty years after the world wrote a treaty meant to end this practice, and seven years after Dadiyata’s front door closed behind him for the last time, “victims first” should not be a slogan for an anniversary. It should be the answer his children are still waiting for.

Damian Ugwu can be reached on damianugwu2@gmail.com