By Damian Ugwu
Three weeks is a long time for a country to argue about a death without agreeing on the most basic facts of it.
Mary Habila, 26, died on 27 June at a guest chalet inside the Uburu, Ebonyi State compound of Nigeria’s works minister, David Umahi.
Since then, Nigerians have been offered a shifting cast of official explanations, a family that has gone to court to stop a post-mortem, a minister who insists there was no foul play while simultaneously asking police to transfer the case out of his home state, and a growing chorus of politicians demanding he step aside.
What no one has offered, three weeks on, is an answer to the only question that should matter: what actually killed her.
Even her job description has changed more than once. The minister’s own media office first described Habila as a physiotherapist on secondment from the David Umahi Federal University of Health Sciences. Umahi later corrected this himself, at a press briefing, saying she was in fact a nurse.
The Nigeria Society of Physiotherapy then confirmed she was not on its register at all. This is not a pedantic detail. If the institution that employed her, and the minister who supervised her for three years, cannot agree on what she was trained and licensed to do, it raises an obvious question about how she came to be working, in whatever capacity, inside a federal minister’s private household in the first place — and under what legal framework the government deployed her there.
The medical picture is no clearer. Umahi has said Habila complained to her boyfriend of a nosebleed on the night before she died, and that she had a history of nasal bleeding, including treatment in Turkey that he says he personally funded. Yet legal guidance reportedly issued within Ebonyi State’s own Ministry of Justice concluded that available evidence showed she was entirely healthy with no underlying condition before she travelled to Uburu.
Activists including Omoyele Sowore have alleged she was found with blood at her mouth or nose, feeding suspicion of something more violent than a spontaneous haemorrhage. Unverified claims about the state in which her body was discovered have circulated too, claims that only a properly documented crime scene and autopsy could confirm or dismiss. None of this can be resolved by press statement. It can only be resolved by forensic evidence, gathered and interpreted by people with no stake in the outcome.
Which brings us to the strangest feature of this case: the one procedure capable of settling the medical question is the one procedure that is not happening. Habila’s father, Tanko Habila Wisdom, has filed an affidavit at the Ebonyi State High Court rejecting any post-mortem on cultural and religious grounds, and has formally asked the Inspector-General of Police to close the investigation and release her body for burial. He insists this is his own decision, made without coercion.
That claim deserves to be taken seriously and treated with basic human decency; grief is not a performance for public consumption, and a father’s wishes for his daughter’s remains carry real moral weight.
But Nigerian law does not treat a sudden, unexplained death as a private matter simply because the family wishes it were. Where death occurs in unclear circumstances, the state has an independent duty to establish cause through a coroner’s inquest, a duty that exists precisely because grieving families are sometimes not in the best position to resist pressure, whatever its source, and because the public interest in knowing how a citizen died in a minister’s compound cannot be waived by any single household, however sincerely.
Legal commentators have already noted that the authorities possess the power to proceed with an autopsy regardless of the family’s objection. The question is why, three weeks in, they have not shown any sign of using it, and why the burden of demanding forensic clarity has fallen on the minister’s own lawyers rather than on independent prosecutors.
That inversion is, in miniature, the whole scandal. It is Umahi’s legal team pressing for an autopsy. It is Umahi who says he asked the Inspector-General to move the case out of Ebonyi, the state he governed for eight years before becoming a federal minister.
It is Umahi’s aides fielding the press. Meanwhile, as the former vice-president Atiku Abubakar has pointed out, the institutions actually charged with independent oversight- the presidency, the Federal Executive Council, the police high command, the National Assembly- have said almost nothing.
An investigation run entirely on the say-so and initiative of the person whose household is under scrutiny is not independent merely because he says he welcomes it.
There are smaller unanswered questions too, each capable of reshaping the whole picture. Why did it take roughly two weeks for the broad details of Habila’s death to reach the national press, in a country where little involving a sitting minister stays quiet for long?
What has the other medical staff member who travelled with her and shared adjoining accommodation actually told investigators, and why has none of it been made public? And what, precisely, was the legal and contractual basis on which a nurse employed by a federal teaching hospital came to spend three years living and working inside a minister’s household, in circumstances close enough that he calls her “like a daughter”?
None of these questions requires anyone to presume David Umahi’s guilt, and this should not be read as doing so; he is entitled to the presumption of innocence like any citizen, and he has, to be fair, publicly requested the very autopsy that would help settle the matter. But the presumption of innocence for an individual is not the same thing as a presumption of adequacy for an investigation, and it is the latter that Nigerians have every right to withhold.
A credible inquiry does not ask the public to trust that the powerful will investigate themselves properly. It removes the need for that trust altogether, by placing the process visibly beyond the reach of anyone with an interest in its outcome, the minister included.
Mary Habila’s family wants her buried. Nigeria’s institutions owe her, and every young woman who might one day find herself working inside the household of someone more powerful than she is, an answer to how she died that does not depend on anyone’s word alone. #Securitynewsalert.com
