Thirty-seven suspected illegal miners are dead after being arrested and detained by the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) in Niger State. The victims were among people arrested during enforcement operations against suspected illegal mining activities in the Wushishi/Lukoto axis of the state. The deaths occurred in NSCDC custody on September 17, 2026, prompting the Federal Government to suspend officers connected to the incident and establish an independent committee to investigate the arrests, detention, cause and circumstances of the deaths. (Ministry of Interior)
The circumstances surrounding the deaths demand a full and independent investigation. But beyond the immediate questions of detention, enforcement and accountability lies a broader question that Nigeria must confront: what happens when large sections of the rural population operate in an economy where access to land and natural resources is largely informal, legally uncertain and difficult to formalise?
The answer is not that land insecurity caused the deaths in Niger State. The ongoing investigation has not established such a connection. But the tragedy provides a timely entry point into a wider problem: economic activity cannot be regulated effectively through enforcement alone when the institutions governing access to productive assets remain difficult for ordinary citizens to navigate.
Nigeria’s rural economy depends heavily on land. Yet fewer than one in ten parcels of land in Nigeria carry a formal title. For the smallholder farmer who makes up the backbone of the rural economy, this is not a paperwork inconvenience, it is the difference between an asset and a liability.
Land that cannot be mortgaged cannot fund a borehole, a second hectare, or a child’s school fees. Land that cannot be proven cannot be safely inherited. And land whose boundaries exist only in memory becomes, sooner or later, land that is disputed.
Nigeria’s Minister of Housing and Urban Development confirmed in March 2025 that over 90 percent of Nigerian land remains unregistered, a share barely changed since formal registration began in 1883. On the Global Economy’s Property Rights Index, Nigeria scores 25 out of 100, ranking 155th of 182 countries, below Benin, Togo, Niger and Gabon. This is not a technical footnote. It is a structural ceiling on rural economic freedom.
The Niger incident therefore raises an important question about the relationship between economic freedom and the rule of law. A state has a legitimate interest in regulating mining, protecting the environment and preventing criminal exploitation of natural resources. But effective regulation also requires institutions that give citizens accessible and lawful pathways to own, use and invest in productive assets.
Where those pathways are weak, informal economic activity can persist despite enforcement efforts. This does not establish that insecure land rights caused the Niger mining deaths, nor does it excuse illegal mining. It does, however, invite a harder examination of the conditions under which rural Nigerians gain access to land, minerals and other productive resources.
If people can spend years working land without formal documentation, struggle to obtain recognised rights over productive assets, and face costly or inaccessible routes into the formal economy, then the line between formal and informal economic activity can become difficult to sustain. The question is not simply why people violate regulations, but also whether the regulatory and property-rights system provides realistic pathways for them to operate lawfully.
That is why Nigeria’s land-tenure problem deserves to be considered not merely as an administrative or property-law issue, but as a question of economic freedom.
A trap built into the law itself
The root of the problem is the Land Use Act 1978, which vests all land within a state in the Governor, who grants rights of occupancy rather than freehold title. In rural areas, the Certificate of Occupancy is nominally available through the Local Government, but the application process is slow, requires a survey plan few smallholders can afford, and routinely takes anywhere from six months to two years to complete.
The result is a two-tier land market: a thin formal layer concentrated in the cities, and a vast informal layer of customary and family land underpinning the livelihoods of most rural households, roughly half of which farm less than one hectare. Without a title, banks decline the land as collateral outright.
Farmers under-invest in irrigation, soil improvement and tree crops that only pay off over many years, because they cannot be sure the investment is theirs to keep. And unclear boundaries, passed down without documentation, turn inheritance into the single most common trigger of family land disputes, disputes that then consume years of scarce customary and community dispute-resolution capacity that could otherwise go toward productive work.
Rwanda: what systematic registration can do in a decade
Nigeria does not need to invent a solution, it needs to adapt one that has already worked next door on the same continent. Rwanda’s Land Tenure Regularisation Programme mapped and formally registered roughly 11 million rural parcels nationwide, using low-cost participatory mapping, aerial and drone survey combined with community-level adjudication, rather than the individual survey-plan model that keeps Nigerian titling out of reach for ordinary farmers.
The results were not marginal: land disputes fell by an estimated 80 percent, and rural borrowing surged once titled land could finally serve as loan collateral. Rwanda proved that mass formalisation is achievable within a single political generation, at a fraction of the per-parcel cost of Nigeria’s current system, and that reduced conflict, not just increased credit, is one of the biggest economic dividends of getting title into people’s hands.
Ethiopia: turning “dormant wealth” into a credit market
Ethiopia offers the second half of the case. Since the early 2000s, Ethiopia has run one of Africa’s largest land certification programmes, and its digital National Rural Land Administration Information System now securely stores tens of millions of parcel records.
The effect on rural finance has been measurable rather than theoretical: research tracking the system found that access to digital land registers significantly increased smallholders’ credit-worthiness and reduced transaction costs, with over 8 million dollars in loans linked directly to land certificates between 2020 and 2022 alone.
A parallel UK-funded programme, Land Investment for Transformation, distributed more than 14 million geo-referenced land certificates to over 6.5 million farmers who had previously held indefinite rights to their land but could not use it as collateral for a single loan.
Ethiopia’s experience also carries a warning worth heeding: independent studies found that land certification delivered its strongest benefits for women’s tenure security and household welfare only where the certification process deliberately named women as co-holders, a design choice, not an accident, that Nigeria’s own pilots should build in from day one rather than add later.
The lesson from both Rwanda and Ethiopia is the same: title only becomes an economic asset once it is cheap enough, and simple enough, to reach the people who actually farm the land.
The Niger mining deaths: when enforcement meets an informal economy
The deaths of 37 suspected illegal miners in Niger State expose another side of Nigeria’s struggle with informal economic activity. The government has made clear that it remains committed to combating illegal mining, while also insisting that enforcement must respect human life, dignity and the law. The independent investigation is expected to establish what happened and determine responsibility where appropriate. (Ministry of Interior)
The tragedy should therefore not be reduced to a question of whether illegal mining should be tolerated. It should prompt a wider examination of how citizens gain lawful access to land and natural resources and how the state regulates economic activity in rural communities.
Mining, unlike ordinary agricultural landholding, involves mineral resources whose ownership and exploitation are governed by a different legal framework. But both sectors raise a common institutional question: how accessible are the lawful pathways for ordinary Nigerians who depend on land and natural resources for their livelihoods?
Where formal systems are expensive, slow or difficult to navigate, informal activity can become deeply entrenched. That does not make unlawful activity lawful. It does, however, mean that enforcement alone may not resolve the conditions that sustain informality.
This is where the Niger incident intersects with the broader land-tenure question. It is too early to say that insecurity of land rights contributed to the deaths, and the ongoing investigation must establish the facts. But it is reasonable to ask whether the wider insecurity surrounding access to productive land and natural resources contributes to the growth of informal economic activity that eventually brings citizens into conflict with the state.
A government committed to the rule of law therefore has two responsibilities that should not be treated as competing objectives. It must enforce laws governing natural resources, and it must build institutions that make lawful economic participation accessible.
The distinction matters. If the state only becomes visible to a rural citizen when that citizen has violated a regulation, the state has arrived at the final stage of a much longer institutional failure. A functioning system should be visible much earlier, when citizens seek to obtain secure rights, register property, obtain licences, access finance and understand the rules governing economic activity.
Land reform is consequently not merely about issuing certificates. It is about creating a system in which ordinary Nigerians can obtain legally recognised rights, invest in productive activity and participate in the formal economy.
Nigeria’s window is open now
What makes this moment different is that Nigeria’s federal government appears to be circling the same conclusion. Late in 2025, it inaugurated Land Reform Task Teams to streamline land administration, and 2026 legislative proposals now under discussion include a unified national digital land registry and reforms to make Governor’s Consent an administrative rather than political process.
Industry voices are making the economic case publicly: analysts have argued this year that broader access to legally recognised land titles could meaningfully expand lending to small business owners, informal-sector workers and rural households alike.
The political appetite for a fight over the Land Use Act itself remains low, repeal or amendment would require a two-thirds supermajority across the National Assembly and every State House of Assembly, a near-impossible bar in the current term. But that fight is not the one Nigeria needs to win first.
A phased, community-level customary title formalisation pilot, run through existing Local Government land bureaux and state Ministries of Lands, using participatory mapping instead of individual survey plans, requires no constitutional change at all. It can start in two or three willing states within the next eighteen to twenty-four months, generate the kind of measurable results, titles issued, disputes resolved, loans secured, that build the political case for national scale, and put safeguards against elite capture in place from the outset through transparent, community-level adjudication panels.
Rwanda and Ethiopia did not solve rural land insecurity by rewriting their constitutions. They solved it by making formalisation cheap, local and fast enough to reach the farmer who has spent thirty years working land she cannot yet call her own on paper.
Nigeria has the administrative machinery to do the same. The recent events in Niger State also show why institutional reform must go beyond enforcement. A society committed to the rule of law needs both effective regulation of natural resources and institutions that give citizens realistic opportunities to participate in the lawful economy.
Abdulwasiu Mujeeb is a lawyer, media enthusiast, and advocate for accountable governance. A former Students for Liberty coordinator and ex-African Liberty fellow, he co-founded and serves as COO of The Peoples’ Mouthpiece Initiative, a civic media and policy oriented organization promoting freedom and economic opportunity in Nigeria.