By Lemmy Ughegbe, Ph.D
Mary Habila was 26, a nurse from Nok in Kaduna State seconded to the Federal Ministry of Works, serving on the medical team attached to the Minister, David Umahi. On 27 June, she died in a room at the minister’s country home in Uburu, Ebonyi State.
Three weeks later, her body remains in police custody. Her burial, fixed for 17 July, was postponed indefinitely when the Ebonyi Police Command refused to release her remains without an autopsy. Nigeria is still waiting for a straight answer.
That waiting is the story.
The minister’s account is on record. Habila and a colleague, Anita Baaki, had travelled with the ministry delegation to Uburu for official duties. Umahi’s office initially described both as physiotherapists on secondment; the family’s lawyer has since corrected this, saying Habila was a registered nurse and Baaki the physiotherapist. Umahi says he received news of her death with shock, personally consoled her parents, and urged an autopsy to establish the cause scientifically.
He has since gone further, addressing the suspicion directly at a press briefing in Abuja: describing Habila as someone who had worked with him for three years and was “like a daughter,” insisting there was no evidence of foul play, and offering a specific account of her final hours.
He cited an existing medical condition he had helped fund treatment for in a Turkish hospital, a nosebleed she reported to her boyfriend shortly before her death, and staff forcing open her door only after she stopped responding. That is a far more detailed account than “unfortunate” and “shock,” and deserves testing rather than reflexive acceptance or dismissal.
The family’s account is also on record and complicates the picture rather than resolving it. Habila’s father, Tanko Habila Wisdom, swore an affidavit before the Ebonyi State High Court declining an autopsy and asking that the investigation be withdrawn: no one had coerced him, the family did not suspect foul play, he asked only that his daughter’s body, organs intact, be released for burial. A grieving father’s wish for his child’s dignity should ordinarily settle a matter like this. It has not, and Nigerians should understand why without rushing to accuse the family of anything.
Baaki’s sworn statement, filed separately, describes the end of an ordinary evening: the two friends talking and laughing, Habila saying she was tired and wanted to shower before bed. That was the last time Baaki saw her alive. The next morning brought silence, a locked door, and a body found unconscious near the entrance, rushed to the hospital and pronounced dead on arrival. There is nothing in that account, by itself, that points anywhere in particular. That is precisely the problem: a sequence of events with no explanation of cause sitting inside it.
Then there is the detail that will not leave the public conversation: reports, not yet independently confirmed, that Habila’s body was found unclothed. Reports alone are not proof, but they explain the scrutiny a case involving a serving minister’s residence has drawn, and why calls for an independent investigation are not idle mischief.
Here, the positions properly diverge. The Ebonyi Police insist an autopsy remains necessary regardless of family wishes. Lawyers for the minister have gone further, formally asking police to conduct a full forensic autopsy before release, a request that sits oddly beside suspicion directed at his household. The opposition, including former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, has called on President Tinubu to suspend Umahi pending a full inquiry.
The law, in fact, is not on the family’s side, however sympathetic their grief. Under the Coroners System Laws applicable across Nigerian states, including Ebonyi, and the Administration of Criminal Justice Act, the state has a standing duty to investigate any sudden, unnatural, or suspicious death. Such a death is a crime against society, not a private matter; once police open a criminal file, the family cannot lawfully command it closed.
A father’s affidavit expresses a wish, not a veto. The state can secure a court order compelling the autopsy over the family’s objection. That the authorities have invoked neither power is, if anything, a sharper indictment than the family’s reluctance.
As the case has spread online, unfounded claims about Habila’s character have circulated; the family has had to publicly deny she was, in the crude term now attached to her, a “runs girl.” A young woman does not forfeit the right to a dignified death or an investigation because strangers online invented a story about her.
A family wanting closure without an autopsy delaying it has a legitimate claim to dignity. A police force insisting that unexplained deaths in a public official’s home require full forensic scrutiny has a legitimate claim to the public interest, backed by the law itself. Those two claims are in genuine tension, and pretending otherwise does no one any favours.
What is not legitimate is the pace at which this has moved. Three weeks on, the country still does not know how she died. Her family, insisting it had met every police condition, watched her funeral date come and go on 17 July, the burial postponed at the last moment.
That same day, her father and the family’s lawyer petitioned the Inspector General at Force Headquarters in Abuja, requesting that the matter be transferred from the Ebonyi command. A father should not have to make that journey to bury his daughter.
Nigeria has been here before: a death near power, an official statement of shock and sadness, a matter dissolving into competing narratives online rather than resolving through the institutions built for exactly this purpose.
What this case needs is simple to state: a police force that communicates as it proceeds, a pathology process insulated from grief and politics alike, and an outcome that treats the truth as owed to Mary Habila’s family, whatever that truth turns out to be.
Until then, the questions from Uburu remain open and should stay open in the public mind until an answer is actually given.
Dr Lemmy Ughegbe, FIMC, CMC
Email: lemmyughegbeofficial@gmail.com
WhatsApp ONLY: +2348069716645
