Awaisu Giwa didn't have to walk into that mortuary. Nobody made him. He did it anyway, and for five days his organisation was the clearest source anyone had for who the 37 dead actually were.

For five days after the Minna deaths, the number 37 did most of the talking. It was in the governor's press conference, in the mourning declaration, in every headline. It said how many people had died without saying who a single one of them was.

Awaisu Giwa is an International Peace Ambassador with the International Human Rights Commission, a civil society body, not a government one. When the bodies were deposited at the General Hospital in Minna, Giwa's organisation went to the hospital directly rather than wait for an official list from the NSCDC, the state government, or the federal committees that were by then already forming. The hospital's Chief Medical Director authorised a mortuary attendant to hand over what records existed. That gave the IHRC 33 names. Four more came from families who approached the organisation directly, saying their relatives were missing and unaccounted for anywhere on the record the state had produced.

Giwa has said the commission still wants a formal version of the list, on the hospital's own letterhead, and that identifying the dead properly is also the first step toward the families being able to pursue compensation. The commission did not investigate the deaths or determine their cause. It did something more basic. It found the names.

A civil society organisation had established the identities of all 37 while the official investigations were still being assembled. The state was investigating what happened. Giwa's organisation had first established who had died. He didn't determine a cause, assign blame, or promise accountability. He got the names, from a hospital record and from families who came looking for their own.