Nigeria’s federal government suspended 20 officers and constituted a 10-member panel within two days of the deaths. That speed says something about what it takes to get the system’s attention, and something else about what came before it.

By the time Interior Minister Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo announced the suspensions and the panel on Saturday, the story had already moved through survivor testimony, protest, and gunfire in the streets of Minna, and was already being reported internationally by the Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse.

Before that, individual families were already asking. Mallam Abdullahi said he and his family had gone looking for his son Salim after he failed to return from a mining trip. Shafatu Sulaiman, who lost two sons in the incident, went to the Minna General Hospital where their bodies were sent for examination and pleaded for the government to intervene. Those appeals were personal, addressed to whoever might help their own son or sons, not demands for a federal panel. But neither appeal produced government action before the deaths became public and impossible to contain quietly.

That contrast is the real test of this response, more than the response itself. A 10-member panel and 20 suspensions inside 48 hours prove the machinery exists to move quickly once the deaths became a national story. The public record doesn’t yet show whether that same machinery would have moved this fast for one family’s private appeal, made before that happened.