The people who died in that NSCDC cell weren’t strangers to risk. For some young people in Niger State, artisanal mining offers a way to earn without the capital or formal employment process that other work may require.

Niger State sits on substantial mineral deposits and attracts thousands of artisanal miners, most drawn by the hope of striking gold with hand tools and hard labour. Yusuf Auwal, the protester who spoke to Reuters, put it in the plainest terms there is. He and the men arrested with him weren’t thieves. They were working.

The attraction isn’t hard to understand, even without a survey to prove it. Artisanal mining offers people with little capital a way to earn from mineral deposits without first building a formal business or securing conventional employment, in a state where that alternative isn’t always available. An illegal operation can begin without going through the licensing process that a legal mining operation requires.

That work isn’t safe on its own terms, regardless of what the state does. Reporting has linked some illegal mining operations in Niger State to armed groups, known locally as bandits, who demand payments from miners in exchange for access to the pits. Miners who refuse, or can’t pay, risk the gangs. Miners who get caught by the state risk what happened in that NSCDC cell. Neither risk goes away because the other one is being enforced against.

The state’s response so far has been enforcement: raids, arrests, suspensions, panels. What it hasn’t addressed is the question underneath the raid. If a mining site gets shut down but the economic reason people went there in the first place remains, what actually prevents another site from taking its place?

Nobody in this story is arguing illegal mining is harmless. It damages land, costs the government revenue, and, as the events of the past week show, has now cost lives in police custody as well as in the pits themselves. But a raid that removes people from a mining site without changing why they were there in the first place doesn’t end illegal mining in Niger State. It just decides which version of danger they, or the next group, will face.