“Nigeria needs an Autopsy Consent Act: strengthened coroner’s authority for suspicious deaths; clear family consent protocols with mandatory counseling; opt-out provisions for religious objection; and criminalized burial without death certification.”
He was twenty-six, famous, and dead before sunrise.
Ilerioluwa Aloba, known to millions as Mohbad, collapsed in a Lagos hospital on September 12, 2023. By the next evening, his body lay in a shallow grave, buried without a death certificate, without a coroner’s inquiry, without anyone asking why a healthy young man had stopped breathing.
His father would later tell the court that he never thought to request an autopsy. The hospital released the body. The family received it. The earth swallowed it.
Only later, when the whispers became roars, did the law remember its duty. The coroner ordered exhumation. Pathologists opened the casket and found what time and soil had made inevitable: decomposition so advanced that the truth had dissolved.
The state autopsy returned “inconclusive.” The family-funded second examination, completed in December 2024, could not determine cause of death. The body had kept its secret.
Mohbad was silenced twice: first by death, then by burial.
This is not a story about celebrities. It is a story about a silence that kills.
Consider the businessman who collapsed in his Lagos office last month, 45 years old, no history of illness. His family received the body within hours.
By dawn, he was wrapped in white linen, buried facing Mecca, his heart never examined, his blood never tested.
The doctor suspected cardiac arrest, but could not confirm. The family suspected a spiritual attack and would not permit “mutilation.” The truth hovered between them, then disappeared into the grave.
Three years later, his younger brother will clutch his chest at a family gathering. The same silence will repeat. The same earth will receive another body that might have been saved by knowledge of the first.
This is the mathematics of refused autopsy: one death unexplained becomes two (or more) deaths unprevented.
Nigeria has laws for the dead. The Coroners Act of 1944 (and its modern Lagos variant of 2007) mandates investigation when death is suspicious, sudden, or unnatural. The coroner can exhume, examine, and demand answers.
But here is the gap that swallows thousands yearly: What happens when death is not obviously suspicious?
When the 40-year-old mother dies in a Port Harcourt hospital after routine surgery, when the teenager fails to wake after a football match, these deaths may not trigger the coroner’s jurisdiction.
For these, we enter the twilight zone where law falls silent, and culture speaks.
The Births and Deaths Act of 1992 governs registration but says nothing about who decides whether a body is opened for examination. The National Health Act of 2014 allows you to donate your organs after death, but offers no guidance on who consents to the autopsy that might explain why you died.
In effect, Nigerian law regulates the documentation of death but remains largely silent on the investigation of the medical cause.
The result is a vacuum filled by grief, religious conviction, and Nigeria’s powerful cultural urgency to bury the dead quickly.
The data tells a devastating story. The most comprehensive Nigerian study, published in 2009 by researchers at University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan, found that only 38 per cent of relatives had satisfactory knowledge about autopsy. When offered, only 5.9 per cent consented.
The reasons were fear of mutilation (54 per cent), concerns about delaying funerals, and religious objections (65.2 per cent).
But here is the hope buried in the data: 75.9 per cent said they would consent if properly approached and explained.
The barrier is not refusal. It is the absence of a system that asks, explains, and respects.
In the Mohbad case, Coroner Magistrate C.A. Shotobi delivered more than a verdict of “inconclusive.” She delivered an indictment of a system that buries its dead too fast and investigates too late.
Shotobi found failure at every turn: the family that failed to obtain a death certificate, the police who ignored prior petitions, the unqualified practitioners who administered injections, and the burial that destroyed forensic evidence before the law could intervene.
Her recommendations were urgent: mandatory investigation of sudden deaths in young, healthy individuals before burial; prohibition of intravenous medication by unlicensed persons; and legal reforms to ensure that traditional burial customs do not override procedures for determining cause of death.
Yet, in January 2025, news broke that the family’s private autopsy had been completed—the results ready since December, waiting only for the coroner’s court to resume.
The pathologist stands ready to testify. But the inquest remains suspended, caught in procedural disputes that international observers have condemned as “unnecessary and insensitive adjournments.” The truth waits while the legal system stalls.
The family who refuses autopsy acts from love. They have heard the Imam or the Pastor say the body must be intact for resurrection. They have been taught that the dead feel the surgeon’s knife.
These are not superstitions to dismiss—they are coherent worldviews held sincerely by millions.
But health law must ask: Whose dignity prevails? Is it dignified to bury ignorance? To wrap a genetic time bomb in white linen and place it in the earth, knowing it ticks in the blood of the living? The businessman’s brother, the mother’s daughter—they deserve the protection that only knowledge can provide.
Nigeria needs an Autopsy Consent Act: strengthened coroner’s authority for suspicious deaths; clear family consent protocols with mandatory counseling; opt-out provisions for religious objection; and criminalized burial without death certification.
The musician in the shallow grave had a name. The businessman in the unmarked plot had a story. The mother, wrapped in white, had a warning in her blood that never reached her children.
It is time our law learned to listen to the dead – so the living may survive.
