On paper, the NSIB Mandate positions the Nigerian Safety Investigation Bureau as one of the most powerful safety institutions Nigeria has ever created. Established by the NSIB Act 2022 and aligned with international standards such as International Civil Aviation Organization Annex 13, the Bureau is empowered to independently investigate accidents and serious incidents across air, road, rail, and marine transport. Its role is to identify safety causes, issue recommendations, and prevent recurrence across Nigeria’s entire transport ecosystem.
In practice, however, the conversation has shifted. The issue is no longer what the NSIB Mandate authorises, but whether the institution is structurally, operationally, and culturally prepared to deliver on it. Authority without execution creates risk, not safety. As recent incidents reveal, the gap between statutory power and institutional performance is widening, raising difficult questions about readiness, coordination, and credibility.
At its core, the NSIB Mandate is under strain from seven interlocking cracks that now define its operational reality. These include a widening mismatch between mandate and capacity, weak assertion of statutory authority, persistent inter-agency coordination failures, delayed or absent communication in the critical early hours of incidents, growing erosion of investigative authority through narrative vacuums, unresolved ambiguity between emergency response leadership and accident investigation roles, and the absence of clear prioritisation thresholds that would allow the Bureau to focus on high-impact cases rather than attempting to investigate everything and mastering nothing
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A Mandate That Covers Everything but Risks Delivering Little
The expansion of the NSIB Mandate into a multimodal framework was intended as a progressive leap. Aviation safety would no longer exist in isolation, while lessons from road, rail, and maritime accidents would feed into a unified investigative system. Instead, the expanded remit has stretched capacity to its limits. Rather than closing safety loops, it has exposed manpower gaps, operational delays, and coordination weaknesses.
Under the NSIB Mandate, the Bureau is required to investigate all accidents and serious incidents occurring within Nigeria, as well as those involving Nigerian-registered assets abroad. Yet, in several high-profile cases, NSIB has arrived late, spoken cautiously to the point of silence, or surrendered the information space to other agencies. This pattern fuels a growing perception problem that statutory reach has outpaced institutional capability.
The uncomfortable question, therefore, is unavoidable. Is the NSIB Mandate too broad for the Bureau’s current capacity, or is the institution failing to assert the authority it already possesses?
The Anthony Joshua Crash and a Credibility Roadblock
The fatal road crash involving associates of global boxing figure Anthony Joshua should have been a defining test of the NSIB Mandate in road accident investigation. Instead, it became a public demonstration of institutional paralysis. The Bureau later disclosed that its investigation had been impeded by a “perceived misunderstanding” of its mandate by the Nigerian Police Force, which impounded the vehicle and denied access to its data recorder.
Inter-agency friction is not unusual in accident investigation. However, this explanation revealed a deeper institutional weakness. An agency vested with statutory investigative authority cannot afford to appear subordinate, confused, or operationally helpless. The NSIB Mandate did not establish a request-and-wait body. It created a lead investigator with powers of access, preservation, and technical control.
If the Police misunderstood the NSIB Mandate, that failure cannot be externalised entirely. It reflects gaps in inter-agency protocols, weak authority assertion, and inadequate preparedness by NSIB itself. In safety investigation, delayed access often means lost evidence, compromised findings, and diminished credibility.
When Others Speak First in Aviation’s Critical Hours
Concerns over the NSIB Mandate became even more pronounced in aviation, the Bureau’s original and most scrutinised domain. A November 20, 2025 incident at Akanu Ibiam International Airport, Enugu, involving an aircraft with registration 5N-BZN that suffered a nose-wheel fault on landing, ended safely. Yet, while the occurrence fell squarely within NSIB’s remit, it was the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria that provided initial details and public updates.
More troubling is the most recent incident in Lagos. A Qatar Airways aircraft carrying 248 passengers and 12 crew members made a safe emergency landing at Murtala Muhammed International Airport on a Friday night. More than twelve hours later, NSIB had issued no statement. Stakeholders, professionals, and the public were left in an information vacuum at a time when clarity was essential.
Into that vacuum stepped the Lagos State Emergency Management Agency. LASEMA’s preliminary report was detailed, confident, and public facing. It outlined the aircraft’s condition, passenger numbers, technical fault, emergency response, and recovery actions. From an emergency management standpoint, this was commendable. From an aviation governance perspective, it was deeply unsettling.
Authority Erosion in Plain Sight
LASEMA is not Nigeria’s aviation or any other accident investigation authority. Its jurisdiction flows from Lagos State emergency response frameworks and airport contingency plans, not from ICAO Annex 13 or the NSIB Mandate. When a state emergency agency becomes the dominant public narrator of an aviation occurrence while the national investigator struggles to speak, the issue is not communication strategy. It is authority erosion.
The optics matter. NSIB was, until recently, a purely aviation investigation body. Silence in aviation incidents carries more weight than in other modes because global confidence depends on disciplined, immediate, and authoritative responses. When the NSIB Mandate appears muted, other agencies naturally fill the space, even if they lack investigative authority.
This shift damages Nigeria’s safety architecture. It signals fragmentation, weak leadership, and uncertainty about roles. For international observers, including ICAO, such signals raise red flags about institutional maturity and compliance.
Ojikitu vs Caulcrick: Direct Warnings from Inside the Profession
The intervention of LASEMA triggered a rare, public professional divide within Nigeria’s aviation community, one that laid bare deeper anxieties about the NSIB Mandate and how it is being exercised. Retired military aviator, Group Captain John Ojikitu, was blunt in his assessment, warning that the situation exposed a dangerous misunderstanding of aviation emergency governance with international consequences.
“LASEMA can only come up within the Lagos Airport Contingency Plans or Programmes,” Ojikitu said. “Gentlemen, ICAO is reading and listening to all we are saying here.” He stressed that jurisdictional clarity mattered not just domestically, but globally, adding that “LASEMA is not a First Aviation Emergency Responder, not to airspace at any level but to the airport.”
For Ojikitu, the silence of federal aviation institutions was not incidental. It reflected deeper structural decay. “All these are happening to aviation because of the disruptions in the career progressions of skilled manpower in the agencies with political office holders,” he said, warning that Nigeria’s aviation safety reputation was being steadily eroded by institutional weakening and leadership drift. In his view, the failure to visibly assert the NSIB Mandate in the early hours of incidents created damaging optics that no amount of post-event clarification could reverse.
Captain Samuel Caulcrick, however, urged a more layered interpretation of events, cautioning against conflating emergency response leadership with accident investigation authority. “Let’s not be narrow-minded,” Caulcrick said, arguing that large-scale incidents often demand coordination beyond the airport fence. According to him, “LASEMA leading airport emergency coordination makes sense because incidents often spill beyond airport boundaries, requiring broader state-level resources.”
Caulcrick emphasised that global practice supports such arrangements, noting that “while airport fire services are the first responders, it is common globally for city or regional emergency agencies to lead or heavily support rescue operations due to their superior capacity.” His argument was not that investigative authority should be diluted, but that emergency management realities must be acknowledged alongside the NSIB Mandate.
Despite their differing emphases, both positions converged on the same uncomfortable truth. The vacuum that allowed this debate to unfold existed because NSIB was largely absent from the public and professional space at a critical moment. Had the Bureau asserted its investigative leadership clearly and early, questions of who spoke first or loudest would have carried far less weight.
Silence Is the Problem, Not Who Spoke
The debate itself risks missing the central issue. The problem was never that LASEMA spoke. The problem was that NSIB did not. ICAO does not expect an accident investigation authority to manage rescue operations. It does, however, expect clarity of roles, disciplined communication, and visible investigative leadership, even while other agencies handle emergency response on the ground.
When agencies such as the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority and NSIB appear muted while others dominate the narrative, Nigeria’s safety architecture begins to look fragmented and reactive. The NSIB Mandate is not fulfilled by eventual reports alone. It is tested in the first hours, when authority, competence, and confidence must be visible to stakeholders at home and observers abroad.
In accident investigation, silence is not neutral. It shapes perception, invites speculation, and weakens institutional credibility long before technical findings are published.
Resolution: A Mandate That Matches Reality
At the heart of these recurring tensions lies a structural truth that policymakers can no longer ignore. The NSIB Mandate, as currently framed, is too expansive to be executed effectively without prioritisation. Not every canoe capsizing on an inland waterway or every routine car crash on a Nigerian road warrants a full federal safety investigation. Attempting to investigate everything risks investigating nothing well.
What Nigeria needs is a streamlined, risk-based interpretation of the NSIB Mandate, one that focuses resources on high-impact accidents and serious incidents with clear safety, systemic, or international implications. Government must refine thresholds, clarify jurisdictional triggers, and align investigative ambition with realistic capacity. Expansion without consolidation only guarantees institutional fatigue.
However, streamlining must not become an excuse for opacity or selective silence. For every occurrence that falls squarely within its refined mandate, NSIB must be held strictly accountable for timely access, visible leadership, and disciplined communication. Authority that is narrowed but enforced is far more credible than authority that is broad but inconsistently exercised.
In safety investigation, credibility is cumulative. Nigeria cannot afford a mandate that exists mainly on paper. The NSIB Mandate must be one the Bureau can handle in practical terms, and one for which it is unambiguously answerable when it does not.
