Four days after the mosque abductions, Niger State's government still can't say how many people were actually taken.
Four days after scores of worshippers were abducted at a Central Mosque in Dakera District, Borgu local government area, the Niger State government is yet to ascertain the number of victims.
A Niger State government that cannot produce a basic victim count four days after an attack on a named mosque in Dekara district is revealing an accounting failure as serious as the security one. Families of the missing are left doing the counting the state should already have finished.
Four days after gunmen abducted worshippers from a Central Mosque in Dakera District, Niger State's government still cannot say how many people were taken. A four-day gap between an attack and a confirmed victim count is long by any standard, and it says as much about state capacity as it does about the attack itself.
Victim-count uncertainty this far out usually means one of two things: families are still reporting missing relatives independently rather than through a coordinated count, or the state's information-gathering in Borgu local government area simply cannot move fast enough to keep pace with an attack of this scale.
Until the government produces a number it stands behind, every account of this attack, including this one, is working with an incomplete picture.
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