The missing forensic anchor in the Chimamanda baby inquest

The coroner’s inquest into the death of 21-month-old Master Nkanu Nnamdi Esege has generated enormous public attention globally, and understandably so.

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The involvement of internationally recognised author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, combined with broader conversations about healthcare standards in Nigeria, has placed the proceedings under an unusual level of scrutiny. The Lagos State Government itself has described the matter as one of broader societal concern.

Public interest in cases of this nature is natural. When grief intersects with questions of medical care, the desire for clarity and accountability becomes heightened. It is also true that inquests serve an important public function. They are designed not to assign civil or criminal liability, but to establish facts: who died, and by what medical cause.

But curiously, critical evidentiary fact has been largely glossed over in public reporting, one that sits at the very foundation of what a coroner’s inquest is supposed to do. The fact that it is now public knowledge that Baby Nkanu has been cremated changes everything about the forensic landscape of this proceeding.

The presiding magistrate at the Yaba Magistrate Court was direct on this point during the preliminary session. She stated, in terms that could not have been clearer, that “for every inquest, the starting point is that there must be an autopsy done to give us a professional report.” That is not a procedural formality. That is the entire evidentiary bedrock upon which a coroner’s finding of cause of death is built.

The Attorney General similarly acknowledged the obvious: it will be difficult to determine the cause of death without the body. And yet, the conversation in the public square has moved on from this admission almost as quickly as it was made, as though the difficulty were a minor logistical inconvenience rather than a structural challenge to the entire inquiry.

The primary physical evidence in any case of disputed or unexplained death, the remains themselves, no longer exist. What remains is documentary and testimonial evidence: hospital records, expert witnesses, the accounts of those present.

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Cremation, by its nature, is irreversible. There is no going back for another look, no tissue to re-examine if new questions arise, no secondary forensic opinion to be sought on the physical remains. Whatever answers the body might have yielded about the precise cause of death, about the sequence of medical events, about what was or was not done in those final hours, those answers are now permanently unavailable.

What happens to an inquest when its central evidentiary pillar is missing? It risks becoming, at its most consequential moments, a competition between expert opinions rather than a determination grounded in primary pathological evidence.

Experts may interpret hospital records differently. Medical witnesses may offer competing accounts of what the documentation shows. Without autopsy findings as an anchor, the court is left to weigh opinions against opinions.

This is not a theoretical concern. In cases where the cause of death is genuinely disputed, and the question of what exactly happened to Master Nnamdi is disputed, pathological evidence is not supplementary to the inquiry. It is the inquiry’s most direct access to truth.

Hospital records document what was done; an autopsy tells you what was found in the body. They answer different questions, and both are ordinarily necessary for a complete picture.

The coroner may still conclude.

The proceeding may still proceed to a finding. But there will be a ceiling on the certainty of that finding, a ceiling imposed by the irreversible absence of the body, that the court itself has acknowledged and that any honest legal observer must recognise.

The Lagos State Government has been explicit: this is not merely a private family matter. It has positioned the inquest as having implications for medical accountability and standards in the state. That is precisely why the forensic gap at its centre cannot be treated as a footnote.

If this inquest, conducted under intense public and governmental scrutiny, proceeds to a finding on cause of death without the benefit of an autopsy and without clearly acknowledging the evidentiary limitations that flow from the cremation, it sets a troubling precedent.

Future inquests involving families with far less public prominence may cite this case as authority for proceeding under similarly constrained forensic conditions. The standard, once lowered under sympathetic circumstances, tends to stay lowered.

The grief is real. The public interest is real. But so is the fact that the primary evidence is gone, and that fact, openly admitted by the family and acknowledged by the court, deserves to be treated with the seriousness it demands.

*Benjamin Odunlamo, a public analyst is based in Lagos.