When a Kano Line hummer bus collided with a fuel tanker on a highway between Gombe and Kano in northern Nigeria on October 26, 2025, 13 of the 18 passengers onboard lost their lives.
Within hours, images of the dead began circulating on Facebook.
The photographs were shared not out of malice, but desperation. In the absence of a reliable system to identify victims and notify families, bystanders and social media users hoped that someone, somewhere would recognise a face and alert the families.
For some, the method worked. For others, it deepened the trauma.
Across Nigeria, this has become an informal but recurring practice: when tragedy strikes on the road, smartphones replace official notification systems. Graphic images of the injured and deceased often travel faster than ambulances, turning social media into the country’s default emergency identification tool.
But for the families left behind, the cost is devastating – dignity lost, privacy violated, and grief multiplied.
A system that fails the dead and the living
Nigeria records thousands of road crashes every year, but emergency response infrastructure remains fragmented. Hospitals, police and road safety officials lack interoperable tools to quickly identify unconscious or deceased victims.
Although more than 120 million Nigerians are enrolled in the National Identification Number (NIN) system, it is rarely integrated into emergency response. The NIN is a unique 11-digit number issued to Nigerians and legal residents by the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC). It is part of Nigeria’s national digital identity system meant to uniquely identify each individual across government and private-sector services.
In practice, a NIN is linked to a person’s biographic and biometric data, including name, date of birth, fingerprints, and facial image. It is used for services such as SIM registration, banking (BVN linkage), passport applications, driver’s licences, and some government programmes. NIN is considered Nigeria’s foundational digital ID, used for building its Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI).
When victims are unconscious or die without identification card, responders face a dilemma: wait indefinitely for families to report missing relatives, or take the risk of circulating images online.
The result is a system that exposes citizens, both dead and alive to public scrutiny, misinformation and emotional harm, while raising serious constitutional and data protection concerns.
Has she been identified?
Several of the photographs from the Gombe-Kano crash circulated widely on Facebook.
While some families were eventually contacted by the motor park officials via telephone, others had already learned of their loss through social media.
Commercial vehicles loading from official motor parks are required to complete a passenger manifest capturing details like name, destination, and next-of-kin contacts. However, duplicates of these records are typically kept on loose sheets of paper with the driver, documents that are easily lost or destroyed in the chaos that follows a crash scene.
When Roseline’s image surfaced online in October, Taheer Damari asked on Facebook, in Hausa, “An gano yan uwansu?” – Have her relatives been found?
Another user, Basiru Muhammad Muhammad, commented, “An gane ta ko?,” – Has she been identified?’
The post by Abdulatifou Zakaria has earned over 3,100 views and numerous comments. Another post by Abu Ayrin, showing a woman later identified as Rashida, attracted over 1,800 reactions, comments and multiple shares.
The two posts were also shared by multiple handles bearing with similar captions “Rayuwa ba tabbas tana cikin accident da motan Gombe line tayi daga Gombe zuwa Kano. Allah ya gafarta musu duka,” – Life is transient. She is part of the Gombe-Kano accident victims. May Allah forgive them.
Even while users like Abdulkarim Abduljabbar pleaded with the authors for the images of the deceased to be taken down, the posts remained online several weeks after as at press time.
“Please take down the victim’s image,” Abduljabbar wrote. “No one would want to see their relative’s dead body posted publicly.”
The families left behind
On a cloudy Sunday afternoon in Gombe, Balkisu Ahmad was doing household chores when a relative rushed in with devastating news: her sister, Aisha, popularly known to family and friends as Rashida, had died in an auto crash.
“I can’t explain how I felt,” she said quietly. “Seeing her picture shared everywhere brought the pain again and again.”
What compounded the shock was learning that the image had been circulating online even after the family was officially informed.
“It is not fair,” Ahmad told Daily Episode. “Families should be contacted directly. Sharing pictures of the dead without consent only increases the pain.”
Each time she encounters her sister’s image online, the grief returns.
“Some images should never be shared,” she said.
She believes a digital identification system could spare families this experience.
“I am hoping for a system that will identify people in emergency situations without violating their privacy rights. Let them rest in peace and let their family be not traumatised.”
Sarah Ishaya, who also lost her sister, Roseline in the crash, echoed the same sentiment. She also learned of her sister’s death not through authorities, but through informal channels.
“I was not officially informed when Roseline died in an accident,” she recalled. “I can’t say I didn’t feel the pain. Our entire family is shocked.”
Roseline set out for Kano on that fateful Sunday from Gombe. That happened to be her last trip in life, she narrated.
“When you see such images online, it affects you deeply,” she said. “Reaching out to families directly is the humane thing to do.”
A DPI failure, not a social media failure
Analysts say, Nigeria’s reliance on social media reflects a deeper failure of digital governance and interoperability issues.
For Muhammad Bello Bala, a public affairs analyst in Gombe, the issue is not just about technology but lack of integration.
“There must be proper documentation of travellers before the journey commence,” he said, “In the event of an accident, families can be notified without exposing victims online.”
Countries such as India and Rwanda, he noted, have built digital identity systems that allow authorities to verify identities across health, security and civil services.
“Nigeria can do the same,” he said. “If properly implemented, DPI would allow authorities to notify families directly, without exposing victims to public humiliation.”
“This is about dignity,” he concluded.
India’s digital public infrastructure success rests on a deliberate strategy of interoperability, open standards and modular building blocks that can be reused across sectors. At its core is the “India Stack,” which layers a universal digital identity system (Aadhaar) with real-time payment rails (Unified Payments Interface) and secure data-sharing protocols. Together, these interoperable systems enable digital services to work across platforms and providers, allowing people to prove identity, move money instantly, and share data securely.
Shehu Usman, the Deputy Chairman of the National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW) at Dankwambo Mega Park (Bus Branch), blamed drivers who pick up passengers along the road without proper documentation for many of the identification challenges after road accidents.
“We record passengers’ details in what we call a manifest here in the park,” he explained. “Even if the original manifest is lost, we keep a duplicate copy, and we have full records of both the vehicle and the driver.”
According to him, every vehicle departing from the park is issued a union receipt, a passenger manifest, and a park receipt, which together make it easy to identify drivers and trips when the need arises.
Usman added that the union is keeping pace with modern trends, noting that plans are underway to introduce online booking, also known as e-ticketing.
“We are planning to digitise our transport system as a union,” he said, adding that the move would improve accountability and passenger safety.
Can DPI help?
Ali Sabo, a digital rights lead at the Centre for Information and Development Technology (CITAD) said sharing of accidents victims images raises a data protection concern.
“It is wrong to share images of injured or dead people,” he said. “They have a right to privacy and dignity, even after death.”
He urged the Nigerian authorities to integrate a DPI that will enable emergency service providers to identify victims of accidents on the spot.
Under the Nigeria’s Data Protection, data must be handled lawfully and respectfully. Emergency situations, Sabo stressed, do not nullify these protections.
Sabo believes that properly implemented DPI which provides emergency responders with secure digital tools – inking identity databases, emergency services, and secure notification systems – would allow for on the spot identification, eliminating the need to post images online.
“Other countries have adopted biometric and facial recognition systems that balance speed with dignity,” he said. “Nigeria must move in that direction.”
The state of DPI in Nigeria
Despite progress in digital identity enrollment, Nigeria does not yet have a fully integrated DPI accessible to emergency responders. Hospitals, police officers, and road safety officials operate without secure biometric tools or real-time, interoperable identity databases.
The absence of such infrastructure shifts the burden of identification onto citizens and social media platforms, creating a cycle of privacy violations and emotional harm.
Whether Nigeria can protect dignity in moments of tragedy may depend less on technology itself and more on political will, regulatory coordination, and recognition that identification should not come at the cost of humanity.
For now, families like those of Rashida and Roseline, the hope is simple: that future tragedies will not require families to scroll through social media to find the faces of the dead.
That, they (both families of Rashida and Roseline) say should never be the price of identification.
NITDA, Police react
Salisu Kaka, the Director of e-Government and Digital Economy at NITDA, said that they are rolling out DPI framework early next year.
“We are laying the foundation with the right regulation, framework, and guidelines,” he noted. “This process is co-created with stakeholders to ensure that what we roll out reflects the needs and expectations of Nigerians.
“What is central is the data exchange — how to get the design right, how to guarantee privacy, how to ensure interoperability and security. These are the cardinal things that make citizens trust government digital services.”
“From the design, all things being equal, we should start dropping our use cases by the first quarter of next year,” he assured.
While speaking to Daily Episode, DSP Buhari Abdullahi, the Police Public Relations Officer of the Gombe State Command, said the police operate strictly within ethical standards and do not post images of accident victims, stressing that the force does not support such practices.
He blamed the circulation of accident victims’ images online on social media influencers and other individuals who share graphic content in the name of virality.
“We have laid-down procedures for identifying accident victims, but many people are yet to understand or accept these processes,” he said. “Through tinted permit registration, we capture fingerprints, and whenever an incident occurs, we can trace the individual through our database, which provides details such as address, phone number, and National Identification Number (NIN).”
Abdullahi also noted that the police operate the Electronic Central Motor Registry (e-CMR), which helps in identifying vehicle owners, not only during emergencies but also in cases of vehicle theft.
This report is produced under the DPI Africa Journalism Fellowship Programme of the Media Foundation for West Africa and Co-Develop.
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