Five years, seven months, and twenty-nine days after Pelumi Onifade was last seen alive, a Lagos coroner court heard on June 23, 2026 what his family had both dreaded and desperately needed to know: a DNA test result presented by the Lagos State government has confirmed that a previously unidentified body is that of the young Gboah TV journalist who was shot and arrested while covering the #EndSARS protests on October 24, 2020.
Onifade was 20 years old when he went to report the demonstrations that had swept across Nigeria, from Lagos to Abuja to Enugu, drawing millions of young Nigerians into the streets to protest police brutality under the Special Anti-Robbery Squad. He never came home. His disappearance became one of the most documented and most unresolved cases to emerge from that turbulent October — a period the EndSARS panel reports across multiple states later found was marked by extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances, and widespread state violence.
The emotional scene at the coroner court on Monday represented the cruel mathematics of accountability in Nigeria: a body, confirmed by science, where justice still lags years behind the evidence. Witnesses at the court described the moment the DNA result was read as one of grief and relief intertwined — a family given the closure of certainty while the question of who killed their son, and why, remains officially unanswered.
Onifade's case sits at the intersection of two crises that have defined the last half-decade of press freedom in Nigeria: the targeting of journalists covering civic unrest, and the slow, frequently stalled mechanisms of state accountability. Media Rights Agenda, which has tracked his case closely, notes that he was one of several media workers who were arrested, attacked, or went missing during the October 2020 protests — a period in which the Nigerian Press Council and the Committee to Protect Journalists both documented a surge in journalist endangerment. The #EndSARS movement itself, which began as a demand to disband SARS, escalated nationally after the Lekki tollgate shooting on October 20, 2020, four days before Onifade was last seen.
The Lagos State DNA forensic result, submitted to the coroner investigating the circumstances of his death, now formally links the unidentified body to Onifade — providing the court with the evidentiary foundation to determine cause of death and, critically, the chain of events from his arrest to his disappearance. The coroner process, while distinct from a criminal prosecution, can make findings of fact and recommend referrals to the Director of Public Prosecutions if it determines that a death was unlawful.
What Nigerians should watch closely now is whether the coroner's findings, expected in the coming months, will trigger a referral for criminal prosecution — and whether the Lagos State government, which has faced sustained pressure from press freedom organisations and Onifade's family, will act on any such referral. The broader EndSARS judicial panel reports submitted to state governments in 2021 and 2022 recommended prosecutions in dozens of cases; as of mid-2026, convictions remain vanishingly rare. Onifade's case now has DNA confirmation behind it — a forensic anchor that advocates say removes the last procedural excuse for inaction.
A 20-year-old went out to tell the story of his generation's defining protest, and it took the state five years to confirm it had his body — Nigeria's press freedom community, and every young journalist who picks up a camera in a crowd, is watching to see what the state does next.
