The field of crime fiction in Nigeria remains under-explored in scholarly discourse. This lacuna is particularly notable given the absence of comprehensive academic works dedicated to this genre. Crime fiction, which delineates narratives surrounding criminals, their crimes, detection and investigation processes, and underlying motivations, has been a prolific subject in Nigerian creative literature. Despite the substantial body of Nigerian literary works delving into themes of crime, punishment, and motivation, it is intriguing that the genre has not garnered significant critical analysis. This study adopts a diachronic approach to trace the historical evolution of crime fiction in Nigeria. It further investigates various sub-genres within this literary category and examines how a multitude of socio-political dynamics have influenced the thematic focus of Nigerian crime fiction. The study posits that crime fiction is gaining relevance in contemporary Nigerian society. It reveals that a significant corpus of these narratives grapple with issues such as colonialism, militarism, corruption, government apathy towards human and national development, and other opaque political and economic elements that perpetuate Nigeria’s precarious journey towards democratic stability.

Communities in Africa in the pre-colonial days lived with one another in a just and equitable manner, in love, on the principles of ubuntu. The way of life was further sustained by the communities’ perception and equation of the land with humanity, where everyone had equal access to the land as factor of production. The communal system which assured of equal treatment of everyone suffered a set-back, through centuries of slave trading and the colonization and the eventual imposition of western laws on indigenous peoples of Africa, these transformed the indigenous communities from their classlessness into stratified un-equal societies of those who have and those who do not have. Corruption evolves as a result of private property ownership and this further compounds in-equality, such that communal properties are unfairly taken over by few individuals, under non-transparent privatisation of public utilities. Access to factors of production and to justice in the post-colonial Africa is a myth on account of technicality and cost. The prospect of sustaining the pre-colonial equitable access to factors of production and to justice through oral tradition suffers a setback on account of the loss of cultural archives like the African traditional religion and the indigenous languages.

From time immemorial and even as it is nowadays, mining operations has been coined as one of the world’s most dangerous activities that are associated with a lot of high risks including loss of lives and untold accident and diseases. This issue of the protection of the health and safety of mineworkers in Cameroon in particular and the world at large has been a called for concern for quite some time and even as we speak. Mining being relatively a new field, the Cameroonian Government still has so many things to put together, especially in the domain of it legislation. One of such is the protection of workers therein. Given that the 1992 Cameroonian Labour code on the one hand has no express or specific provisions for the health and safety of mineworkers and the newly 2016 mining code of Cameroon on the other hand which is the main piece of legislation governing mining operations has not done any better, especially as the protection of the health and safety of such categories of workers in the national territory is concern, and even as a member of the ILO, she has failed to ratify some important ILO Conventions, especially Convention no 176 concerning safety and health of workers in mines, whose purpose is to ensure the social protection of workers and to safeguard fundamental human rights in the mineral exploitation sector. This paper adopts a purely qualitative research method involving an in-depth content analysis based on primary and secondary sources of data collection, this paper questions the effectiveness of the protection of the health and safety of mineworkers in the Cameroonian mining milieu and challenges encountered.