The Tribunal of Inquiry into the Kano Maitatsine Riots was constituted by President Shehu Shagari in January 1981, following the catastrophic religious uprising that had convulsed Kano between 18 and 29 December 1980. The Tribunal was chaired by Justice Anthony Nnanna Aniagolu of the Supreme Court of Nigeria, who later described the assignment as the most emotionally taxing of his judicial career. The mandate was to establish the causes, sequence, and scope of the violence; to determine the identities and ideological origins of the Maitatsine movement; and to recommend preventive measures.
The uprising was led by Muhammadu Marwa, a Cameroonian-born preacher known as 'Maitatsine' (Hausa: 'the one who damns'), who had been resident in Kano since the 1940s and had developed a heterodox theology rejecting the authority of the Prophet's hadith and condemning modern technology. By December 1980 his followers—estimated at between 6,000 and 10,000, drawn heavily from the talakawa underclass, migrant youths, and the urban unemployed—had fortified the Yan Awaki quarter of Kano. When police attempted to dislodge them on 18 December 1980, the followers attacked with machetes, bows, and knives. The federal military intervention that followed required ten days of fighting before the enclave was cleared. The official death toll recorded by the Aniagolu Tribunal was 4,177 persons, including Marwa himself, who was killed on 29 December. Of the dead, a large proportion were Maitatsine followers; the security forces lost over 200 men. Property losses were estimated at tens of millions of naira.
The Tribunal's report, submitted in 1981, identified systemic failures: the Kano State government and federal intelligence had received warnings about Marwa's growing armed network as early as 1962 and repeatedly thereafter but took no decisive action. Socioeconomic alienation—particularly the explosion of unemployed male youth migrants into Kano following 1970s oil-boom urbanisation—was identified as the structural driver of Maitatsine's recruitment. The report recommended better intelligence sharing, urban planning reforms, regulation of itinerant preachers, and the establishment of a national religious affairs council. The report was published by the Federal Government and its findings informed subsequent responses to related uprisings in Maiduguri (1982), Yola and Jimeta (1984), and Gombe (1985), though critics argued that the structural reforms were never seriously implemented, a failure that scholars have since traced as a precursor to the conditions enabling Boko Haram.