The kids are not all right: Inside Nigeria’s security crisis
A decade on from Chibok more children are being kidnapped than ever before – except now it’s strictly business.
Abdulrasheed Hammad in Abuja and Hussain Wahab in Oyo
In the early hours of Monday morning, armed men stormed a secondary school in Maga town, in Kebbi State. They killed two security workers, forced their way into one of the school’s hostels, and abducted at least 26 students.
The Nigerian army had received intelligence of a possible attack. Yazid Abubakar Fakai, a relative to four of the abducted girls, told The Continent that soldiers visited the school the evening before the attack, took photographs, and remained on the premises until midnight. The bandits struck at about 4am, just hours after the soldiers left.
The Kebbi kidnapping happened the day after Nigerian Brigadier General Musa Uba was killed in an ambush, news that shocked the nation and went viral on social media. Less than 48 hours after the ambush, bandits killed three people and abducted at least 10 worshippers in Kwara State.
Yet, those 72 hours were not unusual in terms of Nigeria’s security situation. So far this year, Nigerians have experienced more than 2,300 attacks on civilians, according to data from the Armed Conflict Location and Events Database. That is an average of 50 attacks a week.
The security situation has been spiralling for decades, as Nigeria’s security apparatus became chronically underfunded, poorly co-ordinated between federal and state authorities, and significantly corrupt.
‘Soft targets’
Many of the violent actors in Nigeria work for local criminal enterprises, for whom abduction – like at the school in Maga – has become a business strategy.
This is a shift from the factors that drove earlier mass abductions, including the kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls from Chibok in 2014, which gained international attention. At that time, the Boko Haram insurgents kidnapping schoolgirls were ideologically opposed to the pursuit of Western education.
Today’s kidnappers simply see schoolchildren as soft targets. Since Chibok, more than 1,700 girls have been abducted from their schools. Most of those taken in recent years were hostages held for ransom, according to security think-tank Enact.
In February 2018, 110 girls were taken from a school in Dapchi, Yobe State; more than 300 were abducted from Jangebe, Zamfara State in 2021. Other high-profile cases have been reported in Kaduna, Kebbi, and Niger states. Several incidents involved dozens to hundreds of girls abducted at once.
Girls in rural boarding schools are seen as even softer targets. The schools are often located in remote areas, guarded by unarmed or lightly armed night guards. The grim logic of the kidnappers relies on the fact that mass kidnappings of children spark outrage and deep communal heartache, pushing families and communities to raise large ransom payouts.
An Enact study outlines how the enterprise works. When captives are taken, the kidnappers quickly open ransom talks using burner phones and encrypted channels. In desperation, families pool money, sell belongings, or seek community contributions to meet the demands. In some cases, government agencies or trusted intermediaries step in to negotiate, although this is rarely acknowledged publicly. Payments are typically made through informal networks: cash dropoffs, hawala transfers, or third-party couriers for anonymity and safety.
A moving target
Nigeria’s insecurity situation is also becoming more complicated. More groups are joining the fray and old ones are morphing into deadlier entities, at the intersection of criminal enterprise, terrorism, and flawed responses to the government’s own shortcomings.
The police and military are chronically understaffed and underequipped. They struggle to maintain presence or respond rapidly in vast rural areas where attacks are common. Local communities, unable to rely on the official security forces, sometimes turn to vigilante self-defence groups, which has contributed to escalating violence in the country.
Longstanding inter-community conflicts are also evolving into situations of violence for its own sake. Fulani groups, which initially made news only as actors in farmer-herder clashes, have coalesced into militia and sometimes merged into larger violent networks whose warfare is akin to organised crime. Yet, even before these mergers, the Global Terrorism Index ranked Fulani militia high among the deadliest non-state armed groups in the world.
The locus of violence is also evolving. Some of the Sahel’s most active insurgent groups have spread into Nigeria’s northwest. These include the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and factions of Boko Haram known collectively as the Islamic State West Africa Province.
In the northwest region kidnapping incidents surged between 2023 and 2025, reaching 716 recorded events.
Residents are so alarmed that some call for the Nigerian army – itself responsible for a significant amount of violence against civilians – to be given even more leeway in dealing with armed groups in this region. Colonel Abdullahi Gwandu, the chief security officer at Usmanu Danfodiyo University (formerly the University of Sokoto), told The Continent the northwest army division should be granted “full authority and resources” to crush armed groups before they strike.
Currently, the national army struggles to respond effectively. A Nigeria military unit that pursued Monday’s abductors in Kebbi was ambushed. Several soldiers were injured and the kidnappers got away with all but two of the girls they had taken.
But the deeper solutions lie off the battlefield, says education expert Shadi Sabeh, who argues for curbing corruption in security spending to restore public confidence in government forces. He also calls for more investment into creating jobs and improving agriculture to reduce recruitment into banditry.