Something has shifted in Nigeria — not in the statistics alone, but in the geography of fear. The violence that once seemed distant, a northern problem, a rural problem, someone else's problem, is no longer staying where it was assigned. In Berger, on the outskirts of Lagos, traders now close their stalls before dark. In Abuja, an April 2025 internal memo from the Customs Service warned of ISWAP and Boko Haram infiltration of the Federal Capital Territory, with credible threats against the international airport and a correctional facility. In Kwara State — the geographic seam between the volatile north and the relatively stable southwest — kidnapping incidents now follow scripts that were, until recently, exclusive to Zamfara and Katsina.
The storm has not yet been given a southern name. But it has arrived.
The numbers are no longer possible to abstract. In the first half of 2025 alone, at least 2,266 people were killed by bandits and insurgents — already surpassing the 2,194 recorded across the entire year of 2024, according to the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. Human Rights Watch documented 2,452 kidnappings in 2024, a 31 percent rise from the 1,878 recorded in 2023. Between 2023 and May 2025, more than 10,200 people were killed by armed groups in northern Nigeria. SBM Intelligence recorded 2,938 abductions in the northwest region alone between July 2024 and June 2025 — over 60 percent of the national total. In November 2025, at least 402 people, predominantly schoolchildren, were kidnapped across four north-central states in a single month. In the first quarter of 2026, Global Rights Nigeria's tracking data recorded at least 2,063 deaths and 1,048 abductions, with rural banditry driving 739 discrete fatal incidents.
These are not statistics. They are the biographies of the dead and the missing.
The policy response this moment demands is not new doctrine — it is execution. Every state government must immediately establish motorcycle-mounted rapid response units of no fewer than 200 officers in state capitals and major towns: affordable, proven, and well within the range of existing security vote expenditure. Joint military-police mobile patrols must be formalised and extended to the southern states where the northern spillover is now documented. A funded, anonymised community intelligence network — with verified tip lines, response protocols, and financial rewards for actionable information — must be established across all 36 states. Urban surveillance infrastructure, including CCTV with licence-plate recognition, coordinated dispatch systems, and real-time crime mapping, must be treated as critical national infrastructure under a phased national programme.
Accountability must have teeth. Governors who cannot account for security vote expenditure in states with worsening outcomes must face prosecution, immunity or not. Two exemplary consequences would transform the entire political calculus around public funds and public safety.
Citizens are not bystanders in this framework. Communities that know local networks of violence and remain silent are part of the enabling environment. Business leaders who can direct capital into community security trusts — as Lagos has demonstrated is possible — are part of the solution architecture. Traditional and religious leaders who can organise early-warning systems and reach at-risk youth before armed groups do are a critical intelligence layer. The community policing model pioneered in Azare, Katagum LGA in Bauchi State, confirms that a structured, legally-backed local security framework can function as a genuine first line of defence even outside major cities. And the press and civil society that refuse to trade access for silence remain the accountability mechanism that makes every other reform politically necessary.
The trajectory analysis is stark. Two paths run forward to 2030. On the current path: kidnapping becomes embedded in the economic baseline of both north and south; foreign direct investment remains negligible in practical terms; roughly 40 million Nigerians face acute food insecurity. On the reform path: measurable reversals are achievable across all three indicators, within Nigeria's existing institutional and fiscal capacity.
The distance between those two futures is not resources. It is not knowledge. It is political will — the will to deploy what already exists, to account for what has already been collected, and to treat citizens who are dying and living in constrained fear as something more than a constituency to be managed at election time.
The dawn of a secure Nigeria is entirely achievable. It remains blocked only by a collection of difficult choices that those in authority have simply declined to make. The enduring dilemma is how much more bloodshed and economic ruin must occur before they choose differently.
Author:
Akinola Ezekiel Morakinyo
Published in Nairametrics
26th May 2026
