How armed groups are outrunning the Nigerian state, and what communities are paying for that failure
By Nwanneka Miriam Ike
On an ordinary school morning in Oriire Local Government Area, Oyo State, children filed into classrooms; Teachers wrote on boards; just as the day had begun on thousand other school days had begun in those communities; quietly, hopefully, with the small regular rituals of learning.
Then came the gunmen…
On 15 May 2026, armed bandits descended on three schools: Baptist Nursery and Primary School in Yawota, Community Grammar School in Esiele, and LEA Primary School nearby. They abducted over 30 pupils and teachers and disappeared. Disappeared as one would imagine, like in the Chinese movies, with clouds of smoke into the surrounding forests. Among those abducted was Michael Oyedokun, a mathematics teacher. He would not come home. His captors beheaded him.
Twelve days later, a video emerged of the abducted vice principal, Mrs Alamu. In the video, she kneels in a forest clearing and looks directly into the camera. In this video, she greets, "Good morning," and further goes on to say, "Today is the 27th of May 2026. About 13 days ago we were picked from work and we are still in the bush." The sound of her voice is steady, steadier than the state that failed to protect her.
President Tinubu responded on the first of June, seventeen days after the attacks. He approved 1,000 new forest guards for Oyo State and dispatched a special tactical unit. A teacher was already dead. Children remained in the forest. The guards were still being approved.
For those seventeen days, the rain fell, the sun shone, they were made to move from one forest to another. They were beaten by insects, exposed to wild creatures, psychologically wounded, exposed to grave illnesses without food or water and yet beaten and bruised like they were meant to die a second death for the sins of the world. You would think they would have been rescued because the president spoke, but they still remain in captivity.
This is the story of a gap, not a funding gap, because Nigeria allocated a record ₦6.85 trillion to security in 2025, a 39.5 per cent increase over the previous year. It is an agility gap: the widening, lethal distance between how fast threats move and how slowly the state responds. And it is a story that communities across Nigeria have been living with, and dying inside for years.
WHEN THE NORTH'S CRISIS BECAME EVERYONE'S CRISIS
For over a decade, school abductions became synonymous with the North; usually termed a northern problem. Chibok, 2014: 276 schoolgirls. Then Kagara, Kankara, Kebbi; names that became identical with grief and government failure, in a part of Nigeria that many in the South watched from a terrible distance. In November 2025, gunmen attacked a boarding school in Maga, Kebbi State, killed the vice-principal, and took 25 girls from their beds at 4 a.m. The pattern continued, as it always had.
The Oyo attacks shattered that distance, creating a new narrative. Southwest Nigeria, which had built a regional security layer in the Amotekun corps, and whose governors had in November 2025 agreed on a real-time digital security platform to coordinate rapid cross-border responses to criminality, found itself waking up to the same nightmare it had watched from afar. The attackers used the Old Oyo National Park's dense forest as an approach corridor and refuge. Those same forests had been struck in January 2026, with the incident of armed men killing five forest guards. The warning signs were written in blood yet the response was not fast enough.
"The terrified parents could only watch and weep," a member of the House of Representatives said, describing the morning of 15 May. The sentence that was often spoken in Borno, in Zamfara, in Kebbi has changed geography, with the signature of failure being the same.
THE SPEED OF VIOLENCE, THE SLOWNESS OF THE STATE
We need to understand why this keeps happening, who moves faster and why.
The armed groups operating across Nigeria's forests and ungoverned spaces do not hold budget hearings, no ministerial approval, inter-agency coordination, or procurement sign-off. Yet we watch a bandit commander, well-coordinated in his operations authorising an operation, executing it, retreating into terrain he has spent years mapping, and beginning ransom negotiations before the nearest military formation has filed an incident report. Their cells are small, flat, and modular, difficult to disrupt, easy to reconstitute and dissolve when needed.
Technology has amplified this advantage into something alarming. By April 2025, ISWAP, the Islamic State West Africa Province, deployed armed drones fitted with locally made grenades against military bases in Borno. By February 2026, the group reportedly held approximately 35 commercial First-Person View drones configured as flying IEDs. ISWAP operates dedicated vehicles fitted with satellite internet, releasing battlefield footage within hours of attacks, outpacing military press offices with its own propaganda infrastructure. The smaller Lakurawa group, with just 200 fighters across Sokoto and Kebbi, operates surveillance drones and satellite communications equipment.
Nigeria launched its first domestically developed weaponised drone, the Damisa, in April 2025. Months after ISWAP had already used drones offensively in the field. The state continuously arrives at a battlefield its adversaries have already left.
The legislative picture is equally stark. In March 2025, the House of Representatives passed over 80 constitutional amendment bills, including critical security provisions. By mid-2026, the Senate had not acted on many of them.
The financial mathematics of this insurgency is devastating. In 2024, Nigerians paid an estimated ₦2.23 trillion in ransoms, a kidnapping economy nearly 58 per cent the size of that year's security budget, directly financing the next cycle of abductions. Of Nigeria's ₦6.57 trillion 2025 security allocation, over ₦4 trillion went to personnel costs, salaries, pensions, and pay grades. Non-state actors have none of these obligations. Every resource they generate goes directly to weapons, movement, and operations. This is not a funding problem. It is a structural one.
THE CHILDREN THE STATE FORGOT TO PROTECT
Behind every statistic is a school desk left empty, a parent standing at a forest edge, listening and a teacher who chose this profession because she believed education was safe work.
PSJ UK exists to amplify the voices of communities that have been failed first, failed longest, and failed most completely by the institutions meant to serve them. In Nigeria's security crisis, no group fits that description more than children and the communities that raise them. According to civil society watchdog Intersociety, more than 7,000 Christians were killed in Nigeria in the first 220 days of 2025 alone; an average of 35 lives a day. Millions more live under the shadow of displacement, extortion, and fear.
A report by SBM Intelligence recorded 2,938 kidnappings in the Northwest alone between July 2024 and June 2025, which is over 60 per cent of reported incidents nationwide. In September 2025, an insurgent attack in Borno killed at least 60 people in a community that the government had returned from an IDP camp it had closed just one month earlier. When six senior directors of the Federal Ministry of Defence were abducted on the Kabba–Lokoja highway while travelling for a promotion examination, the symbolism could not be clearer: the officials responsible for national security had become among its most visible victims.
The second crisis runs alongside the physical one: the slow collapse of trust. When a community cannot rely on the state to protect its schools, it turns, very quietly, necessarily, desperately, to whatever protection it can find. Vigilante groups, communal militias, or the most devastating option: accommodation with the armed groups themselves, paying the extortion that funds the next attack. Communities in Southwest Nigeria that once viewed Northeast school abductions as a distant, regional problem are now confronting the same threat in their own backyards. Each failure to protect deepens the distance between citizens and the Nigerian state.
WHAT JUSTICE DEMANDS
Naming a failure is not enough. Communities deserve more than documentation of their suffering; they deserve a demand for change. PSJ UK offers that demand plainly.
The Nigerian state must move at the speed of light to match up with the threat. This would mean field commanders empowered to act without routing every decision through Abuja; this gap between state and non-state actors is, in large part, a decision-making speed gap. It means security forces that are community-embedded, not consolidated in distant military base, that leave rural populations exposed. The forest zones of Oyo, Ondo, and Edo now require the same intelligence infrastructure as Borno and Zamfara.
It means attacking the financial architecture of violence and not just its foot soldiers. The ₦2.23 trillion ransom economy is sustained by intermediaries, ungoverned financial flows, and a culture of paying what is demanded because the state offers no credible protection alternative. Breaking that cycle requires political will, financial intelligence capacity, and a victim-centred protection strategy that precedes crises, not one that reacts to them two weeks later.
And it means treating governance and justice as a security strategy. The communities of Oriire LGA, the farming communities of Zamfara, the fishing villages of the Lake Chad Basin- these are the front lines of a social contract being broken, day by day, abduction by abduction. Where young people have no education worth protecting, no livelihood worth defending, and no government worth trusting, armed groups will always find recruits. Closing the security gap requires closing the justice gap first.
The Oyo school abductions are a threshold moment. A tactic perfected in the Northeast has been executed with full brutality in the Southwest, against communities that were not supposed to be next. Who knows which region stands to face this insurgency? The question before Nigeria's government, legislature, and security agencies is not whether they can outspend these groups. It is whether they can outthink them, and whether they can do so at the speed the threat demands.
Every day this question goes unanswered, more classrooms are emptied. And with each empty classroom, the Nigerian state loses not just a child to a forest, but its claim to the future, as it is said the children are our future.
A WORD FROM PSJ UK
The International Organisation for Peace Building & Social Justice (PSJ UK) stands with every community in Nigeria living under the shadow of insecurity. We stand with the parents of Oriire. We stand with the teachers, living and dead. We stand with every family waiting at a forest edge for a child who should never have been taken.
Our mission is not to observe suffering from a distance. It is to name injustice clearly, hold institutions accountable, and insist in every forum available to us that the Nigerian state fulfil its most fundamental obligation: to protect the people it was built to serve.
Nigerians deserve the truth. Nigerians deserve peace. Nigerians deserve leadership that protects lives first.
