Mass kidnapping in Nigeria

Translated by Angela Tagliafierro

For more than a decade, the countries in the Northern Nigeria have been heavily attacked by armed groups. In the northern-east area of the country, Islamist radical groups like Boko Haram are particularly operational. In the Northern-west area, not only the conflict between shepherds and the local communities are quite widespread, but some criminal groups usually kidnap to obtain a ransom, as well. In many other situations, the kidnappings are made by criminal groups with no ideological or religious reason.

The first kidnapping gaining an international wide appeal was made by Boko Haram in 2014: 276 female students, mostly Christian, were kidnapped from a school in Chibok. A hundred of them have not been found yet. At that time, the extremist groups aimed to discourage families from raising their children following the Christian education since “the Western education is sinful”: they were supposed to prefer the Islamic education.

The extremist groups considered and still consider these acts to affirm their power in the country. Terrorist and criminal groups make real mass kidnapping because of the lack of strong and stable government institutions. According to the statistics by the non-governmental organisation Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, only in 2023 3500 people were kidnapped in Nigeria.

In the last months, several kidnappings followed one another in several areas of the country. At the beginning of March in Kuriga 287 students and the headmaster of a school were kidnapped with a ransom demand of approximately 560,000 euros (around 478008.59 pounds). On March 09^th in Gada, in the Northern-west area of the country, fifteen children and four women were kidnapped in a school. In the night between March 17^th and 18^th, some men kidnapped 87 people in Kaduna, taking them from their homes. Some kidnappings were also committed against Catholic priests: only between July 2022 and June 2023, twenty-one were kidnapped. However, in this case, there was no religious reason behind it: the kidnappers aimed to obtain a ransom from the economic resources of the church.

The schools, as well as the boarding schools, being outside city centres, are almost always located in isolated places in the cities, resulting in a precarious security situation. In the affected countries, usually the poorest ones, armed groups demanding ransom force families and communities to sell land, livestock, and grain in order to secure the release of their families. Many of them even resort to crowdfunding on social media or pay by selling food, medicine, fuel, or vehicles. In the Northern states, especially in the state of Borno, more than two thousand people have abandoned their homes and their life to shelter in cities surrounded by military forces and defence lines. Last month the Governor Zulum declared that the Government is no longer able to help these populations despite the unstable conditions they live in since the institutions have already spent a huge amount of money on supporting them. On this occasion, Zulum presented a plan, defined as aggressive by the analysts, proposing to close these military areas and make the evacuees move to unsafe areas.

Since the beginning of the mass kidnappings and along the two consecutive mandates, the Government of that period, run by Muhammadu Buhari, lived a meaningful increase in ethnic and territorial fights and attacks by criminal and terrorist groups. For this reason, in 2022 the Government approved a law which makes the payment of ransoms illegal and makes kidnappings punishable by death in the event of the death of hostages. The new Government, chaired since March 2023 by Bola Tinubu, has already been accused of being unable to solve the country's internal security problems. Tinubu had pledged to restore security in the country and decrease jihadist violence, banditry and intercommunal tensions. Although the economic conditions of Nigeria worsened because of the Covid-19 pandemics and the demands of ransoms by kidnappers decreased, according to the company Sbm Intelligence, the number of kidnappings is still quite high since the beginning of Tinubu’s mandate: 4777 people were kidnapped.

Several national and international organisations, including the United Nations, have moved to design solutions that would lead to greater security in the most critical areas of the country, especially in peripheral and school areas. However, these projects have often been interrupted or hindered by the corruption of local politics and, above all, by the instability of the country itself. Moreover, many Nigerian governments over the years have taken advantage of the phenomenon of mass kidnapping to enrich themselves through the large amounts of money used for ransoms. With these, many public officials have increased their profits by keeping part of the sum intended for the release of hostages. 

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