In my column of 17 March 2021, ‘Kidnappings Incorporated!’, I shared the story of Nuhu Tanko, a gardener at the Shehu Musa Yar’Adua Centre in Abuja, whose two brothers were abducted on New Year’s Eve 2020 while on the road from Dakunu village in Chukum Local Government of Kaduna State. The masked abductors were more than 50 in number, all on motorcycles and armed with at least two guns each. In the Katarimape forest where the brothers were held along with three other captives, they were tied hand and foot, given a cup of water each day, and some scraps to share. Their families were told to produce ten million naira or prepare their graves. Following three weeks of negotiation, the sum of N450,000 was raised for each of the five victims, totalling N2.25 million. The ransom was dropped at a location in the forest as directed by the kidnappers. “It’s like bandits have taken over our village and the surrounding communities,” Immani Tanko recounted after regaining freedom. “They kidnap people, kill and rape women, even if the women are pregnant.”

In that same column, I also shared the story of Mallam Iliya Gwaram who was in captivity at the time the abducted Jangebe schoolgirls in Zamfara State were brought to the kidnappers’ camp. He recognised his daughter but they had to pretend not knowing each other. He recounted his ordeal after the girls were eventually taken away: “I never cried in the whole of my life like I cried that day because I felt it was the last time I would see my daughter.” I also shared, in that column, the chilling report of the Zamfara State committee on banditry whose members included a retired Inspector General of Police. The pauperisation of local government, abandonment of political thugs after elections, collusion of rogue security officers with bandits, and the ease with which court orders freed arrested criminal kingpins were some of their findings. The committee recommended that ten military officers be court-martialled for what it called “dirty involvement in escalating the menace of armed banditry, mismanagement of recovered livestock, and unholy relationship with criminals.”

I chose to title that column ‘Kidnappings Incorporated’ because, even in 2021, the evidence was already clear: Abduction for ransom had ceased to be a crime of desperation. It had become an industry. Structured. Profitable. Scalable. And protected, including by those who were supposed to be fighting it. Sadly, what I described as an emerging industry five years ago has metastasised into a fully operational enterprise.

On 30 May 2026, armed bandits ambushed a vehicle on the Karaduwa–Matazu Road in Katsina State. Inside the vehicle were Major General Rabe Abubakar (rtd), who served as Director of Defence Information from 2015 to 2017, and his wife, Hajiya Amina Abubakar. Their driver was shot and barely escaped with his life. Two weeks into their captivity, the bandits released a video. It showed Abubakar, his wife with him, visibly frail, apparently injured in the leg, surrounded by armed men, while appealing directly to the Katsina State Government to meet the kidnappers’ demands: release three detained fighters and return livestock allegedly seized during military operations. It was one of the most humiliating images this country has been made to absorb in recent memory. At the end, the General died in captivity. Then the Katsina State Government informed the public that the late General died of “natural causes”.

When a man is kidnapped, held against his will, denied access to medical care, paraded before a camera to deliver his captors’ political ultimatum, and dies before the state can secure his release, calling that death “natural causes” is a moral evasion. Diabetes and hypertension may well have been part of the General’s medical history. But what created the conditions in which those ailments became fatal? Kidnapping. Captivity. Trauma. The systematic removal of access to whatever medications and care a 61-year-old man with such diagnoses would have required. Therefore, the bandits did not need a gun to finish the General. They simply placed him in an environment where his pre-existing conditions could do the work for them. And then comes the detail that should make every Nigerian stop and ask a very hard question. Within 48 hours of the announcement of the General’s death, troops located Hajiya Amina, engaged the bandits and rescued her. At least that is what Nigerians have been told.

Forty-eight hours!

The General was in that forest for two weeks. And yet the same help that could not reach him in 14 days reached his wife in two. I do not raise this point to diminish the bravery of the soldiers who conducted that operation, or to ignore the complexities of jungle rescue. I raise it because the Nigerian public deserves an honest accounting of what “concerted efforts” actually looked like in practice, and whether the urgency that characterised the rescue of Hajiya Amina was present from day one. And talking about accountability, in the plea video of the Abubakars from the forest, there were evidently other captives. What happened to them?

But let’s go back to the statement. If the Katsina State Government had said, ‘We are devastated by the death of a gallant officer. We will not rest until his wife is brought home alive,’ that would still have been inadequate. But it would at least have acknowledged that what occurred was a crime, not a medical episode. Instead, what we received was the administrative equivalent of a death certificate, as if an autopsy was performed on the corpse by bandits. But let us not allow the specific outrage of one lousy statement to distract us from the broader catastrophe that produced it. Because the death of Abubakar is not a stand-alone tragedy. It is a data point in a crisis that has been compounding for years.

In that 2021 column, I described kidnapping as an industry. Five years on, the industry has filed its returns, and they are staggering. According to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) Crime Experience and Security Perception Survey 2024, between May 2023 and April 2024, an estimated 2.2 million Nigerians were abducted, and approximately 600,000 killed across the country with about N1.42 trillion paid in ransoms. Between July 2024 and June 2025, SBM Intelligence also recorded at least 4,722 kidnappings across 997 incidents nationwide. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project reported that Nigeria accounted for 58 percent of all abductions in West Africa between 2019 and 2023.

These are the statistics of a country that has, in large part, already ceded territory, economy, and daily life to organised criminal enterprise. No fewer than 140 police officers died from violent attacks, accidents, and other duty-related incidents within a one-year period in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) alone, the Inspector General of Police (IGP) Olatunji Disu, told Nigerians two weeks ago. And now, even retired army generals are no longer beyond the reach of kidnappers. In February 2025, former NYSC Director-General, Major General Maharazu Tsiga (rtd.) was abducted from his hometown in Bakori, Katsina State, alongside at least nine other civilians. Even traditional rulers are now abducted right in their palaces.

Five years ago, I highlighted the Zamfara State committee’s recommendations. I am not aware that anybody has addressed the systemic rot the committee identified—fake mobile subscriber registrations, release of criminal kingpins by compromised courts, and political abandonment of unemployed youth who had served as thugs. What I am aware of is that the industry has continued to expand across the country because the conditions that produced it were never dismantled.

Now, let me address one important issue here. There is an argument some will make that the insecurity crisis is the product of decades of government neglect, poverty, corruption etc. I do not dispute that argument which I have written about many times. But that argument cannot be allowed to become a comfortable alibi for the criminal. Because there are now operators in this enterprise who are not the product of poverty alone. They are the product of impunity. They have drawn the rational conclusion that abduction is a low-risk, high-reward business. The industry has attracted investment. It has attracted structure. It has attracted, according to multiple security analyses, the interest of opportunistic networks who see kidnapping for ransom as both a revenue stream and a political tool. That is the challenge we must confront as a country.

In January 2022, then Kaduna State Governor Nasir el-Rufai, advocated a radical solution to the menace. “I have always believed that we should carpet-bomb the forests; we can replant the trees after,” El Rufai said in what many considered a scary proposition at the time. “Let’s carpet-bomb the forests and bomb all of them. There will be collateral damage, but it’s better to wipe them out and get people back to our communities.” With the manner in which these criminals have converted the forests into ‘campuses’ for stolen school children, not a few people are beginning to think that something must give.

We must confront this existential threat, most especially to the education of our children. The script remains the same: the dawn raid on motor cycles by gunmen who herd innocent children into the bush, release of videos by the criminals, the promise that “no stone will be left unturned,” and then the national amnesia until the next set of school children is abducted. Amnesty International has documented at least 17 separate mass abductions from Nigerian schools since Chibok in April 2014, with no fewer than 1,700 children as victims. Other tallies run higher.

To end this menace, we must find the resolve and resources to dismantle the criminal enterprise entirely. And we must begin by clearing the forests of the violent ‘landlords’. Then we must follow the money, prosecute the collaborators, and refuse to negotiate on terms that make the next abduction more likely than the last. I understand the unbearable trauma of having loved ones held captive by some animals, and I will not stand in judgment over any family that does what it must to bring their abducted people back home. But as a matter of state policy, the ransom economy is the engine of this entire enterprise. Every payment is a business plan for the next abduction.

Now that these criminal gangs have opened a flank in the Southwest, President Bola Tinubu needs nobody to interpret for him the Yoruba adage I used for the late President Muhammadu Buhari when his state of Katsina was being taken over by bandits: ‘Ẹni tí yóò ya’ni l’áṣọ, t’ọrùn rẹ̀ lá á kọ́ wò’. Crudely translated, it means before you take seriously someone who promises to robe you in a beautiful apparel, you will first check out what the person is wearing!

As I have repeatedly argued on this page, the connecting thread for the variants of violence we are witnessing across Nigeria is the loss of what Max Weber described as “the legitimate use of physical force” to criminal cartels. Therefore, authorities (at all levels) must muster the requisite capacity and political will to effectively confront those who have made it their business to trouble the peace and security of Nigeria.

Sandra Adio at 50

The CEO of Metro Bakery and Restaurant,Mrs Sandra Adio was 50 on Tuesday and she chose to mark the day with the children of my wife’s Not Forgotten Initiative (NFI) School which provides free and purpose-driven education (with one meal a day) to children from underserved communities in Abuja. For the past eight years, Metro has provided meals for the children (now about 140) once every week. Meanwhile, what I find remarkable about Sandra is the beautiful balance she strikes between being an exemplary wife and mother, and a formidable entrepreneur in her own right. She has been to my friend, Waziri Adio, a helpmate in the truest sense of the word and a worthy partner in building a home filled with love and values.

But Sandra is far more than what happens within her home. She is also a woman who dared to dream, and more importantly, dared to turn those dreams into reality. The Metro story is one I have had the privilege to witness from its humble beginnings. I remember that Saturday in December 2014, when I had the honour of offering the opening prayer at what was then just a small bakery. At the time, Metro had three staff members. Today, that number has grown to about 80 workers, creating in the process more than a hundred other indirect jobs. From a space where she baked bread in Lugbe, Sandra has built a thriving enterprise with three distinct arms in multiple locations: bakery, pastry line, and restaurant.

This happened because Sandra combined her God-given talent (learned at the feet of her enterprising late mother, Mrs. Kate Odigue) with training, hard work, and an openness to innovation. And she has built this impressive empire without losing herself. She remains warm, humble, and accessible.

At 50, I celebrate Sandra Adio’s legacy of excellence, entrepreneurial courage, and beautiful humanity. I celebrate a woman who proves that it is possible to be an excellent wife and mother while also building something significant outside the home. I celebrate a life that inspires, encourages, and shows others, especially young women, that with faith, hard work, and determination, anything is possible. Here is to you, ‘Madam Metro’, five decades of grace and grit. May your second half be even more remarkable than your first. And may you continue to be a blessing to your family, community, and all whose lives you touch.

You can follow me on my X (formerly Twitter) handle, @Olusegunverdict and on www.olusegunadeniyi.com

(This Day)

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