From remote highways to Catholic schools, kidnapping has become one of Nigeria’s most profitable criminal enterprises. Behind this week’s abduction of hundreds of Christian students lies a decade-old market in fear, ransom and state failure.
Viewer discretion: This article describes real kidnappings, violence and the targeting of children. Most readers may find these details upsetting, but we believe the harsh realities are essential to understanding the story.
By Carlos Taylhardat | 3 Narratives News |
Just after midnight in Agwara, a quiet town in central Nigeria, the gunmen came through the school gate. They moved from dormitory to dormitory at St. Mary’s Catholic School, shouting orders, firing into the air, and binding the hands of teachers who stepped outside. One teacher’s daughter began to cry when she saw her father being forced to the ground; a gunman pressed the barrel into the child’s mouth and threatened to shoot if she didn’t stop. Her father was taken. She was left behind to remember the threat.
By dawn, more than 300 children and staff were gone, marched into the bush in one of Nigeria’s worst mass school abductions since the Chibok girls in 2014. Around 50 students managed to escape. Some 253 children and a dozen staff are still missing, as parents wait by the roadside for news and church leaders plead publicly for mercy and negotiation.
The attack did not happen in isolation. Within the same week, armed gangs kidnapped schoolgirls in Kebbi state and abducted 38 worshippers from a church service in Kwara, reportedly demanding 100 million naira (about $69,000) per victim. President Bola Tinubu has ordered 47 colleges to close, promised 30,000 new police officers, and told security chiefs to redeploy officers from VIP protection back to rural patrols.
Behind these dramatic incidents is a quieter arithmetic. Over the past decade, kidnapping for ransom has evolved into one of Nigeria’s fastest-growing criminal industries, stretching from jihadist strongholds in the northeast to bandit camps in the northwest, and now into the everyday life of farmers, traders and schoolchildren across the country. Analysts estimate that kidnappers extracted at least $18.5 million in ransom between 2011 and 2020, with millions more in recent years.
This is a story about faith and fear, but it is also about business: who profits, who pays, and what happens to a country when safety itself becomes a commodity.
So here are two narratives about Nigeria’s kidnapping economy. The third, as always, is yours to decide.
Narrative 1: “Bandits With Ledgers” — Kidnapping as a Rational Business
In the first narrative, the men who storm schools and churches are not mysterious fanatics so much as entrepreneurs of violence. They are “bandits with ledgers,” operating in the vacuum between a weak state and desperate communities.
Security officials and some policy analysts describe today’s kidnap gangs as the latest phase of a long evolution. In the 2000s, militants in the oil-rich Niger Delta seized expatriate oil workers to force community projects and political concessions. In the northeast, Boko Haram fused ideology with abduction, using kidnappings to fund operations, recruit fighters and win prisoner releases. By the early 2010s, a third model was spreading across Nigeria’s 36 states: commercial kidnappings, driven primarily by ransom.
From this vantage point, the logic is bleak but straightforward. Rural Nigeria is full of people with little to lose and plenty of small targets: pastors, traders, schoolchildren, local government workers. The state cannot protect them consistently. Phones and cheap rifles are easy to obtain. Ransom demands can be calibrated to each victim’s perceived wealth. A village family might be asked for a few hundred dollars, a church network for hundreds of thousands.
Data from Nigerian consultancy SBM Intelligence paints a picture of a mature industry. Between July 2024 and June 2025, at least 4,722 people were abducted in 997 kidnapping incidents, according to its latest report. Kidnappers demanded roughly 48 billion naira (around $32 million), and victims paid an estimated 2.57 billion naira in ransom money that flowed mostly into the hands of armed groups in the northwest and north-central states.
To those who frame the crisis this way, religion is often secondary. Christians and Muslims alike are taken; entire buses disappear from highways cutting across overwhelmingly Muslim states. The common denominator is opportunity: an isolated road, a vulnerable village, a school that ignored a government instruction to close for security reasons, as authorities said of St. Mary’s.
Analysts in this camp describe a business model that breaks into familiar columns:
- Investment: motorcycles, rifles, satellite phones and informants inside towns and security services;
- Revenue: ransom payments from families, churches, companies and occasionally local governments;
- Expenses: bribes to officials, payments to camp commanders and foot soldiers, fees to money-changers and gun-runners.
Nigeria’s own Financial Intelligence Unit has flagged kidnap ransom payments as a major money-laundering risk, warning that ransom cash is recycled into weapons, luxury goods and cross-border financial networks.
Viewed through this narrative, the solution lies in tightening the screws on the business model itself. That means better financial surveillance, restrictions on cash withdrawals in high-risk areas, targeted sanctions against sponsors and middlemen, and more aggressive military operations against camps in forests that have become de facto tax offices, where communities negotiate rates for the right not to be abducted.
It is a brutal marketplace, the argument goes, but still a marketplace. Change the incentives, choke the flows of money and weapons, and the kidnappings will eventually decline.
Narrative 2: “A Country Held Hostage” — Corruption, Complicity and Betrayed Communities
The second narrative begins in the same villages and on the same highways, but it tells a different story. Here, kidnapping is less a “business model” and more a symptom of a deeper sickness: a state that cannot or will not protect its citizens, and elites who sometimes profit from that failure.
From this vantage point, every new mass abduction, the Chibok schoolgirls in 2014, the Greenfield University students in 2021, the Catholic schoolchildren in 2025, is not just a crime but an indictment. Nigeria has more than 200 million people and one of Africa’s largest economies, yet villagers often rely on their own savings and church networks to negotiate releases while soldiers and police arrive late or not at all.
Human-rights groups and local journalists point to a pattern that suggests, at minimum, negligence and, at worst, collusion. Community leaders describe paying ransoms, only to see the same gangs return months later, apparently untouched by security forces. In some states, officials have openly acknowledged past amnesty deals with bandit leaders, handing out cash and motorcycles in hopes of buying peace and, critics say, strengthening the very actors who destabilize the countryside.
Under President Tinubu, the pattern of violence has continued. Since his election in 2023, more than 10,000 people have been killed in various conflicts and hundreds kidnapped, according to estimates cited by regional analysts. Millions are displaced, living in camps or with relatives, their land abandoned to bandits and militias.
Religious leaders, especially in Christian communities, emphasize another layer: selective vulnerability. Most of the victims in the St. Mary’s attack were Christian students and staff. So were the 38 worshippers taken from the Christ Apostolic Church earlier that week. They are part of a long list of pastors, seminarians and parishioners abducted along Nigeria’s highways or from their homes in recent years.
Into this mix stepped Donald Trump, whose threats of “fast” military action over the alleged persecution of Christians have turned Nigeria’s kidnapping crisis into a geopolitical talking point. To Nigerian critics, that rhetoric distorts a complex reality in which both Christians and Muslims are victims and, at times, perpetrators. But they also argue that such international pressure exposes what local governments would prefer to paper over: a systemic failure to protect religious minorities in contested areas.
Activists in this narrative focus not on ransom flows but on justice. They ask why so few kidnap kingpins are prosecuted, why intelligence warnings about imminent attacks — like the one Niger state officials say they sent to St. Mary’s before the raid — are not backed by visible protection, and why grieving families so often feel they must choose between paying criminals or risking their loved ones’ lives.
Whether the victims are farmers in Zamfara, Muslim schoolgirls in Kebbi or Christian worshippers in Kwara, the conclusion is the same: a country that cannot guarantee basic safety is a country that has broken its part of the social contract.
The Price of a Child’s Future
Strip away the policy memos and the ransom arithmetic, and a quieter story emerges not about bandits or presidents, but about what happens to a society when kidnapping becomes normal.
Parents in northern Nigeria now make calculations that would have been unthinkable a generation ago: Is it safer to keep a daughter at home than send her to school? Is a son better off in an apprenticeship close to the family compound than in a boarding school two hours away? After the latest attacks, hundreds of schools have been ordered to close; many will quietly stay shut long after the formal security directive is lifted.
Teachers describe classrooms half-empty, students jittering at the sound of motorbikes outside. Pastors and imams shorten evening services so congregants can get home before dark. Traders build the cost of “security contributions”, protection money by another name, into the price of grain and petrol. Whole regions learn to live with a permanent low-level fear.
This is where the “business of kidnapping” seeps into everything else. Every ransom paid is a scholarship not funded, a clinic not built, a road not repaired. Every child traumatized by an abduction, or withdrawn from school to avoid one, is a line item on a ledger that does not show up in Nigeria’s GDP figures but will shape its future more profoundly than a quarter’s growth rate.
The story also stretches beyond Nigeria’s borders. Diaspora communities in Europe and North America wire money home to pay ransoms. Arms traffickers cross porous Sahel borders with weapons originally shipped for other wars. International media, including outlets like Reuters and Al Jazeera, drop in for the mass abductions, then move on. The long, slow work of rebuilding trust and institutions is left to underfunded local officials, religious leaders and civil society groups.
For 3 Narratives readers, this silent story may feel familiar from very different contexts. Our investigation into the Epstein files and missing girls traced another economy built on vulnerability and silence. Our explainer on AI in the newsroom examined how information about such abuses is filtered, amplified or buried.
Here in Nigeria’s kidnapping belt, the silent story is simpler and harder: how do you raise children in a place where a bus ride to school feels like a gamble with their lives?
At 3 Narratives News, our work stops at the edge of that question. We can lay out the competing stories of bandits with ledgers, a state that cannot protect its people and shine a light on the systems beneath them. The third narrative, what you believe this kidnapping economy really says about Nigeria and about us, is still yours to write.
Key Takeaways
- Kidnapping for ransom has become one of Nigeria’s largest criminal industries, with thousands abducted each year and billions of naira demanded in ransom, even as official statistics undercount the true scale.
- Analysts who see kidnapping as a “business model” focus on how armed groups exploit weak security, cash economies and porous borders to turn abduction into a steady revenue stream.
- Critics emphasize systemic governance failures, alleging corruption, collusion and neglect by authorities who have repeatedly failed to prevent or punish mass abductions.
- The impact goes far beyond ransoms: school closures, trauma and lost trust in institutions are quietly reshaping education, faith life and economic opportunity across large parts of Nigeria.
- Recent attacks on Christian schools and churches have added a dangerous religious dimension, turning Nigeria’s kidnap crisis into a flashpoint for international politics and domestic grievance.
Questions This Article Answers (FAQs)
- How big is the kidnapping economy in Nigeria?
Reports from Nigerian analysts suggest that thousands of people are abducted each year, with kidnappers demanding tens of billions of naira in ransom and receiving at least several billion, on top of an estimated $18.5 million taken over the decade from 2011 to 2020. - Who is behind the latest school kidnappings and church attacks?
Security experts say most recent attacks, including the St. Mary’s Catholic School abduction and the church raid in Kwara state, are carried out by armed gangs known locally as bandits, motivated primarily by ransom money rather than ideology, though jihadist groups remain active elsewhere. - Why are schools and churches such frequent targets?
Schools and places of worship gather large numbers of people in predictable locations with limited protection. Abducting students or worshippers increases public pressure on families, churches and governments to pay, making them attractive targets in a ransom-driven economy. - How has the Nigerian government responded?
Authorities have closed dozens of schools, launched military operations and promised tens of thousands of new police officers, while sometimes negotiating or granting amnesty to armed groups. Critics say these measures are inconsistent, under-resourced and undermined by corruption and weak prosecutions. - Are Christians being targeted more than other groups?
Many recent high-profile attacks have hit Christian schools and churches, feeding a perception of targeted persecution, especially among church leaders. However, Muslim communities have also suffered mass abductions and killings, and many analysts argue that profit and weak security, rather than religious identity alone, drive most kidnappings.
Process & AI-Use Disclosure: This article was reported and written by human editors at 3 Narratives News, using sources including Reuters, Al Jazeera, Nigerian data analysts and academic studies. AI tools were used only for timeline checks, language clarity and copy-editing under human supervision. For our full policy, see /how-we-use-ai/. Corrections are logged at /corrections/.
