Mass Kidnappings in Nigeria, Daily Brief March 19, 2024

Banditry and insurgency are plaguing northern Nigeria from east to west, and a fresh wave of mass kidnappings seems to show authorities are unable to protect people.

Just yesterday, more than 87 people were reportedly abducted in Kajuru community in Kaduna State.

On March 9, criminal gangs known as “bandits” attacked a boarding school in Gidan Bakuso village in Sokoto State and kidnapped 15 children as they slept.

Two days before that, bandits abducted 287 students, including many girls, at the government secondary school in Kuriga town, in Kaduna State.

On February 29, more than 200 internally displaced people were abducted, many of them children, in the Ngala Local Government Area of Borno State. The perpetrator in that case is believed to be the Islamist insurgent group Boko Haram.

It’s a spate of truly alarming attacks. The overall insecurity it reveals is frightening, and it’s hard to even imagine the terror the abductees – so many of them just kids – must be suffering and the overwhelming distress of their families worrying about them back home.

It’s not exactly new, of course, such mass abductions have been a problem across northern Nigeria since Boko Haram abducted 276 schoolgirls from Chibok in 2014. That atrocity sparked the #BringBackOurGirls movement, which received massive international attention.

Still, the recent wave of mass kidnappings is shocking, and the key question remains: where are the authorities? Why can’t they protect people from bandits and insurgents?

Government security forces say they are working to obtain the safe release of those abducted. Bandits sometimes demand ransoms be paid, but authorities are loathe to do so, not wanting to reward banditry and encourage even more. Security forces also highlight the difficulties reaching the remote forest areas where the victims are being held.

Assuring their safe release is essential, of course, but Nigerian authorities also face what’s perhaps an even greater challenge: preventing more kidnappings, particularly of vulnerable students, without frustrated security forces engaging in abuses against those they are rescuing, as they’ve done in the past.

Ultimately, what may be most critical in ending these horrific mass abductions in northern Nigeria – and stopping the abuses seen in security forces’ responses to them – is, as my expert colleague Anietie Ewang says, holding the perpetrators to account. If people keep getting away with such horrific crimes, these horrific crimes will keep happening.