In the bandit heartlands of north-west Nigeria, the number of recorded incidents rose 78 per cent in the first half of this year compared with the same period in 2025, according to the conflict monitor ACLED. Over the same months, Nigeria’s National Human Rights Commission recorded a doubling of kidnappings nationwide.

Neither figure has led an international bulletin. This is a conflict that kills and abducts at a scale comparable to wars that dominate the news, and it is reported mainly in Nigeria.

What “banditry” means here

The word does a lot of work, and it obscures more than it explains. These are organised armed groups operating across Zamfara, Katsina, Kaduna, Sokoto, Kebbi, Kano and Jigawa — Nigeria’s seven north-western states — running mass abduction as a business model, alongside cattle rustling and the taxation of villages.

They are not an insurgency in the sense that Boko Haram or Islamic State West Africa Province are. They make no stated political or religious claim on the state. That is precisely why the label stuck, and why the response has been treated as a policing problem for a decade while the scale grew into something else.

ACLED recorded 13,485 deaths linked to banditry across those seven states between 2010 and 2023. Malik Samuel of Good Governance Africa put the current position bluntly: there is no region in northern Nigeria that is not experiencing some form of mass abduction.

The numbers, and where they come from

Several independent datasets point the same way, which matters more than any single figure.

SBM Intelligence recorded 2,938 people kidnapped in the North-West between July 2024 and June 2025 — more than 60 per cent of all reported kidnapping incidents in Nigeria. Zamfara led with 1,203, then Kaduna with 629, Katsina with 566 and Sokoto with 358. A separate half-year security review found 4,672 security incidents and 6,800 fatalities in the first half of 2025, with Zamfara again highest on both.

The UN estimates roughly 800,000 people have been forced from their homes by violence in the north-west. A camp in Gusau, Zamfara’s capital, holds more than a thousand people and is short of food and of places to sleep.

One caution on all of it. Kidnapping figures are drawn from reported incidents, and reporting depends on whether a family goes to the police — which many do not, because negotiation and payment happen privately and involving the authorities is widely believed to endanger the hostage. Every number here is a floor.

It has stopped being a northern problem

In May, armed men on motorcycles attacked three schools in Oyo State, in Nigeria’s south-west. They took 39 children — the youngest was two years old — and seven teachers. One teacher was killed during the attack; another was killed in captivity, and footage of the killing was circulated online. Forty-four of those still held were released after 56 days.

Oyo is a long way from Zamfara. The spread of the tactic southward is the development that ACLED’s Africa analysts have been flagging, and it is the thing most likely to change how the Nigerian state responds, because it changes who is affected.

What the government has done, and the argument about it

President Tinubu’s administration raised the defence and security budget by 10 per cent in December 2025 and approved the recruitment of 28,000 new military personnel. Counter-banditry operations across Sokoto, Katsina, Kebbi and Zamfara reported 1,023 kidnap victims rescued and 305 bandits killed in 2025. Thousands of residents in Zamfara have joined government-backed self-defence units.

Supporters of that approach argue that groups holding territory and running abduction at industrial scale cannot be policed and must be fought, and that arming local communities is what fills the gap where the army cannot be everywhere at once.

Critics — including Nigerian civil society groups and international human rights organisations — make two objections. The first is about accuracy and accountability: in January, a Nigerian Air Force strike hit Tungar Kara village in Zamfara’s Maradun LGA, killing at least 20 people, reportedly including members of a state-backed community protection guard responding to a bandit raid. An investigation was announced after public outcry; no findings have been published. Similar strikes have killed hundreds in previous years without published accountability.

The second is about the self-defence units. Researchers who study armed community groups in the Sahel note that they are effective in the short run and difficult to demobilise afterwards, and that they tend to acquire their own local interests. Nigerian officials counter that the alternative — unarmed villages facing motorcycle raids — is not a policy.

Why it stays uncovered

Partly access: the north-west is dangerous for journalists and expensive to reach. Partly the framing — “banditry” reads as crime rather than conflict, and crime is treated as a domestic story. And partly repetition: an abduction of forty schoolchildren was a global headline in 2014, and has since become a category of event that happens often enough to lose its news value while losing none of its consequences.

Sources

ACLED incident data and NHRC kidnapping figures as reported by The Namibian; Oyo abductions, budget and displacement figures via UA.News; state-level kidnapping breakdown from SBM Intelligence and the Tungar Kara airstrike via Human Rights Watch.