Society · Nigeria · Reflection

The daily arithmetic of fear

To take another human being hostage is to place yourself outside the human community. Nigeria is losing people to that act every single day, and we owe them more than anger.

There is a number I cannot get out of my head. In 2024, Nigeria was losing an average of twenty-six people a day to kidnappers. Not a year. A day. Between July 2023 and June 2024, more than seven and a half thousand people were taken. Behind each figure is a family by a phone, a farm being sold to raise a ransom, a child who did not come home from school.

I am writing this because I love the country I come from, and because silence in the face of this feels like a kind of consent. Kidnapping for ransom has become one of the defining terrors of everyday Nigerian life, and it is time we talked about it honestly: not just how angry it makes us, but what would actually make it stop.

The scale of it

The picture the evidence paints is grim, and it is spreading. What began concentrated in the northwest and north-central regions, Zamfara, Katsina, Kaduna, is now reaching into parts of the country that had felt untouched. Analysts have noted abductions creeping into the southwest, along the highways, into states that never used to feature on this map.

The victims are everyone. Schoolchildren taken by the hundreds from their classrooms, surpassing even the horror of Chibok. Farmers seized from their fields. Worshippers taken from churches and mosques alike. Travellers pulled from cars on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway. This crime does not respect faith, region, or class. It has become, in the chilling words of one analyst, “a normal thing.”

Why anger alone will not save us

When a crisis is this raw, the instinct is to reach for the harshest possible answer. I understand it completely. When politicians call for the death penalty for kidnappers, they are speaking to a real and righteous fury, the fury of parents who have watched their children dragged into the forest while the state looked away.

But I want to be honest, even where it is uncomfortable. The evidence suggests that the problem is not that our punishments are too soft. The problem is that almost no one is ever caught.

Read the reporting and one theme repeats again and again: kidnapping has become a low-risk, high-profit enterprise, because ransoms are often paid and prosecutions are rare. A death penalty written into law means very little to a criminal who is almost certain he will never see the inside of a courtroom. You cannot deter a man with a punishment he does not believe will ever reach him.

And there is a darker risk still. Kidnappers have murdered hostages even after the ransom was paid. If we raise the stakes to execution without first raising the chances of capture, we may simply give armed men one more reason to leave no witnesses. The intention would be justice. The result could be more funerals.

The question is not whether kidnapping deserves severe punishment. Of course it does. The question is what actually reduces the number of families waiting by a phone tonight.

What would actually work

If punishment on paper is not the answer, what is? The same sources that document the horror also point, consistently, at the things that would change it. None of them is a slogan. All of them are hard. But they are real.

End the impunity. The single most powerful deterrent is not the severity of a sentence, it is the certainty of being caught. That means investigation, intelligence, prosecution, and conviction that actually happens. Until kidnapping stops being a safe bet, it will not stop being a business.

Protect the obvious targets. Nigeria endorsed the Safe Schools Declaration in 2015, yet rural schools remain heartbreakingly exposed. Securing schools and the roads people cannot avoid travelling is not glamorous work, but it is where lives are saved.

Confront the accountability failure inside the state itself. This is the hardest truth in the reporting. There have been cases where security personnel were reportedly withdrawn shortly before kidnappings, with no accountability afterward. No strategy will work while the people meant to protect communities are not themselves held to account.

And, closest to my own heart, starve the pipeline. Analysts are clear that poverty and youth unemployment feed this crisis, that young men with no hope and no prospects become the foot soldiers of the kidnapping economy. Greed drives the men at the top, but desperation supplies the ranks. A young person with a future to protect is far harder to recruit into destroying someone else’s.

Why this is my fight too

I have spent my working life on a simple belief: that opportunity, dignity, and a way into the modern world should reach everyone, not just the fortunate few. It is easy to think of that as gentle work, digital skills, inclusion, confidence. This crisis is a reminder that it is not gentle at all. It is foundational.

When a generation is left without education, without work, without a stake in society, the vacuum does not stay empty. It fills with something. In too much of Nigeria, it is filling with the gun and the ransom note. The long answer to kidnapping is not only more soldiers and more prisons, though we need honest, accountable security. It is a country in which a young person can imagine a life worth building, and has the means to build it.

That is not naive. It is the most practical thing I know. You cannot arrest your way out of a crisis that hopelessness keeps refilling.

What I am asking

I am asking, first, that we refuse to let this become background noise. Twenty-six people a day is not a statistic to scroll past. It is a national emergency, and it deserves to be treated like one, by our leaders and by all of us who love this country from home and from abroad.

And I am asking that our response be as serious as our grief. Not just louder punishment for the few who are caught, but the patient, unglamorous work of catching them, protecting the vulnerable, holding the state to its own duty, and giving the young a reason to choose a different road.

To take a person hostage is to step outside the human community. Our task is to build a country strong enough, and just enough, that fewer and fewer people ever make that choice, and that those who do can no longer count on getting away with it.

Sources include Human Rights Watch World Report 2026, ACLED, the Soufan Center, the EU Agency for Asylum country reporting, and Nigerian press including Vanguard and The Guardian Nigeria. Figures are drawn from those reports and reflect the most recent available data at the time of writing.

Handwritten by John Adewole, built for people, by a person.