By Rekpene Bassey
Nigeria has witnessed a gradual unravelling of its internal security architecture in the past decade. At the heart of this crisis is the phenomenon simplistically labelled as banditry, a term that conceals more than it reveals.
When armed groups invade villages in the dead of night, killing entire families, torching houses, farmlands, and abducting schoolchildren, the crimes transcend mere theft.
This isn’t banditry in the conventional sense; it is insurgency in disguise; organised, ideological in undertones, and systemic in execution.
The insistence on calling them “bandits” is, in itself, part of Nigeria’s security dilemma: a failure to correctly diagnose the problem, and by extension, an inability to prescribe the proper cure.
This linguistic evasiveness seems deliberate. Northern political elites coined the “banditry” euphemism as a shield against admitting an uncomfortable truth: that decades of deliberate state neglect, weaponised poverty, feudal subjugation, and the politicisation of religion have bred a generation of extremists and violent entrepreneurs.
Official narratives preferred to mask the deep ideological roots of violence in the North, framing them instead as localised criminality. That self-delusion has proven catastrophic.
According to the Global Terrorism Index 2024, armed groups labelled as “bandits” were responsible for over 4,800 deaths and 7,200 abductions in Nigeria’s North-West alone between 2020 and 2023.
Pretending this is banditry or mere thievery, therefore, doesn’t make the bullets any less real.
This mischaracterisation has policy consequences. Unlike Niger Delta militancy, which was essentially an economic protest over resource control and environmental devastation, Northern violence is far more layered. It is not simply about profit but also about power, control, and ideology.
The so-called bandits do not primarily come to steal, but to kill and maim, as it were. It follows that efforts to replicate the Niger Delta amnesty model in the North were doomed from the outset.
Paying off violent actors in Kaduna, Katsina, Zamfara, and Sokoto without addressing the socio-political incubators of extremism has been akin to watering weeds and expecting roses to bloom.
Katsina’s former governor, Aminu Masari, admitted in 2021 that he “gave millions” to so-called repentant bandits, only to watch them return to the forests and resume their atrocities. His lament was both predictable and avoidable.
Throwing money at insecurity, as a former governor of Kaduna did, without addressing its root causes, amounts to subsidising violence.
The Northern crisis has many “parents:” an entrenched medieval feudal system trying to co-exist in a 21st-century economy; a deliberate suppression of mass education to maintain docility; the dangerous fusion of religion and politics; and a culture of elite indifference.
These factors have created fertile ground for violent movements to take root and flourish. In rural Katsina, Zamfara, and Sokoto, where literacy rates hover around 20 per cent compared to the national average of 62 per cent, extremist recruiters roam unchecked, preying on idle, impoverished youths abandoned by the state.
This is bitter, or rather the uncomfortable truth: a leadership class addicted to self-preservation has sown the seeds of its own destabilisation.
Well-educated Northern elites, whose children attend private schools in Abuja, America, France, London, and Dubai, seem to prefer the status quo; a largely uneducated, impoverished populace is easy to manipulate during elections.
But the children of the commoner, raised in deprivation yet radicalised by itinerant preachers, are fighting back, though not always ideologically.
What was once political docility has mutated into a volatile mix of anger, hunger, and opportunism, now weaponised with AK-47s smuggled freely across porous borders.
National security cannot survive such contradictions. Nigeria today faces a hydra-headed threat: so-called ‘banditry’ in the North-west, insurgency in the North-East, militancy and oil theft in the Niger Delta, separatist agitations in the Southeast and Southwest, and farmer-herder conflicts in the Middle Belt. Treating these threats as identical is a fundamental policy flaw.
A one-size-fits-all blueprint, as Abuja has attempted for decades, guarantees failure. Each security challenge arises from distinct historical, economic, geographical, and socio-political contexts; solutions must therefore be localised, evidence-based, and multidimensional.
Equally damaging is the culture of impunity that shields sponsors of violence. Security intelligence has repeatedly implicated political godfathers, certain traditional rulers, and clerical elites in funding or shielding armed groups.
Yet few are ever prosecuted. This double standard corrodes state legitimacy. In an era where data monitoring and drone reconnaissance make it nearly impossible to hide large-scale terror financing, Nigeria’s security institutions may appear lethargic, or somewhat complicit, and dangerously fragmented.
There is also the transnational dimension. North-Western Nigeria borders Niger, Chad, and Benin; a region notorious for porous borders and illicit arms trafficking.
The Small Arms Survey estimates that over 350 million illicit firearms circulate in West Africa, with Nigeria accounting for nearly 70 per cent of them.
Without regional cooperation and robust border security, local interventions will remain cosmetic. Criminal syndicates exploit these vulnerabilities, embedding themselves in regional smuggling networks that transcend Nigeria’s jurisdictional reach.
The economic consequences are devastating. Agricultural output in Benue, Kaduna, Katsina, Zamfara, and Sokoto, once the breadbasket of Northern Nigeria, has plummeted as farmers abandon their lands for fear of attacks.
The National Bureau of Statistics reports that the North-west alone lost an estimated ₦1.2 trillion in agricultural revenue between 2020 and 2023 due to so-called banditry and mass displacement.
In the Malumfashi area, for instance, where entire communities have been sacked, thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) now languish in makeshift camps, straining state resources and fuelling cycles of poverty.
The human toll is staggering. According to Amnesty International, over 3.2 million people have been displaced by ‘banditry’ and related violence across the North-West and North-Central regions.
Insecurity is hollowing out entire towns, creating ghost villages where silence replaces the hum of life.
School closures are accelerating a generational catastrophe: UNESCO data show that over 20 million Nigerian children are currently out of school, with the highest concentration in conflict-ridden Northern states. A generation uneducated is a generation lost, and one potentially weaponised by future conflicts.
The solutions are neither quick nor simple, but they must begin with brutal honesty. The North must confront its internal contradictions and dismantle the structures that perpetuate feudal exploitation and systemic neglect.
Political elites must invest in mass education, healthcare, and infrastructure, not as favours to the populace but as foundational national security imperatives. Societies that weaponise ignorance eventually inherit violence.
Second, Nigeria must overhaul its security architecture, integrating actionable intelligence, precision technology, and community-driven solutions.
Satellite surveillance, drone reconnaissance, and inter-agency data fusion centres should be upgraded to standard tools in combating armed groups.
The Nigerian military, overstretched across multiple theatres, needs strategic recalibration; shifting from reactionary deployment to predictive, intelligence-led operations that disrupt threats before they metastasise. More airpower must be deployed against these dangerous malefactors.
Third, local communities must become co-creators of their own security. Traditional rulers, religious leaders, and civil society actors possess invaluable knowledge of terrains and actors that outsiders lack.
Empowering local vigilante outfits and integrating them into formal policing structures, with training, oversight, and resources, can turn security from a distant Abuja bureaucracy into a grassroots partnership.
Fourth, Nigeria must tackle the financing of terror with unprecedented resolve. This means tracing ransom payments, disrupting informal financial flows, and sanctioning domestic sponsors regardless of their political connections.
The current cycle, where victims’ families fund their own tormentors through ransom, must be broken through a combination of enforcement and social safety nets that reduce vulnerability.
Lastly, Nigeria cannot fight this war in isolation. Regional frameworks, such as the Multinational Joint Task Force, must be revitalised, not just on paper, but in practical coordination, intelligence sharing, and joint border patrols.
International partners can support with technology transfer and capacity-building, but the political will must be home-grown.
‘Banditry’ or whatever euphemism one prefers, is not a local nuisance; it is insurgency, an evolving, dangerous national security crisis with regional implications.
Unless Nigeria abandons denialism, dismantles structural enablers, and adopts a context-driven security strategy, the Bokos, Danko-Wasbu, Riyom, Talata Mafara, Yelwata and Malumfashi massacres, among others, will not be the last. The nation stands at a crossroads where failure to act decisively risks normalising mass violence as a permanent feature of national life.
The window for reform is narrowing. History is unkind to nations that mistake symptoms for causes and slogans for solutions. Proper criminological characterisation or classification of banditry has become imperative.
Nigeria can no longer afford self-delusion. Banditry may be the name, but state fragility is the disease. And without urgent, courageous interventions, the country risks watching its sovereignty erode; one so-called ‘bandit’ raid at a time.
*Rekpene Bassey is the President of the African Council on Narcotics (ACON), and also a Security, Drug and Crime Prevention Specialist.
