By Lemmy Ughegbe, Ph.D
Kidnapping in Nigeria is no longer merely a crime; it is fast becoming an economy. There are victims, and there are buyers of freedom. There are negotiators, informants, financiers and ransom collectors. There are arms suppliers. And somewhere within that chain, money changes hands efficiently enough to keep the enterprise alive. That is perhaps the most disturbing conclusion to draw from the latest report by SBM Intelligence on Nigeria’s kidnapping crisis.
Between July 2025 and June 2026, no fewer than 7,825 people were reportedly abducted across the country, and at least 1,142 were killed. Kidnappers demanded about ₦22.86 billion in ransom and received an estimated ₦7.78 billion of it. Pause over that last figure. ₦7.78 billion is not loose change exchanged between desperate families and a handful of isolated criminals. It is an economy.
More troubling still is the direction of travel. The number of victims rose by 66 per cent over the preceding year, while actual ransom payments more than tripled, from ₦2.56 billion to ₦7.78 billion.
Kidnapping, in other words, appears to be growing more profitable, and profitable criminal enterprises inevitably attract more participants. That is why Nigeria may need to rethink its response.
For years, the country has treated kidnapping primarily as a security problem: deploy soldiers, mobilise police tactical units, search forests, establish checkpoints, rescue victims where possible, arrest perpetrators where intelligence permits. All of this remains necessary. But what if we have been fighting only half the problem?
Kidnapping is simultaneously a security enterprise and a financial one. A kidnapper does not abduct simply because he possesses a gun; he abducts because somebody will pay. Every successful ransom therefore validates the business model.
This is not an argument for condemning families who pay. Few parents will debate national security strategy while their child sits in a forest with an AK-47 pointed at him, and few spouses will refuse payment when the alternative may be receiving the corpse of a husband or wife. The state cannot reasonably demand such sacrifice from frightened families when it cannot guarantee the rescue of their loved ones.
The real question is different: how does billions of naira move through a criminal economy without the state sufficiently disrupting the financial architecture that sustains it? Some payments are undoubtedly made in cash; others may pass through intermediaries and informal channels specifically designed to frustrate detection.
But ₦7.78 billion should provoke more than shock. It should provoke financial intelligence. Who collects the money, and who moves it? Where does it eventually go, and how much of it finances weapons? How much supports terrorist and bandit networks, and who converts or launders the proceeds? Who supplies the motorcycles, fuel, food, ammunition and communication equipment that keep the enterprise running, and who within legitimate communities or institutions facilitates that chain?
The gunman in the forest is merely the most visible participant in a much wider ecosystem. Nigeria therefore needs to attack kidnapping from both ends: the gun and the money.
Our intelligence agencies, security services, banks, telecommunications companies and financial regulators should be capable of combining data far more aggressively to identify patterns around ransom demands and criminal networks. That does not mean reckless surveillance of innocent Nigerians, nor does it mean freezing accounts merely because distressed relatives are trying to save a loved one. It means developing intelligence sophisticated enough to follow criminal money while still protecting victims, and the latest figures make that imperative.
SBM reports that mass abductions have become increasingly prominent, and it warns that payment of ransom does not necessarily guarantee survival; in some documented cases, victims were reportedly killed even after money had changed hands. There is something especially horrifying about that. Families impoverish themselves to purchase life, only to discover that criminals recognise neither contract nor conscience.
Kidnapping also produces consequences that reach far beyond the immediate victim. Farmers abandon their fields for fear of abduction, and children stay away from school because parents fear the journey to the classroom.
Businesses avoid communities considered unsafe, and transporters raise fares to price in the risk. Families sell land, houses and livestock to raise ransom. Entire communities grow poorer because criminals have discovered that human beings can be converted into cash.
That is why these ransom figures should be understood as more than criminal proceeds. They represent a private tax imposed on Nigerians by armed groups because the state has failed sufficiently to protect them.
Unlike legitimate taxation, this one buys no roads, hospitals or schools; it buys freedom from captivity, if the victim is fortunate. The tragedy is that every successful transaction potentially finances the next abduction.
Ransom can purchase another weapon, another motorcycle, more ammunition and more recruits, and another kidnapping then produces another ransom. The cycle feeds itself.
The mass abduction in Niger State this week is a reminder that this is not an academic discussion. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has ordered security forces to rescue those taken in the latest attack, and that operation must succeed. But Nigeria cannot continue lurching from one rescue operation to the next. A country of more than 200 million people cannot run its security architecture permanently on emergency response.
We must make kidnapping economically unviable. That requires better policing, intelligence-led operations, stronger border security and prosecution. But it also requires following the money, dismantling logistics networks, identifying collaborators and making possession of ransom proceeds as dangerous as carrying the gun used in the abduction.
Nigeria must also confront the conditions that supply criminal organisations with recruits: poverty, unemployment, weak local governance and vast territories where the presence of the state is barely felt.
The latest figures should not become another frightening statistic that dominates headlines for 48 hours before disappearing. Seven thousand eight hundred and twenty-five abducted Nigerians are not statistics, and neither are the 1,142 reportedly killed. Nor is ₦7.78 billion in ransom simply money. It is evidence of an industry.
Nigeria has spent years fighting kidnappers. Perhaps it is time we became equally determined to destroy the economy that keeps kidnapping alive.
Lemmy Ughegbe, FIMC, CMC
WhatsApp ONLY: +2348069716645
