When the State abandons its primary duty, survival becomes an act of radical rebellion in a nation waiting for an election while its citizens wait for rescue.
Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, the first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet.
•Onuma, a contributing analyst to USAfrica, is a Nigerian writer, editor, and consultant.
There is a strange trepidation in the air across Nigeria today — a weight that settles on the mind and crawls through the skin the moment you step outside. It is the feeling of living in a country where human life has become a negotiable commodity, where safety is no longer a right but a transaction. To live in Nigeria in 2026 is to exist with the constant awareness that anyone — a child on the way to school, a commuter on a bus, a farmer on his land — can be taken. The state has lost its monopoly on force. Armed groups now dictate the terms of daily life from forests, highways, and the edges of cities. We have become a country suspended between fear and fatigue, waiting for the phone call that demands a price for someone we love.
This is not merely insecurity. It is an economy. A marketplace built on human bodies. This is the Ransom Republic.
The numbers confirm what ordinary Nigerians already feel in their bones. According to independent security trackers SBM Intelligence and Beacon Security & Intelligence, abductions nearly doubled in a single month in early 2026 — jumping from 345 in March to 709 in April alone, while fatalities climbed from 777 to over 1,000 in that same period. Analysts estimate that Nigerians paid more than ₦100 billion in ransoms between 2011 and 2020. Add the unreported payments, the private negotiations, the quiet transfers families make out of shame and fear, and the total climbs into the trillions. A recent estimate puts the cumulative ransom economy at ₦2.2 trillion — money that should have funded school fees, hospital bills, and small businesses but has instead flowed into the hands of armed networks that terrorize communities and destabilize entire regions.
This is not a petty crime. It is a structured economy, operated by networks with coordination, informants, financiers, and supply chains. They have learned the rhythms of Nigerian life — when people travel, when they are most exposed, when the state looks the other way. And they have learned that the state, consistently, cannot stop them.
The case of Nabeeha Al-Kadriyah crystallised something that many Nigerians had long suspected. In January 2024, Nabeeha, her father, and her four sisters were kidnapped from their home in Abuja — the Federal Capital Territory, the place we are told is most heavily guarded in the country. Her father was released to negotiate ransom for his daughters. Before the family could raise the full amount, the kidnappers murdered Nabeeha and told her relatives where to collect her body. Strangers organized crowdfunding campaigns on social media to help raise ransom money for the surviving sisters. Ordinary citizens doing what the state could not, or would not, do. That moment broke something in the national psyche. It confirmed that the violence was no longer contained to distant rural regions. It was bold. It was confident. It was at the gates of the capital.
What makes the crisis worse is the government’s duplicity. Publicly, the Nigerian state insists it does not negotiate with terrorists and has criminalised ransom payments. But behind the rhetoric, a different story keeps emerging. When nearly 230 children and staff were abducted from St. Mary’s Catholic boarding school in Niger State in late 2025, they were freed after two weeks. The government praised its security agencies and denied paying ransom. Yet an AFP investigation, citing intelligence sources, reported that a substantial ransom was allegedly delivered by helicopter to a militant enclave — and that two detained Boko Haram commanders were released as part of the arrangement. Similarly, when 25 schoolgirls were taken from a school in Kebbi State in November 2025 by bandit leader Ado Aleru — explicitly to pressure the government into releasing eleven arrested associates — the girls were freed within a week. Sources claimed the demanded concessions were quietly granted. The government denied everything, as it always does.
Picture it plainly: a government helicopter allegedly flying taxpayer money into a terrorist stronghold while the same government lectures grieving families on television about the dangers of “encouraging” kidnappers. If the allegations are correct, this is not crisis management. It is state-sponsored reinforcement of a criminal economy. Every secret payout guarantees the next kidnapping. Every denial corrodes public trust. And every capitulation teaches armed groups exactly how to break a government that lacks the will to hold firm.
For years, southern Nigerians told themselves that this was a “northern problem” — rooted in poverty, geography, and conditions that belonged to a different Nigeria. That illusion collapsed in May 2026, when gunmen attacked three schools in the Esiele and Yawota communities of Oyo State in the South-West. According to the Christian Association of Nigeria, 46 people — mostly children between the ages of two and sixteen — were taken, along with their teachers. We must resist processing this as another statistic. We must sit with what it means for an armed man to walk into a nursery school, look at a two-year-old child, and see not a human being but a bargaining chip. The same networks that terrorized the North for over a decade have arrived at the school gates of the commercial and cultural heartland of Nigeria. The old mental map of safe and unsafe regions is gone.
The government’s response to Oyo was depressingly familiar: high-powered delegations visiting grieving families, a late announcement about deploying forest guards, and the President’s representatives assuring the public that he “cannot sleep” until the children return. But what does a President’s insomnia mean to a mother whose two-year-old is lying on the cold floor of a kidnapper’s hideout? Nigeria has satellite intelligence, a standing army, and billions in annual security votes. It repeatedly fails to find and rescue toddlers taken in broad daylight.
At some point, we must ask — with a quiet, controlled anger — whether this is incompetence or something more troubling. When a government consistently arrives late, consistently offers excuses, and consistently fails to act, the line between incompetence and complicity does not blur. It disappears.
The political class offers no relief. As the 2027 elections draw near, Abuja is consumed by party negotiations, zoning arithmetic, and delegate counts. The people who feel the danger most acutely are not the ones making the decisions. The people making the decisions are insulated from the danger entirely. This is Nigeria’s central crisis: two parallel systems of governance. One is the official state, with its ministries, budgets, and televised briefings. The other is the shadow system — the men in the forests and on the highways — who dictate the terms of daily existence for millions. In the Rugu forest reserve, bandit leaders give journalists interviews and issue demands to government officials as though running parallel administrations. The state’s authority is not merely challenged. It is openly mocked.
So, what can ordinary Nigerians do? The painful truth is that we have been orphaned by the state, and we cannot afford to wait for a rescue that is not coming. We must decentralize our survival — strengthening community vigilante structures, funding neighbourhood watch programs with the same seriousness as school fees, building hyper-local intelligence networks that serve as early-warning systems before kidnappers disappear into the trees. We must instruct our children, gently but honestly, about the world they are growing up in. These conversations do not steal their innocence. What steals innocence is leaving them unprepared in a country that has already decided to exploit their vulnerability.
But the most powerful form of self-defence is still political. The kidnapping industry thrives because bad governance creates the conditions for it. A political class that has never faced consequences for catastrophic security failures has no incentive to fix anything. As 2027 approaches, we cannot reward leaders who treat kidnapping as a footnote in their manifestos. We cannot take part in consensus politics that protects impunity where accountability should live. We must demand security-focused debates as the core question of nationhood — and hold every candidate responsible for explaining, concretely, how they intend to protect Nigerian lives.
The ₦2.2 trillion ransom economy is not a symptom. It is evidence — the clearest evidence available — that we now live in a republic where citizens are currency and the state is a spectator. The government may have abandoned the script of governance, but the citizens still hold the pen. We can transform our grief into civic power, our fear into strategy, our exhaustion into the sustained, unrelenting demand for accountability that this moment requires. Because if we do not act, the ransom demanded of us will not be money, or even our children.
The ransom will be Nigeria itself — the very possibility of a country where life has value and the future is not negotiated at gunpoint.
This is the Ransom Republic. And only we can end it.
