Kidnapping is now so rampant in Nigeria that it seems as if everyone knows someone who has been taken. People have been kidnapped while driving on interstate roads, while worshipping at church, and while sleeping in their homes. The novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s late father, a professor, was once kidnapped on the road between his home town and the university town where he lived; he was released three days later, after his family paid a ransom. The mother of the former finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala was taken; so were an Anglican archbishop and his wife. At least forty-seven hundred Nigerians were kidnapped between July, 2024, and June, 2025, and more than seven hundred of them were killed, according to the research firm S.B.M. Intelligence. Victims’ families and friends collectively paid more than two and a half billion naira, or about one and a half million dollars, to kidnappers during that time—double the figure from the year before. This study relied on cases reported in the media, meaning that the real total is almost certainly higher. The kidnap-for-ransom industry has become one of the most lucrative in the country.
The crisis began in the nineties, in the Niger Delta. Militant groups had formed there to oppose the exploitation and pollution of their communities by foreign oil companies such as Shell, and they began abducting oil workers and demanding ransoms from the companies as a form of protest. In the two-thousands, criminal gangs in the southeast began emulating the practice—but as a way of making money rather than as an act of resistance. They often seized people from vehicles on busy roads. “People could not go home for Christmas,” Abubakar Siddique Mohammed, the director of a Nigerian think tank called the Centre for Democratic Development Research and Training, told me. The gangs would pay cattle herders in the vast, ungoverned forests of northern Nigeria to hold the hostages until ransoms were paid. “That is how some of them were actually initiated into kidnapping,” Mohammed said.
In 2009, Boko Haram, based in the northeast of the country, began a campaign of guerrilla attacks and suicide bombings, in an effort to establish a caliphate in the region. It declared itself against Western-style education, and began kidnapping children from schools and forcing them to convert to Islam. Fighters raped the girls and married them against their will. In 2014, Boko Haram took almost three hundred girls from a secondary school in Chibok; the whereabouts of some ninety are still unknown. Last November, the group is believed to have kidnapped about three hundred students from a Catholic school, some as young as five.
In the northwest, the practice spread through less ideological conflicts. There are ongoing disputes in the region between farmers from the Hausa ethnic group and Fulani cattle herders over access to grazing land. Attacks between the communities have displaced thousands of people. Some young herders turned to organized crime. “Initially, they would go to a village, attack, and extract money from the local notables,” Mohammed said. “Then they moved to blocking local highways to seize whatever is in the vehicles. Then they started kidnapping people.” Today, according to a report from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, some thirty thousand armed Fulani militants operate in Nigeria. Some groups consist of only a couple of dozen people; others, several hundred.
The groups are usually named for their leaders. One of the most brutal is led by Bello Turji, a Fulani man believed to be in his early thirties. Turji uses the language of Fulani liberation; he told a Nigerian newspaper called the Daily Trust that he had “been forced into banditry” because of “a genocide being committed against the Fulani,” and that a group of farmers had stolen a thousand cattle from his family and killed several of his relatives. His group now carries out kidnappings, extortions, and evictions in farming communities. A few years ago, a pseudonymous musician released a song calling Turji a hero, angering many Nigerians. A group led by a man named Ado Aleru, which kidnapped twenty-five schoolgirls last November, has promised to stop its campaign if the government provides alternative means of livelihood for its followers, along with better schools and hospitals and access to clean water. (Turji and Aleru did not respond to requests for comment.)
