by Mohammed Bello Doka
11 June, 2026.
The men who sit in Abuja would have you believe the kidnappers and bandits spreading death across this nation are merely opposition politicians in camouflage. Senator Orji Uzor Kalu recently insisted before a national television audience that Nigeria's security crisis is not a failure of governance but a deliberate plot to weaken President Bola Tinubu ahead of 2027. “People are sponsoring this insecurity to destabilise the government. They want Tinubu to fail. They did the same thing to former President Jonathan,” he declared on Politics Sunday, a Channels Television programme. The former Abia governor, speaking with the confidence of a man who has never lost sleep over a kidnapper‘s ransom demand, assured viewers that those girls snatched from their schools would be recovered. But he offered no names. No evidence. Only the convenient fiction that bullets are being fired not by criminals but by political rivals.
This narrative — that insecurity is a political weapon against Tinubu — has become the ruling class’s favourite anaesthetic. From the President himself down to his allies in the Senate, the chorus is uniform: the North is using banditry as blackmail, or worse, as election interference. Already, voices within the Zamfara State chapter of the APC have alleged a political plot to link the Minister of State for Defence, Bello Matawalle, to banditry. The party cited video recordings in which a notorious bandit leader supposedly denied any association with the minister, while questioning the circumstances surrounding the release of a suspected bandit, Musa Kamarawa, arrested during Matawalle’s tenure as governor. The message is unmistakable: the insecurity ravaging the North is not a crisis — it is a conspiracy.
Meanwhile, across the South, a different reality is taking shape. Even the once-pardoned agitator Sunday Igboho — whose name was removed from the government's wanted list on January 26, 2026, after President Tinubu granted him clemency — now finds his warnings on the same frequency as the ruling party's talking points. On June 4, 2026, Igboho stood before a delegation of National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) leaders at his Ibadan residence and declared that he knows exactly who is financing the kidnappers. "The politicians behind them are the ones giving them ammunition and money," he said in a viral video. "I know the politicians behind them, and if they do not stop perpetrating their evil acts, I will mention them all". Then came the crucial line — the one that lets the political class breathe easy: "The same thing they did to Jonathan is what they are doing to Tinubu. They want to make the country ungovernable for him".
Igboho, who spent nearly five years in exile after a DSS raid on his Ibadan residence in July 2021 and detention in a Cotonou prison, now blames opposition politicians for the very kidnappings he once claimed he could single-handedly resolve. He has insisted that Oyo State Governor Seyi Makinde knows he has the capacity to rescue the Oriire kidnapping victims, yet has blocked him from acting. Even the media aide to former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, Paul Ibe, has urged the DSS to summon Igboho for questioning over the claims, arguing that if the activist genuinely possesses information on those behind the kidnappings, security agencies should engage him to assist ongoing rescue efforts. But here is the irony: while the political class fights over who is sponsoring the kidnappers, the kidnappers themselves have continued to collect ransoms and expand their reach southward.
The belief that the South can somehow remain insulated from the violence that has consumed the North is a dangerous delusion. In April 2025, Governor Monday Okpebholo of Edo State suspended the traditional ruler of Uwano Kingdom in Etsako East Local Government Area over incessant kidnapping and killings in his domain. The governor’s statement, dated April 21, 2025, announced that the monarch’s secretary had been arrested following a recent incident that led to the death of a palace chief. Just weeks earlier, on March 3, 2025, suspected kidnappers had abducted a Catholic priest and a seminarian at St. Peter Catholic Church in Iviukwa, near Agenebode. While the priest was eventually released, the seminarian was killed by his abductors. By July 2025, two minor seminarians of the Immaculate Conception Minor Seminary in Agenebode were still in captivity. A viral video showed the children holding dried human skulls and begging that funds be raised for their release. The Catholic Diocese of Auchi, in a statement on August 15, 2025, lamented: “Our people feel frustrated and helpless. We are deeply worried about how this abnormality has become normal.”
In Oyo State, on June 26, 2025, six armed men stormed the home of a man identified as Timothy in Mokorede, Ipapo, Itesiwaju Local Government Area, and abducted him at around 11 p.m. Five suspects were later arrested — Usman Abubakar, Umar Abubakar, Abdulkadir Sulaiman, Abdullahi Naira, Isiaku Saboyaro — and police recovered N4,618,700 in cash, part of the ransom paid by the victim‘s family. In Ondo State, the story repeats. On August 4, 2025, a commercial motorcyclist who routinely conveyed a lecturer of Adekunle Ajasin University Akungba-Akoko to his workplace used his familiarity to spy on the victim’s movements. Shortly after the motorcyclist‘s departure, other gang members moved in and abducted the lecturer, demanding a ransom of five million naira. Police detectives later arrested seven suspects. These are not isolated incidents. This is a pattern. The forests of the South-West are no longer safe. The highways of the South-South are no longer secure. The air pollution of banditry is drifting southward, and those who believe otherwise are breathing poison.
Perhaps the most tragic irony is what the government is doing — or not doing — in response. On the one hand, we hear bold proclamations of a zero-tolerance policy on negotiation. Special Adviser to the President on Policy Communication, Daniel Bwala, clarified in an interview with Channels TV on December 3, 2025, that the Federal Government does not negotiate with or pay ransom to terrorists. “You are constructively financing terrorism without knowing it. Instead of targeting those sponsoring them, ransom payments only allow terrorists to buy more weapons. The Federal Government does not, and will not, tolerate the idea of negotiation,” Bwala said. On the same day, the Minister of Defence, General Christopher Musa, insisted during his ministerial screening that government at all levels must enforce a total ban on ransom payments. “There is no negotiation with any criminal. When people pay ransoms, it buys terrorists time to regroup, re-arm and plan new attacks,” he warned.
But then there is the other hand. Despite these official pronouncements, ransoms continue to be paid. The suspects arrested in Oyo were caught in the act of sharing money collected as ransom. The kidnapped lecturer in Ondo was released only after a ransom was demanded. The seminarians in Edo remained in captivity for thirty-five days as families begged for their release. Every ransom paid is a weapon delivered into the hands of the bandits. Every negotiation conducted in secret is a signal that the government‘s policy is not zero tolerance but selective blindness. We are, in effect, arming our own enemies while pretending to fight them.
The Afenifere, the pan-Yoruba socio-political organization, said it plainly in a statement issued recently: efforts made over the years to stem the various iniquities going on in Nigeria have been ineffectual because powerful people among those who are to make the efforts fruitful are the very ones sabotaging such efforts. The statement noted that kidnapping, cattle rustling, banditry bordering on genocide and territorial expansion have become rampant. These inhumane acts were once confined to the North-East and North-West parts of Nigeria, but now they have spread to other parts. Yorubaland, which used to be comparatively safe, has been infiltrated, with many already kidnapped and some dead.
This is the truth that the political and media elite refuse to confront. Banditry is not a Northern problem. It is not a political problem. It is not a conspiracy against President Tinubu. It is a national crisis that is spreading precisely because the government has spent more energy blaming political opponents than arresting criminals. The people being kidnapped in Oyo, Ondo, and Edo are not political pawns. The seminarians in Edo who held human skulls for ransom were not opposition plants. The families who scraped together millions of naira to buy back their loved ones are not part of any 2027 plot.
Like air pollution, banditry does not respect state boundaries. It does not respect political affiliations. It drifts wherever the wind — or the government‘s negligence — takes it. And if we do nothing, it will reach everyone. It already is.
Mohammed Bello Doka can be reached via [email protected]
Abuja Network News
Tags
Opinion