By ‘Tunde Adeparusi
Across the world today, insecurity is changing its character. It is no longer defined only by conventional war, formal insurgency, or ideological terrorism in the classic sense. From the Sahel to parts of Latin America, violence has become more fluid, more decentralised, and more deeply embedded in local political economies. Armed groups no longer simply attack the state. They exploit the spaces where the state is absent, weak, compromised, or distrusted. They tax, abduct, extort, raid, and negotiate power from below. In many fragile environments, insecurity has quietly evolved into an alternative system of governance.
Nigeria is not insulated from this dangerous drift. Rather, the country has become one of its most painful illustrations.
What confronts Nigeria today is not merely a spate of criminality. It is the proliferation of a layered and mutually reinforcing security crisis. Terrorism persists in the North-East. Banditry continues to mutate across the North-West. Kidnapping has become a thriving criminal enterprise. Farmer-herder violence remains deadly. Separatist tensions have not entirely disappeared. And in several rural communities, the ordinary citizen increasingly lives at the mercy of armed non-state actors rather than under the protection of the state. That is not just a security challenge. It is a crisis of state legitimacy. This is where the conversation must become more honest.
Nigeria’s insecurity crisis is too often discussed in fragments, as though terrorism is separate from banditry, banditry from kidnapping, kidnapping from rural collapse, and rural collapse from governance failure. That approach is intellectually weak and politically convenient. The truth is that these forms of violence increasingly overlap. They feed on the same structural conditions: chronic poverty, corruption, weak justice systems, porous borders, illicit arms flows, poor intelligence coordination, and the gradual retreat of effective governance from vulnerable territories. Insecurity in Nigeria is not simply multiplying. It is interlocking.
From the standpoint of my research on banditry, this is perhaps the most crucial point. Banditry in Nigeria, particularly in the North-West, should no longer be understood as isolated rural criminality or random violence by faceless outlaws. It has developed into a complex economy of violence. It now operates through kidnapping for ransom, cattle rustling, illegal taxation, territorial intimidation, coercive control of mobility, and attacks on agrarian livelihoods. In simple terms, what we are seeing is not just crime. It is the emergence of violent order in places where legitimate order has failed.
The decay has become so severe that even senior military officers are no longer beyond its reach. Reuters reported in November 2025 that ISWAP claimed to have executed a captured senior Nigerian army officer, Brigadier-General M. Uba, though the army denied the claim. Then, on April 9, 2026, Reuters also reported that Brigadier General Oseni Braimah was killed in coordinated attacks in Borno State, alongside other soldiers, during a fierce assault on a military base. These are not ordinary headlines. They are warning signs. When senior officers are being killed, captured, or reportedly executed within a country’s internal security theatre, the message is plain: insecurity is no longer at the fringes. It is pressing dangerously against the nerve centre of the state itself.
According to Human Rights Watch, citing SBM Intelligence, 2,938 people were kidnapped in Nigeria’s North-West between July 2024 and June 2025, representing more than 60 per cent of reported incidents nationwide. Zamfara alone accounted for 1,203 abductions, followed by Kaduna with 629, Katsina with 566, and Sokoto with 358. When figures of this scale become routine, it is clear that kidnapping is no longer an occasional offence. It has become a system, a market, and a method of domination.
The tragedy, however, goes beyond numbers. Every abduction means a family thrown into terror, a village emptied by fear, farms abandoned, children pulled from school, women widowed or traumatised, and communities forced to improvise their own methods of survival. The humanitarian consequences are equally grim. ACAPS has warned of escalating and interlinked violence across the North-East, North-West, and North-Central, with displacement flows, illicit economies, underreporting, and restricted humanitarian access making the crisis even harder to contain. Once insecurity begins to disrupt farming, schooling, trade, and mobility at scale, it stops being an isolated criminal matter and becomes a full social emergency.
Indeed, the deeper crisis here is the erosion of public faith in the state itself.
A nation may survive economic pain. It may survive political disappointment. It may even survive bad leadership longer than it should. But once citizens begin to believe that their safety depends more on vigilantes, ransom payments, ethnic networks, or private arrangements with gunmen than on lawful public authority, the moral architecture of statehood begins to crumble. That is the real meaning of proliferating insecurity. It is not only the multiplication of violent incidents. It is the slow death of public order.
Even more troubling is the wider regional context. Nigeria’s insecurity cannot be detached from the changing security landscape of the Sahel. ACAPS has noted that the crises across northern Nigeria are interconnected rather than isolated, linked through displacement, illicit economies, and cross-regional armed group networks. That means the old assumption that Nigeria’s violence is purely domestic is becoming harder to defend. Insecurity now travels along corridors of arms, fighters, money, and ideas.
This is why force alone will not resolve the crisis.
Yes, military action remains necessary. No serious country folds its arms in the face of terror and mass criminal violence. But Nigeria cannot shoot its way out of a crisis that is sustained by governance failure. Where corruption weakens the security sector, where justice is delayed, where intelligence is politicised, and where communities experience the state as distant or extractive, violence will continue to regenerate. A forest may be cleared today, only for the gunmen to return tomorrow because nothing fundamental has changed.
What Nigeria urgently requires is not more rhetoric, but a new seriousness of statecraft. The country needs accountable and intelligence-led policing. It needs stronger border governance. It needs more disciplined and transparent use of security funding. It needs victim-centred policy rather than Abuja-centred performance. It needs to secure farms, schools, roads, and rural communities with the same seriousness with which it secures elite convoys and government quarters. Most importantly, it needs to restore trust between citizens and the institutions meant to protect them.
For the avoidance of doubt, insecurity is not merely a security problem. It is a governance problem, a development problem, a justice problem, and increasingly, a national identity problem.
Nigeria remains a potentially great nation. But potential does not protect lives. Speeches do not secure highways. Propaganda does not stop abductions. Denial does not defeat armed groups. A country of more than 200 million people cannot continue to normalise bloodletting while pretending that all is under control.
The time has come for the Nigerian state to confront this crisis with honesty, urgency, and uncommon resolve. Otherwise, what is currently described as insecurity may harden into something even more dangerous: the permanent fragmentation of authority and the steady surrender of national space to violent entrepreneurs.
And that would be a tragedy far greater than the statistics can ever capture.
‘Tunde Adeparusi is a criminologist (a member of the British Society of Criminology-BSC), a researcher whose current work explores ‘’victim-community relations and the dynamics of banditry in northern Nigeria’’. He writes on the intersection of security, governance, and post-colonial statehood in Africa. www.tundeadeparusi.com
