Oyewole O. Sarumi and Olusola Aliu
I. THE LETTER THAT NEEDED TO BE WRITTEN
On the 29th of May 2026, a letter arrived at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. It was addressed to His Excellency António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, signed by Dr. Michael O. Omoruyi, a Nigerian-American author, educator, and publisher based in New York. The letter was simultaneously copied to virtually every major international media organisation on the planet: CNN International, the BBC, Reuters, Al Jazeera, The New York Times, The Guardian, and more than a dozen others. It was, by any honest reckoning, an act of diplomatic advocacy disguised as a direct appeal. And it arrived on a date freighted with bitter irony: Nigeria’s Democracy Day, a day meant to celebrate governance and citizen protection.
Dr. Omoruyi wrote with passion and with clarity. He documented a humanitarian emergency — the escalating kidnapping of schoolchildren, the terror of rural communities, the growing perception that political leaders were more preoccupied with preparing for the 2027 elections than confronting the immediate danger facing millions of their citizens. He called the kidnapping of children “a failure of protection.” He invoked the memory of Chibok. He asked the United Nations for urgent engagement, for the deployment of human rights mechanisms, for international cooperation on intelligence and counter-terrorism, and for humanitarian assistance to victims. The letter was morally powerful, diplomatically crafted, and emotionally resonant.
A forensic reading of the letter, however, reveals both its strengths and its structural limitations. What it says with force and feeling, it sometimes fails to anchor in the weight of documented evidence. What it asks of the United Nations in terms of operational intervention exceeds the practical legal and logistical authority of that institution within a sovereign state. And what it implicitly communicates, that Nigeria’s security crisis has now become an international reputational emergency, not merely a domestic governance failure, is the most important message of all, and yet the one least explicitly stated.
This article takes the letter seriously as a policy text, subjects it to rigorous forensic analysis, and then moves beyond it to the harder, less comfortable conversation: what precisely must Nigeria’s Federal Government do, and do now, to address a security crisis that has grown from a northern tragedy into a national catastrophe, one that has now, as of May 2026, arrived at the doorsteps of the South-West?
II. THE ARCHITECTURE OF TERROR: WHAT THE DATA ACTUALLY SHOWS
Nigeria’s insecurity crisis is not a single phenomenon. It is a layered, intersecting, mutating complex of criminal and ideological violence that has defeated simple categorisation and resisted every policy framework that attempts to treat it as such. To understand it is to abandon the comforting notion that it consists only of Boko Haram in the North-East, or bandits in the North-West, or farmers-herders conflicts in the Middle Belt. By 2026, the taxonomy of violence has expanded so dramatically that the country is effectively managing multiple concurrent insurgencies, each with its own logic, its own funding model, its own geographic footprint, and its own relationship to the international jihadist ecosystem.
Let us begin with the numbers, because the numbers are the most brutal form of argument.
NW REGION 2024–25
2,938 people kidnapped in the Northwest alone (July 2024–June 2025), representing over 60% of nationwide reported kidnappings. Zamfara State recorded 1,203 abductions, followed by Kaduna with 629 and Katsina with 566.
Source: SBM Intelligence / HRW World Report 2026
NATIONWIDE
SBM Intelligence recorded 4,722 kidnappings in 997 incidents between July 2024 and June 2025, with at least 762 people killed. The National Human Rights Commission documented 3,012 kidnappings and 3,584 killings between January 2024 and April 2025 alone.
Source: SBM Intelligence; National Human Rights Commission 2025
SCHOOL ATTACKS
In November 2025, at least 402 people — mostly schoolchildren — were abducted across four northern states in a single wave, surpassing the 2014 Chibok abduction. The Papiri kidnapping alone (November 21, 2025) saw 315 students and staff seized from St. Mary’s Catholic School in Niger State.
Source: Global Centre for R2P; HRW; Wikipedia records
2026 ESCALATION
In late January 2026, more than 160 worshippers were abducted. On February 3, 2026, an armed attack on Kwara State villages killed over 160 people. By February 10, 2026, one analysis calculated 1,258 people killed in security incidents in the first six weeks of the year alone.
Source: Global Centre for R2P; Nigeria press reports Feb 2026
SOUTHWEST 2026
On May 15, 2026, gunmen simultaneously attacked three schools in Oriire LGA, Oyo State — abducting over 45 pupils, students and teachers, beheading a teacher, and deploying explosives. Concurrent with this, Boko Haram kidnapped 42 students in Borno State, leaving 88 children in captivity on Nigeria’s Children’s Day, May 27, 2026.
Source: Yoruba Council of Elders statement; Skabash tracking; Punch NG 2026
The trajectory from these data points is not ambiguous. Between 2019 and 2023, kidnapping incidents in Nigeria increased by over 400 percent, according to verified cross-source tracking. Between July 2023 and June 2024, 7,568 people were kidnapped nationally. In the first half of 2024 alone, 4,777 people were reported abducted. These numbers represent not isolated criminal events but a systemic breakdown in the state’s monopoly on violence, the most fundamental obligation of any government in the Weberian framework of legitimate authority.
Beyond the raw statistics of kidnapping and killing lies a dimension of the crisis that receives insufficient attention in policy debates: the cascading economic consequence. An estimated 34.7 million Nigerians are projected to face food crisis conditions or worse between June and August 2026, partly as a direct consequence of insecurity driving farmers from their land. According to FEWS NET’s April 2026 analysis, farming activity across large portions of northern Nigeria remains atypically constrained by persistent insecurity, with ongoing attacks and abductions disrupting operations, limiting movement, and restricting access to farmland. In Borno State, multiple Local Government Areas are projected to face Emergency conditions, IPC Phase 4, through September 2026. The IPC classifies Phase 4 as the second most severe humanitarian category, a step below famine. Nearly 6.4 million children aged zero to fifty-nine months are suffering from acute malnutrition through September 2026, including 2 million with Severe Acute Malnutrition.
“Security is not merely a governance metric. In Nigeria’s north, it is the difference between farming and famine.”
The Association of Nigerian Farmers reported that some 165 farmers across the country lost their lives in the early months of 2024 due to farmland insecurity, and in other instances, farmers paid organised criminal groups to access their own land. This is not a security failure. It is a taxation of survival. It represents the practical defeat of state legitimacy at the most granular level of Nigerian life.
III. THE MUTATION OF THE THREAT: FROM BANDITS TO JIHADISTS
One of the most important, and most underappreciated dimensions of Nigeria’s security crisis is the ideological mutation now occurring within its criminal-insurgent ecosystem. What began in the North-West as largely economically motivated banditry, criminal gangs extorting communities, rustling cattle, and kidnapping for ransom, is undergoing a dangerous transfiguration into organised jihadist violence with international affiliations, theological motivations, and strategic objectives that extend far beyond the extraction of ransom payments.
The emergence of Lakurawa has been one of the most consequential security developments in Nigeria in recent years. According to research by the Institute for Security Studies Africa, Lakurawa emerged from the fusion of Malian Fulanis tied to the Macina Liberation Front, now absorbed into the Al-Qaeda affiliate Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, known by its French acronym JNIM, and a Nigerien self-defence militia focused on herder security. The group entered Nigeria through the porous borders of Sokoto and Kebbi states from the Niger-Mali axis, exploiting the security vacuum created by the 2023 coup in Niger Republic that disrupted joint patrols between Nigerian and Nigerien forces. In January 2025, the Nigerian government formally designated Lakurawa as a terrorist organisation. Between November 2024 and September 2025, the group was responsible for the deaths of nearly 100 community members. The Christmas Day 2025 United States Tomahawk missile strikes on its enclaves in Sokoto State reportedly killed at least 136 fighters with dozens more injured and approximately 200 missing.
But Lakurawa is only part of the emerging threat architecture. JNIM itself, the Sahel’s most dangerous jihadist coalition, recorded its first attack on Nigerian soil on October 29, 2025, targeting soldiers on patrol in Kwara State, near the Benin border. JNIM had signalled in June 2025 its intention to establish a Katiba, a permanent brigade, inside Nigeria. By early 2026, JNIM had conducted further incursions in Benin, Togo, and Côte d’Ivoire, confirming ACLED’s assessment of a broader regional trend of southward jihadist expansion from the Sahel towards the Gulf of Guinea. Nigeria, as the most populous country in the region, represents the most consequential potential expansion theatre.
What makes this mutation genuinely alarming is that it combines the worst features of two categories of threat that are difficult to counter simultaneously. Pure banditry is responsive to economic incentives, communities can negotiate, ransom can be paid, development programmes can reduce recruitment. Ideological jihadism is driven by theological conviction and strategic ambition that development programmes alone cannot address. Lakurawa and its JNIM-affiliated cousins represent a hybrid: groups that simultaneously extort for revenue and evangelise for ideology, that kidnap children for ransom while imposing Salafist governance on communities, and that exploit the legitimacy vacuum created by the Nigerian state’s absence from rural territories. This is not a problem that any single policy lever can resolve.
IV. THE GEOGRAPHIC CATASTROPHE: INSECURITY REACHES THE SOUTH-WEST
For years, a dangerous complacency prevailed in the southern states of Nigeria, grounded in the assumption that mass kidnapping and jihadist terror were northern problems, tragedies visited upon other people, in other places, separated by cultural, geographic, and political distance from the relatively more stable South. That assumption was already being eroded by 2025. It was demolished entirely on May 15, 2026.
On that date, gunmen simultaneously attacked three educational institutions in Oriire Local Government Area of Oyo State: the Baptist Nursery and Primary School in Yaworan, the Community Grammar School in Esiele, and the L.A. Primary School. Over 45 pupils, students, and teachers were abducted. A teacher, Michael Oyedokun, was beheaded on camera, the footage released deliberately as a message of terror. Explosives were deployed. The simultaneity of the attacks, three schools, one moment, signalled prior planning, intelligence gathering, and coordinated command. This was not opportunistic crime. This was deliberate tactical operation.
The warnings had been there for months. Gani Adams, the Aare Ona Kakanfo of Yorubaland, had issued a formal alert on November 18, 2025, that terrorists and bandits had infiltrated forests across all six South-West states: Osun, Oyo, Ondo, Ogun, Ekiti, and Lagos. On January 6, 2026, armed attackers stormed Old Oyo National Park in Oriire Local Government, killing five forest guards. In April 2026, heavily armed men attacked a church in Ekiti State’s Eda Oniyo during an open-air crusade, killing a pastor and abducting worshippers. On May 12, 2026, Ogun State police confirmed the abduction of three family members at Ipojo Golden Estate in Ijebu Ode. The forest adjacent to the Oyo kidnapping site had long been identified by local communities as a criminal sanctuary from which gangs launched raids and retreated after operations.
The South-West governors have responded with some institutional initiative. At a meeting in Ibadan in November 2025, they agreed on the establishment of a real-time digital security platform designed to issue threat alerts, coordinate rapid cross-border responses to criminality, and integrate the intelligence functions of the Amotekun regional security outfit that had been established precisely to address the growing threat. A South-West Security Trust Fund has been proposed. These are constructive regional initiatives. But they are insufficient to the scale of a threat that is now national in scope and international in its ideological connections. Oyo to Lagos is about 200 kilometres. If the forest corridors connecting northern Nigeria to the Middle Belt, and the Middle Belt to the South-West, have been compromised, as the evidence now strongly suggests, no single state, and no single regional security arrangement, can contain what is coming without federal strategic architecture and national political will.
“More than 1,600 schoolchildren have been kidnapped in Nigeria since the 2014 Chibok abductions. The year 2026 has confirmed that no region is immune.”
— Skabash! Timeline, May 2026
V. ANALYSIS AND TAKEAWAYS ON THE ACCOUNT OF DR. OMORUYI’S LETTER
Dr. Omoruyi’s open letter to the United Nations Secretary-General is a document worthy of serious analytical engagement. It is not simply a cry of despair, though it carries real anguish. It is a strategically constructed advocacy instrument designed to achieve three objectives simultaneously: to internationalise Nigeria’s insecurity crisis; to increase international pressure on the Federal Government; and to generate diplomatic scrutiny from global institutions. The extensive media CC list reveals that the true target was not merely Guterres’ inbox but global public opinion. In that specific sense, it deserves credit as a sophisticated diplomatic act.
The letter’s moral framing is its greatest strength. By anchoring the argument in children, in schools, and in the language of universal human rights, Dr. Omoruyi correctly identified the vocabulary most likely to activate international humanitarian mechanisms. Children as victims are politically universal in a way that adult combatants, farmers, or even worshippers are not. The invocation of Chibok was deliberate and effective, reminding international audiences of their own prior emotional and political engagement with Nigeria’s education crisis. The letter also demonstrates diplomatic sophistication in avoiding direct partisan attacks on the Tinubu administration by name, preferring instead the carefully constructed observation that “many Nigerians are increasingly troubled by the perception that political leaders appear more focused on preparations for the 2027 elections.” This is criticism through inference, and it is the wiser form.
The letter’s principal weakness, however, is also its most consequential: the near-total absence of hard data. A policy submission that speaks of “escalating kidnappings” without citing SBM Intelligence’s 4,722 kidnappings in 997 incidents, or the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect’s documentation of the 402-person November 2025 wave, or the FEWS NET projections of 34.7 million food-insecure Nigerians, sacrifices the most powerful available ammunition. International institutions respond to documented evidence. The difference between a letter that generates a UN press release and one that triggers referral to the Human Rights Council often lies not in the passion of the argument but in the weight of the accompanying evidence. Dr. Omoruyi makes his case emotionally where the situation warrants him making it forensically.
There is also a structural problem in the letter’s specific requests. When it calls on the United Nations to “dispatch appropriate UN agencies and human rights mechanisms” and to “encourage stronger international cooperation in intelligence gathering, anti-kidnapping operations, and counter-terrorism efforts,” it rests on an implicit assumption of UN authority that international law does not support in the case of a sovereign state with functioning institutions. The United Nations cannot command the Nigerian Army, cannot deploy troops without Security Council authorisation and host-government consent, and cannot conduct anti-kidnapping operations on Nigerian soil. Its practical tools are technical assistance, humanitarian coordination, advocacy, and the moral weight of public attention. The letter asks for more than the institution can legally deliver, which risks creating the impression of a response when what actually occurs is diplomatic courtesy.
The deeper reading of the letter, what it communicates beneath its explicit requests, is the more important text. It is asking, ultimately, whether the Nigerian state retains the capacity to protect its citizens, whether public trust in governmental protection has collapsed beyond repair, and whether insecurity is becoming so entrenched that it has begun to function as a permanent condition of Nigerian civic life rather than a crisis to be resolved. These are not questions the United Nations can answer. They are questions the Federal Government of Nigeria must answer, with policy and with resources and with political courage.
VI. WHAT THE GOVERNMENT HAS DONE: CREDIT WHERE IT IS DUE
Analytical rigour demands acknowledging genuine government effort before prescribing solutions. The Nigerian Army’s year-end 2025 operational report documented 1,023 kidnap victims rescued, 305 bandits neutralised, and 189 rifles recovered. Nationwide, security forces rescued 2,336 individuals and arrested 4,375 suspects. The US military’s Tomahawk missile strikes on Lakurawa enclaves in Sokoto State in December 2025 — and the subsequent collaboration between Nigerian and US forces that led to the killing of an Islamic State second-in-command in the Lake Chad area, reflect a level of intelligence coordination and bilateral security partnership that represents genuine institutional progress. The passage of the Nigeria Police Force Training Institutions Act in October 2025, signed into law by President Tinubu, provides a legal foundation for modernising police training infrastructure. The Police Trust Fund Amendment Bill of 2026, advanced by the Senate in April of that year, addresses long-standing gaps in police funding, training, and welfare.
The Senate’s commitment in March 2026 to complete the constitutional amendment enabling state police before year-end is, if honoured, one of the most structurally significant governance reforms in Nigerian security architecture since independence. Senate spokesman Yemi Adaramodu gave explicit assurance that the amendment would be concluded before electioneering commenced, describing it as “a popular demand” with backing from the President, the governors, and the National Assembly. Whether this commitment is met will be one of the most consequential tests of institutional credibility that the Tinubu administration faces in 2026.
These achievements matter. They should be acknowledged. A government that produces no results should be condemned. A government that produces some results while falling dramatically short of the scale of the problem should be held accountable for that gap, not absolved because of the results, but neither dismissed as if the results do not exist. The problem with Nigeria’s security communication is that it tends toward both extremes simultaneously: official communiqués that claim too much, and opposition commentary that acknowledges too little. Neither serves the citizen who simply needs to know what it will actually take to send a child to school safely.
VII. THE ARCHITECTURE OF DURABLE SOLUTIONS
A. State Police: From Pledge to Implementation
The single most structurally important reform available to Nigeria’s security architecture is the establishment of state police, and the Senate’s 2026 commitment to completing this constitutional amendment before year-end must be treated not as a headline to be celebrated but as a deadline to be enforced. The argument for state police is not merely political, though it has acquired political colouring, but operational. A federal police force of approximately 370,000 officers attempting to secure a country of over 220 million people across 923,768 square kilometres is structurally incapable of the kind of granular, community-responsive intelligence-led policing that effective crime prevention requires. State police, operating under democratic accountability frameworks that prevent political weaponisation, as demanded by Afenifere and Miyetti Allah alike, would allow governors to deploy resources proportional to local threat profiles, respond more rapidly to emergent kidnapping waves, and build the intelligence relationships with communities that are the actual foundation of all effective anti-kidnapping operations.
The cautions from organisations like Afenifere about citizen rights to challenge police misuse in court, and from Miyetti Allah about ethnically and religiously balanced recruitment, are not obstacles to state police. They are design specifications. A properly framed state police constitutional amendment would include judicial oversight mechanisms, civilian review boards, clear delineation of federal-state jurisdictional boundaries, and recruitment standards that prevent the force from becoming a tool of ethnic or political persecution. The APC chieftain Ayodele Arise’s suggestion of moving policing to the Concurrent List by amending Section 214 of the Constitution is technically the most elegant solution, allowing federal and state forces to coexist rather than compete. This is the model that most mature federal systems employ.
B. The South African Private Security Model: A Nigerian Application
One of the most underutilised tools in Nigeria’s security conversation is the formal, regulated incorporation of private security services into the national protection architecture. South Africa provides the world’s most instructive example of what this looks like at scale. The South African private security industry, governed by the Private Security Industry Regulation Act of 2001 and overseen by the Private Security Industry Regulatory Authority, has grown to encompass over 10,380 registered companies with more than 2.5 million registered security guards, many times more personnel than the South African Police Service and South African Army combined. South Africans spend more than four billion US dollars annually on private security. The industry provides armed reaction, CCTV monitoring, access control, VIP protection, perimeter security, and community patrol services to households, businesses, schools, farming communities, and corporate entities.
Nigeria has a private security industry, but it operates in a largely unregulated, under-leveraged manner that prevents it from performing the structural role it could serve in a comprehensive national security architecture. What Nigeria needs is a formal regulatory framework that licenses private security companies to operate in explicit collaboration with state and federal police, defines the boundaries of their authority, mandates minimum training and equipment standards, and creates protocols for intelligence sharing between private operators and public law enforcement. This is not privatisation of security, it is the professional layering of security capacity that every well-governed society employs.
The technology dimension is critical to this model. South African private security operators have long deployed geofencing technology as a frontline threat detection capability. Geofencing systems create virtual perimeters around protected areas, schools, farms, residential estates, corporate campuses, and trigger automatic alerts when those perimeters are breached or when unidentified movement is detected within defined warning zones kilometres beyond the physical boundary. In a country where the most common early warning of an imminent attack is the sound of approaching motorcycles or gunfire, geofencing technology can provide five to fifteen minutes of advance notice, enough time to alert rapid response units, evacuate buildings, and engage local security forces before attackers strike. Applied to Nigeria’s most vulnerable school environments, this technology could transform the current reactive posture, in which security forces respond to kidnappings already in progress, into a proactive posture in which attacks are anticipated and interdicted.
The Nigerian application of this model would involve private security companies being licensed by a new National Private Security Authority, analogous to South Africa’s PSIRA. Communities, schools, corporations, state governments, and individuals who can afford contracted private security services would be able to engage licensed providers, with mandatory collaboration protocols requiring immediate notification of the nearest police and military formations when threats are detected. For schools in high-risk areas, the Federal Government could subsidise geofencing and rapid-response private security contracts as part of a National School Protection Programme, modelled on the Safe Schools Initiative but operationally restructured to function as a real security instrument rather than a funding vehicle.
“Geofencing technology gives communities five to fifteen minutes of advance warning. In a kidnapping scenario, those minutes are the difference between a rescue and a ransom.”
C. Intelligence Reform: From Reactive to Predictive
The most enduring weakness of Nigeria’s security architecture is its structural dependence on reactive intelligence, learning about attacks after they happen, rather than disrupting them before they do. This is not primarily a resource problem, though resources matter. It is an architectural problem rooted in fragmented information systems, inadequate data fusion, poor community intelligence networks, and the absence of the analytical infrastructure that converts raw intelligence into actionable threat assessments. The fact that the November 2025 mass abductions in the North, and the May 2026 coordinated attack on three Oyo schools simultaneously, occurred without advance detection does not suggest that intelligence was entirely absent. It suggests that intelligence was not being integrated, analysed, and acted upon within timeframes that would have enabled interdiction.
An effective intelligence reform programme would establish regional fusion centres at the geopolitical zone level, integrating signals from the DSS, military intelligence, police intelligence, telecommunications metadata analysis, financial intelligence on ransom transactions, and community informant networks. It would invest in drone surveillance technology capable of monitoring forest corridors and known bandit transit routes. It would establish AI-supported threat analysis platforms that can identify patterns in attack frequency, target selection, and timing, generating predictive threat indices for Local Government Areas based on historical incident data. And it would formalise the role of community leaders, traditional rulers, school headmasters, market associations, motorcycle riders, as structured intelligence inputs, creating protected reporting channels and meaningful incentive systems that reduce the risk of informant exposure.
The killing of the Islamic State’s second-in-command in the Lake Chad area, achieved through Nigerian-American intelligence cooperation, demonstrates that this kind of integrated, actionable intelligence is achievable. The question is why it remains the exception rather than the rule.
D. Border Security and Regional Diplomacy
Lakurawa’s ability to operate across the Nigeria-Niger-Benin tri-border area is not primarily a failure of military capacity. It is a failure of border architecture. The forests straddling these international boundaries, dense, poorly mapped, inadequately monitored, and routinely exploited by armed groups, arms traffickers, and smuggling networks, represent a strategic vulnerability that no domestic security programme can fully address in isolation. Nigeria’s strained relationship with Niger following the 2023 coup disrupted the joint border patrols that had previously constrained Lakurawa’s cross-border movement. Restoring some form of functional security cooperation with Niamey, regardless of the political complexities introduced by the coup, is a strategic necessity. The cost of ideological purity in relations with a military government is being paid in Nigerian lives.
A regional counter-jihadist strategy would also require more assertive Nigerian diplomatic engagement with Benin, Togo, Ghana, and Côte d’Ivoire, all of which are experiencing JNIM incursions along the coastal belt. The shared intelligence, joint patrol, and rapid deployment protocols that ECOWAS frameworks nominally authorise have rarely been operationalised with the speed and specificity that the threat demands. Nigeria, as the region’s largest economy and military power, has both the obligation and the institutional leverage to force this coordination into genuine operational reality.
E. A National Anti-Kidnapping Architecture
Kidnapping in Nigeria has evolved from opportunistic criminality into a vertically integrated industry with professional recruiters, logistics networks, holding facilities, financial intermediaries, and negotiation specialists. Treating it as isolated crime is as intellectually inadequate as it is operationally ineffective. The anti-kidnapping response must match the sophistication of the criminal enterprise. This means a dedicated National Anti-Kidnapping Task Force, integrating military intelligence, DSS, police intelligence, telecommunications tracking, and financial intelligence with a mandate to pursue kidnapping networks as organised crime syndicates, freezing their financial assets, prosecuting their facilitators and financiers, and dismantling the ransom payment infrastructure that makes the business model viable.
The temptation to pay ransom, which the November 2025 Papiri kidnapping reportedly resolved through a reported payment of approximately N2 billion, is understandable from the perspective of desperate parents and compliant governments anxious to avoid sustained negative media coverage. But as security analysts have consistently documented, ransom payments are the principal fuel of the kidnapping industry. Each payment validates the business model, recruits new entrants to the enterprise, and raises the market price of the next abduction. Nigeria cannot negotiate its way out of a crisis that negotiation is actively financing.
F. The Long Game: Youth Employment and the Root Cause Architecture
Marcus Aurelius, in his Meditations, observes that the obstacle is the way. The security crisis is, at its root, a governance crisis, the accumulated consequence of decades of failure to deliver the basic conditions of economic opportunity, educational quality, and institutional legitimacy to tens of millions of young Nigerians concentrated in the most security-affected regions. Kidnapping gangs and jihadist recruiters do not manufacture their membership from nothing. They recruit from populations of young men with no land, no employment, no education, no expectation of justice from the state, and no alternative source of income, identity, or purpose. The security crisis has roots that military operations cannot reach. Ending it permanently requires making the criminal and jihadist enterprise compete economically with legitimate alternatives in the communities from which it draws its recruits.
This is not an argument for ignoring the immediate security emergency in favour of long-term development programming. It is an argument for parallel tracks operating simultaneously. In the short term, the security apparatus must contain and degrade the operational capacity of armed groups. In the medium and long term, the conditions that perpetually replenish those groups must be systematically dismantled. Youth employment programmes in the North-West, North-Central, and North-East, anchored in agriculture, vocational training, and small enterprise development; educational investment in out-of-school children recovery programmes; and local governance reform that brings functioning state presence into communities that have long experienced government only as an intermittent and extractive visitor, these are the irreplaceable architecture of lasting security.
VIII. WHAT THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT MUST DO: A POLICY AGENDA
Drawing together the analytical threads of this article, we propose a structured policy agenda for the Federal Government organised across three time horizons. This is not a wish list. Every element below is technically achievable, constitutionally supportable, and financially justifiable given the existential nature of the threat.
In the immediate term, within ninety days, the Federal Government should declare a National School Safety Emergency, deploying perimeter security and rapid response units to all identified high-risk schools across the thirty-six states, with particular priority given to the North-West, North-Central, North-East, and now the South-West forest-adjacent communities that have demonstrated vulnerability. This declaration should be accompanied by a specific Presidential Directive mandating the Ministry of Education, the NSA’s office, and relevant security agencies to produce within sixty days an updated national school risk register, categorising every school in the country by threat level and specifying the minimum security standard appropriate to each category. The existence of the Safe Schools Initiative since 2014, which has consumed federal allocations without preventing mass school abductions, argues not for abandoning school protection investment but for fundamentally restructuring its implementation model from a funding programme into an operational security architecture with measurable outputs and accountable commanders.
Within the same ninety days, the National Anti-Kidnapping Task Force should be constituted by Executive Order, with a specific mandate to treat kidnapping networks as organised crime, a dedicated financial intelligence unit empowered to trace and freeze ransom-linked financial flows, and a public accountability dashboard publishing monthly data on rescues, arrests, and prosecutions. Transparency about operational results is not merely a communications exercise. It is the instrument by which public trust in the state’s protective capacity is rebuilt.
In the medium term, one to three years, the Private Security Services Regulatory Act should be presented to the National Assembly as a priority legislative instrument, establishing a National Private Security Authority on the South African model, mandating collaboration protocols between licensed private operators and public security forces, and creating a framework for the deployment of geofencing and rapid-response technology in high-risk civilian environments. The state police constitutional amendment, pledged for completion before year-end 2026, must be treated as a non-negotiable legislative priority, not a campaign promise to be deferred when political pressures mount. Intelligence reform, including regional fusion centres, drone surveillance investment, and AI-supported threat analysis, should be embedded within the 2027 defence and security budget as a priority programme rather than a discretionary line item.
In the long term, three to ten years, the structural conditions that generate criminal and jihadist recruitment must be systematically addressed. This requires a genuine northern youth employment strategy embedded within the administration’s broader economic reform programme, not as a footnote but as a strategic priority. It requires local governance reform that makes the Nigerian state functionally present in communities that currently experience it only in the form of violence and extraction. And it requires a justice system reform that ensures swift prosecution of kidnapping networks, dismantling the culture of impunity that currently makes kidnapping a rational career choice for young men in the country’s most marginalised communities.
IX. CONCLUSION: HISTORY DOES NOT REMEMBER DECLARATIONS
Dr. Omoruyi concludes his letter to Secretary-General Guterres with a phrase that deserves its own forensic attention: “History often remembers those who acted when others remained silent.” It is a statement of rhetorical conviction. But history also remembers those who acted effectively, and distinguishes them, without sentiment, from those who acted performatively. Nigeria’s insecurity crisis has generated more declarations, more summits, more joint communiqués, more promises of action, and more media condemnations than perhaps any comparable crisis on the continent. What it has not generated, consistently and durably, is a comprehensive operational architecture commensurate with the scale and sophistication of the threat.
The letter to the United Nations is a symptom of a deeper institutional failure: the failure of the Nigerian state to give its own citizens the assurance that their children can attend school, that their farmers can access their land, that their worshippers can enter a place of prayer, without reasonable fear of abduction or death. When a country’s citizens are compelled to appeal to an international multilateral institution — one that lacks the legal authority to intervene in a sovereign domestic crisis, because they no longer trust their own institutions to protect them, it is not the letter that has failed. It is the state.
Epictetus taught that we suffer more in imagination than in reality. But Nigeria’s security crisis is not imagined suffering. It is 2,938 abductions in the North-West alone in a single year. It is 315 children seized in the middle of a November night in Niger State. It is a teacher beheaded in front of Oyo State’s children. It is 88 children in captivity on Children’s Day. It is 34.7 million Nigerians facing food crisis because insecurity has made farming suicidal. It is a two-year-old in captivity, a detail so obscene in its particularity that it defeats the language of policy analysis and demands the language of moral emergency.
The Federal Government of Nigeria has the constitutional mandate, the security architecture, the legislative tools currently in various stages of completion, and the intelligence partnerships, demonstrated by the US collaboration in Sokoto and Lake Chad, to mount a response genuinely proportional to this crisis. What has been intermittently missing is the sustained political will to treat security as the pre-eminent governance priority it has become: not a background issue to be managed between economic reforms, but the very foundation upon which all other governance achievements either stand or collapse.
No macroeconomic stabilisation is durable in a country where farmers cannot reach their fields. No educational investment is credible in a country where schools are hunting grounds. No investment climate is sustainable in a country where the risk calculus of kidnapping is factored into every business decision. Nigeria’s security crisis is not separable from its economic crisis, its education crisis, or its governance crisis. They are expressions of a single underlying condition: the gap between the state that Nigerians need and the state that currently exists.
Closing that gap is the work of this generation of Nigerian leadership. The letter has reached the UN. The question now is whether the response will be found in New York or in Abuja.
About the Authors
Prof. Sarumi, a digital transformation architect, Policy Analyst, Political Economist and leadership strategist with over 40 years of cross-sector experience across Nigeria and the African continent, writes from Lagos.
Prof. Olusola Aliu PhD is a entrepreneurship and policy analyst and political economist with extensive research experience in Nigerian governance, security, and development. He collaborates with Prof. Sarumi on political economy analysis across the African continent.
REFERENCES
ACLED. (2025). New frontlines: Jihadist expansion is reshaping the Benin, Niger, and Nigeria borderlands. Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project. https://acleddata.com
Africa Defense Forum. (2026, February 20). Nigeria faces growing terror threat. https://adf-magazine.com
Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET). (2025, October). Nigeria food security outlook: Escalating conflict, below-average harvests sustaining Crisis (IPC 3). https://fews.net
FEWS NET. (2026, March). Nigeria key message update March–September 2026: Conflict and economic pressures driving Crisis (IPC Phase 3) outcomes in northern Nigeria. https://fews.net
FEWS NET. (2026, April). Nigeria food security outlook update: Conflict and rising input costs driving Crisis (IPC Phase 3) in northern Nigeria. https://fews.net
Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. (2026, March 16). Nigeria. https://www.globalr2p.org/countries/nigeria/
Human Rights Watch. (2025, November 25). Nigeria: Renewed spate of school kidnappings. https://www.hrw.org
Human Rights Watch. (2026, February 4). World Report 2026: Nigeria. https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2026/country-chapters/nigeria
Hudson Institute. (2025, October 15). Who are Nigeria’s “newest” jihadist militants? https://www.hudson.org
Institute for Security Studies Africa. (2026). Lakurawa: Nigeria’s hybrid threat that attracted US missile fire. https://issafrica.org
Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC). (2025, October). Nigeria (Northeast, Northwest, and North Central): Acute malnutrition situation for October–December 2025 and projections for January–September 2026. https://www.ipcinfo.org
Jamestown Foundation. (2025). JNIM edges into Nigeria through bandit collusion. Terrorism Monitor. https://jamestown.org
National Human Rights Commission, Nigeria. (2025). Documentation of kidnappings and killings: January 2024–April 2025. Abuja: NHRC.
OkayAfrica. (2025, January 25). Nigeria designates Lakurawa as a terrorist group. https://www.okayafrica.com
Omoruyi, M. O. (2026, May 29). Open letter to the Secretary-General of the United Nations on Nigeria’s escalating kidnapping crisis. New York: iNewsAfrica.
PRNigeria. (2025, October 13). Police reform deepens as NASS okays 2 landmark bills to strengthen force. https://prnigeria.com
Punch Newspapers. (2026, May 27). Children’s Day of gloom: Nigeria’s abducted and out-of-school. https://punchng.com
SBM Intelligence. (2025). Security and conflict data: Nigeria kidnapping report July 2024–June 2025. Lagos: SBM.
Skabash! (2026, May). Tracking cases of school kidnappings in Nigeria from 2014 to date. https://www.skabash.com
Soufan Center. (2026, February 6). IntelBrief: Lakurawa’s growing presence in Nigeria and the crime-terror nexus. https://thesoufancenter.org
The Conversation. (2025, November 18). Nigeria’s new terror threat: JNIM is spreading but it’s not too late to act. https://theconversation.com
TheCable. (2026, March 1). Senate: Constitutional amendment for state police will be concluded before end of 2026. https://www.thecable.ng
WifITalents. (2026, February 12). Nigeria kidnapping: Data reports 2026. https://wifitalents.com
Yoruba Council of Elders. (2026, May 22). Statement condemning Oyo school abductions and tasking South-West governors. Lagos: YCE.
