Olu Allen
For years, Nigeria has treated kidnapping primarily as a security problem.
Deploy more soldiers. Establish more police formations. Send special forces into forests. Arrest suspects. Rescue victims.
All of these measures matter.
But Nigeria may be missing another battlefield, the one where kidnapping becomes profitable.
Between July 2023 and June 2026, kidnappers demanded about N81.9 billion in ransom, while approximately ₦11.4 billion was reportedly paid, according to a recent analysis by SBM Intelligence.
During the same period, more than 20,000 people were abducted.
Those numbers should force Nigeria to ask a different question.
What happens when kidnapping becomes an economically viable criminal enterprise?
Because a kidnapping does not end when a victim is taken into the forest. It creates a chain of financial transactions: someone negotiates, someone transfers money, someone receives it, someone moves it, someone converts it, and someone ultimately benefits from it.
That is an economy.
And if Nigeria wants to defeat kidnapping sustainably, it must attack that economy.
The numbers are telling us something
The most disturbing part of the latest data is not simply the number of people abducted. It is the changing relationship between ransom demands and actual payments.
Between July 2025 and June 2026, an estimated 7,825 people were abducted, while about N7.78 billion was reportedly paid in ransom.
That represents a much higher collection rate than the previous year.
But the numbers require some caution.
A significant proportion of the reported ransom payments was linked to large-scale abductions attributed to a Boko Haram faction.
Two incidents alone, the abduction of 416 people in Ngoshe, Borno State, and 315 people in Papiri, Niger State, accounted for a substantial part of the reported payments.
So the data does not necessarily mean every kidnapping gang has suddenly become more successful at collecting ransom.
It does, however, demonstrate something important:
When large kidnapping operations can successfully convert human captivity into billions of naira, the financial incentive becomes impossible to ignore.
The ransom is only the visible part
The conventional response to kidnapping tends to focus on the gunmen.
But the gunman is only one part of the ecosystem.
There are financiers, informants, transporters, negotiators, communication channels, money handlers and individuals who help criminals move or disguise the proceeds.
This is where financial intelligence becomes as important as military intelligence.
Nigeria’s National Counter-Terrorism Centre has raised concerns about the use of payment channels, including point-of-sale operators, in facilitating ransom payments and obscuring financial trails.
That should concern policymakers.
If investigators can trace the money after a ransom payment, they may be able to identify networks that conventional intelligence operations struggle to reach.
The question therefore should not only be:
“Where are the kidnappers?”
It should also be:
“Where does the money go?”
Nigeria already spends heavily on security
The federal government’s 2026 budget contains more than N5 trillion for defence and security.
That is an enormous public commitment.
But security spending should not be measured only by how much money is allocated. It should also be judged by what Nigerians receive in return.
Can communities move safely?
Can farmers return to their farms?
Can children travel to school without fear?
Can Nigerians travel between states without calculating the kidnapping risk?
Can families refuse ransom demands because they trust the state to rescue their relatives?
These are ultimately the outcomes that matter.
A bigger security budget is not automatically a safer Nigeria.
Make kidnapping financially unattractive
Nigeria already criminalises ransom payments under its anti-terrorism framework.
But legislation alone cannot dismantle an underground economy.
If a family believes that refusing to pay means its loved one may be killed, the law will not eliminate the incentive created by desperation.
The more effective strategy is to attack the entire business model.
That means strengthening financial intelligence.
It means identifying suspicious transactions and high-risk payment channels.
It means improving cooperation between the police, military, intelligence agencies, financial regulators and telecommunications companies.
It means following the money across POS networks, bank accounts, informal financial channels and other mechanisms criminals may use.
It means identifying financiers and facilitators rather than celebrating only the arrest of low-level gunmen.
And perhaps most importantly, it means making rescue operations sufficiently credible that ransom is no longer perceived as the only realistic path to survival.
The forest is only half the battlefield
Nigeria has spent years looking for kidnapping camps in forests and remote communities.
But the money rarely remains in the forest.
It eventually enters an economic system.
That is the vulnerability.
A kidnapping syndicate may be armed, mobile and difficult to locate physically. But money creates trails. People have to communicate. Payments have to move. Assets have to be acquired. Networks have to be maintained.
The financial ecosystem can therefore provide investigators with a different route into the criminal organisation.
This is why Nigeria should begin thinking about kidnapping not merely as a security war, but also as a financial crime war.
The objective should not simply be to catch kidnappers after they have collected ransom.
The objective should be to make the entire operation increasingly difficult to finance, sustain and scale.
The real measure of success
There is a temptation whenever new security initiatives are announced to celebrate the number of arrests, weapons recovered or suspects neutralised.
Those figures matter.
But Nigerians need another set of metrics.
How much ransom money was prevented from reaching criminal networks?
How many financial channels were shut down?
How many financiers and facilitators were prosecuted?
How quickly were kidnapped victims rescued?
How many kidnapping networks were permanently disrupted?
And, most importantly, how much did the incidence of kidnapping fall?
That is how the public should judge the war.
Because the ultimate goal is not to build a more efficient system for responding to kidnapping.
It is to destroy the economic incentive to kidnap in the first place.
Nigeria cannot afford to lose this war twice
Kidnapping already takes a terrible human toll.
It also imposes an economic one.
Families sell property and borrow money to pay ransom. Farmers abandon productive land. Businesses change routes. Transport costs rise. Communities become economically isolated. Investment becomes harder.
The criminal does not need to abduct every Nigerian to damage the economy.
Fear does some of the work for them.
That is why Nigeria’s response must go beyond the forest.
Find the kidnappers. Find the financiers. Find the money. Find the payment channels. Find the networks that make the business possible.
Then make the business unprofitable.
Nigeria does not simply need a tougher war against kidnapping.
It needs a smarter one.
And perhaps the most important question for policymakers is no longer how many kidnappers have we arrested?
It is this:
How much money have we prevented from reaching them?
Allen writes on public affairs and advocates for good governance.
