The Inquiry · BBC World Service

How can Nigeria stop its kidnap crisis?

December 16, 2025·24 min·2 clips

Scholar says the 2014 Chibok kidnapping taught Nigeria's criminal gangs that mass abduction pays.

One question frames it. Tanya Beckett asks how Nigeria can stop a kidnap crisis that now draws international concern. The opening is grim. Gunmen in northern Nigeria abducted over 300 pupils and 12 teachers from a Catholic school in November. Weeks later, authorities rescued 100 of the children. The rest of the pupils and all 12 teachers are still believed to be captive. The state has moved, at least on paper. President Bola Tanubu declared the problem a national security emergency in November 2025, and the government had already banned ransom payments in 2022. Still, the kidnappings continue. Human rights groups say hundreds, and in some years thousands, of people are abducted, with many cases likely going unreported because people are afraid. Foreign pressure has grown too. Donald Trump has talked about sending American troops, while Emmanuel Macron has offered help against insecurity in Nigeria more broadly. Part three looks past the immediate response. It asks what keeps banditry alive in the northwest and north-central regions. Geography is part of it: vast, remote spaces where government control is thin and the crisis has worsened in recent years. James Barnett adds the longer history. He traces banditry back to the 1970s, when oil revenue turned Nigeria into a petro-state and rural northern agriculture mattered less. That neglect left marks. Barnett connects later rises in banditry to poverty, commodity shocks, COVID lockdowns, and weapons spreading after Libya's collapse. The answer starts there. Stopping abductions means more than raids and rescue operations. It also means governing neglected regions and reducing the conditions that let banditry take hold.

As heard by us

A sober BBC briefing on Nigeria's kidnapping crisis, strongest when it connects insecurity to rural neglect, poverty, and weak state reach.

The Inquiry treats Nigeria's kidnapping crisis as both an immediate security emergency and a symptom of deeper state failure. Tanya Beckett opens with the abduction of more than 300 pupils and 12 teachers from a Catholic school in northern Nigeria, noting that 100 children were…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Why Nigeria's kidnapping crisis keeps outpacing the fixes.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from The Inquiry