There is a question that no government official in Abuja will answer honestly, because the honest answer is too damning to survive in the morning newspapers. The question is this: if the rate at which Nigerians are being kidnapped and killed continues to climb at its current trajectory, and if the state continues to respond with the same mixture of committee sittings, security summits, press releases and strategic inaction that has defined its approach for the past decade, at what point does the daily death toll and daily abduction figure become so large that the country can no longer describe itself as a functioning republic?
That question is not hypothetical. It is arithmetic.
In the twelve months between July 2024 and June 2025, a report by SBM Intelligence documented at least 4,722 abductions across 997 kidnapping incidents in Nigeria. At least 762 people were killed in direct connection with those abductions. Families paid more than two billion, five hundred million naira in ransom to criminal organisations operating in open defiance of the state. The National Human Rights Commission, in its own separate reporting, recorded 570 killings and 278 kidnappings in April 2025 alone and described the situation as a deepening human rights crisis driven by violence and mass displacement. These are not projections. These are not estimates drawn from opposition party press conferences. These are the documented numbers, verified by credible institutions, which means the actual figures, accounting for unreported cases in communities with no access to media, law enforcement or communication infrastructure, are almost certainly higher.
Consider what those numbers mean when extended forward honestly.
If the April 2025 figure of 570 killings in a single month is annualised, that is more than 6,800 deaths per year connected to kidnapping alone, before accounting for terrorism-related massacres, farmer-herder conflicts, bandit raids, and the persistent insurgency in the North East. If the trajectory continues its established pattern of escalation rather than reduction, if criminal networks continue to expand their operational territory and their ransom economies continue to grow, the moment when daily deaths and abductions measured in the thousands becomes daily deaths and abductions measured in the tens of thousands is not a fantasy. It is, in this writer's opinion, a mathematical destination that Nigeria is currently moving toward without meaningful resistance from the political class responsible for preventing it. I will state clearly that this is my opinion and my projection, not a certified forecast. But I will also state clearly that dismissing this projection as alarmism is exactly the same instinct that dismissed earlier warnings when the numbers were smaller, and that dismissal has cost this country an incalculable number of lives already.
The constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, in Section 14(2)(b), states without ambiguity that "the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government." Those words carry the force of supreme law. They are not ornamentation. They are not aspirational language inserted into the preamble for ceremonial effect. They define the foundational bargain between citizen and state, the bargain upon which the entire structure of political authority rests. A government that cannot secure life and property has not merely failed in one department among many. It has failed in the only department that makes every other department meaningful, because education, healthcare, infrastructure, and economic policy are all contingent on the most basic prior condition: the citizen must be alive to benefit from them.
By that standard, the Nigerian state under successive administrations, and under the present Tinubu administration in particular, has failed. Not partially. Not in isolated respects. Fundamentally and comprehensively.
From the forests of Zamfara, where armed bandits have effectively established parallel governance structures and extract tribute from communities that the military cannot permanently pacify, to the farming communities of Benue and Plateau where seasonal violence between herdsmen and farmers has become an annual massacre, to the highways of the South East where travellers are waylaid with the regularity of weather, to the university campuses and village markets and places of worship across the Middle Belt and the North West and the North Central zones, no geography in Nigeria has maintained permanent immunity. The insecurity that politicians once reassured southerners was a northern problem has crossed every geographic, ethnic, and economic boundary that was supposed to confine it. The rich are kidnapped. The poor are kidnapped. Chiefs are taken. Students are taken. Clergy are taken. Farmers on the way to their own land are intercepted and executed. The republic has been unable to establish the most elementary truth of statehood, namely that the men and women who hold it together through their daily labour can move from one point to another without fearing for their lives.
What makes this especially shameful is that Nigeria is not a poor country in the sense that would make a security infrastructure impossible to fund. Nigeria produces oil. Nigeria has the largest population in Africa. Nigeria has access to international military partnerships, intelligence sharing arrangements, and equipment that most of its neighbours can only envy. The failure of Nigerian security is not primarily a resource failure. It is a failure of political will, a failure of leadership, a failure of institutional integrity, and above all, a failure of the moral seriousness that a government must bring to the one task the constitution identifies as primary.
What would political seriousness look like?
It would look like a government that treats every kidnapping as a national emergency rather than a local incident to be managed by a state governor issuing a statement. It would look like a military that is properly funded, properly equipped, properly led, and held to genuine accountability for results rather than for press conferences. It would look like intelligence agencies that exist to produce intelligence rather than to serve factional political interests. It would look like a police force whose salaries are paid consistently, whose officers are trained in modern counterinsurgency and community policing techniques, and whose commanders are promoted on the basis of performance rather than connection. It would look like a government willing to name its enemies honestly and pursue them without mercy within the framework of law.
On the question of terrorists and bandits who take up arms against the Nigerian people, this writer's position is unambiguous. Combatants engaged in active hostilities against Nigerian civilians and security forces must be neutralised by overwhelming force. There is no negotiated arrangement with a man who has a rifle pointed at a schoolchild. There is no mediated settlement that ends with the release of a kidnap victim and the payment of ransom, because ransom buys more weapons, more motorcycles, more recruits, and more kidnappings in the next quarter. The Nigerian state has spent years paying ransoms, offering amnesties, rehabilitating combatants who returned to violence within months of their release, and negotiating with criminal organisations whose entire operational model depends on the state's unwillingness to destroy them. That approach has produced the statistics documented above. It has failed completely and at enormous human cost, and it must end.
Those captured alive must meet the justice system with the same urgency that their crimes demanded. Not the Nigerian justice system that currently takes a decade to complete a terrorism trial while the accused sits in a holding facility and his organisation continues operating. A reformed, purpose-built counterterrorism court process that moves from arrest to verdict in weeks rather than years, that applies the death penalty where the law provides for it and where the evidence demands it, and that does not permit the procedural delays, political interference, and institutional dysfunction that have allowed dangerous men to walk free on technicalities while their victims remain in mass graves. The rope and the hangman's knot are not barbarism when applied through lawful conviction to men who have massacred villages. They are the most honest statement a republic can make about the value it places on the lives of its citizens.
The ideological dimension of this crisis cannot be addressed through security measures alone, and any analysis that treats the insurgency in the North East as purely a law enforcement problem is an analysis that will eventually produce another generation of recruits for Boko Haram and ISWAP. These organisations have endured for more than a decade not only because of military failure but because of the conditions that produce radicalisation: poverty, illiteracy, the collapse of functional governance in communities that have received almost nothing from the Nigerian state except periodic military operations, and an extremist theological tradition that has been permitted to incubate in certain communities without serious ideological counter-pressure.
This republic must be absolutely clear about the distinction it draws. Every Nigerian has the right to practise the faith of their choice and to advocate for their understanding of the public good through lawful political channels. That right is fundamental and non-negotiable. But the Nigerian state must draw, and enforce with complete firmness, the line between lawful religious practice and the weaponisation of religious identity against the constitutional order. A man who preaches that the Nigerian constitution is illegitimate, that armed resistance to secular governance is a religious duty, and that Nigerian citizens who do not share his theology are legitimate targets, is not exercising a constitutional right. He is conducting incitement. The Nigerian state has the legal and moral authority to prosecute incitement, to shut down institutions that serve as pipelines from ideology to violence, and to pursue those who use religious platforms to recruit for terrorist organisations with the full weight of the law, including life imprisonment without the possibility of parole where the evidence supports it. What it cannot do, and must not do, is permit the tolerance of violent ideological infrastructure in the name of religious sensitivity while the body count rises.
It is also worth stating plainly that the frequent invocation of religious identity as a framework for demanding unconstitutional arrangements has not, and will not, solve the material problems of the communities from which that demand emerges. The northern political elite that has governed much of the region for decades has done so while presiding over some of the highest rates of poverty, illiteracy, and underdevelopment on the continent. Whatever arrangement of governance those communities live under, the accountability for their material condition lies primarily with the leadership that has governed them, not with the constitutional architecture of Nigeria. Nigerians across every region deserve a republic that is accountable to them. They do not deserve to have their legitimate grievances channelled into violent movements that profit from their suffering.
The political conclusions that follow from all of this are not complicated.
Nigeria is a democracy. Democratic accountability means that governments that fail in the basic functions of governance are replaced. Replaced through votes. Replaced through legitimate political organisation. Replaced through the persistent and unrelenting demand of citizens who refuse to accept drift, who refuse to lower their expectations to match the performance of underachieving administrations, and who refuse to be divided by the ethnic and religious competition that the political class has historically used to distract Nigerians from demanding results. The present administration has had its opportunity to demonstrate the seriousness of purpose that the security crisis demands. The statistics tell the story of how that opportunity has been used. Nigerians have every constitutional right to translate that assessment into electoral consequence at the earliest available opportunity.
But elections alone are insufficient if the deeper fractures remain unaddressed.
Nigeria's insecurity has exposed something more fundamental than the failure of a single administration. It has exposed the fragility of a national consensus that was never properly constructed. A country of more than two hundred million people, composed of hundreds of ethnic groups, two dominant religious traditions, and a colonial geography that grouped together communities with vastly different historical trajectories, cannot survive indefinitely on the basis of constitutional text alone. It requires a shared civic identity, a common understanding of what it means to be Nigerian that is strong enough to compete with the tribal, religious, and regional loyalties that have repeatedly proven more immediately compelling to citizens under pressure.
Building that identity requires honesty about what is destroying it. It requires a political culture that refuses to reward leaders who mobilise ethnic and religious grievance as a substitute for governance. It requires citizens who hold their own communities' leaders to the same standard of accountability they apply to their opponents. It requires schools that teach Nigerian history with the seriousness it deserves, including its failures and its unresolved contradictions. And it requires the moral courage, across every demographic, to say clearly that the conditions under which Nigerians are currently living are not normal, are not acceptable, and will not be tolerated indefinitely.
History is not kind to nations that mistake adaptation to worsening conditions for resilience. Nations rarely collapse in a single dramatic event. They decline gradually. Citizens adjust their expectations downward. Institutions weaken. Violence spreads from the margins to the centre. Confidence in the state evaporates. Economic activity retreats from insecure territories. Educated and talented people find ways to leave. Then one day the country looks in the mirror and the face looking back belongs to a failed state that everyone saw coming and nobody stopped in time.
Nigeria is not yet at that point.
But the distance between where Nigeria is today and where it does not want to be is shrinking at a rate that should terrify every serious person in the country. The political will to close that distance exists, in potential, in the Nigerian people. It is not yet organised. It is not yet focused. It is scattered across civil society organisations, professional associations, religious bodies that have the courage to speak inconvenient truths, communities that have decided to demand accountability from their representatives, and individual Nigerians who have not surrendered their capacity for outrage.
The arithmetic of this crisis will eventually force a reckoning. The question is whether Nigerians choose the reckoning or wait for the reckoning to choose them.
History shows that the second option is considerably more painful.