The staggering statistical data released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on December 17, 2024 on insecurity shocked and held Nigerians spellbound.
The government agency’s research revealed the killing of 614,937 Nigerians in one year, a figure that dwarfed the death toll in Israel’s war on Gaza, where over 40,000 had died, and the killings from the long-running Russian war on Ukraine, where 57,500 had been massacred as at December 2024.
Most of the deaths in the hands of bandits and terrorists occurred in rural areas, where peasants are never protected against bloodthirsty killers.
Over the years, we have advocated a genuine security infrastructure designed to secure Nigeria’s rural areas, which have been designated as ungoverned spaces by even government officials. From the NBS data, it is apparent that Nigerian citizens lose their lives cheaply because their assailants are not challenged by superior military forces.
The number of persons abducted, put at 2.2 million within that period, sounds hyperbolic until it is put in the context of the mass abductions in the North-West and North-Central. Every now and then, entire villages are herded into some ‘ungovernable space’ for weeks and even months until the people sell off their assets and borrow funds to deliver as ransom to bandits.
Bandits extort ransoms in millions of naira, and that aligns with the estimation of the NBS that some N2.2 trillion had been transferred to the criminals in the period covered in the research.
Without doubt, Nigeria is a major victim of banditry in the world, more than states in conflict-ridden Sahel region. Killings by bandits and terrorists in Nigeria surpass the totality of deaths in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger Republic, which are also plagued by terrorism and banditry.
Since the dispensation of the Tinubu administration, officials have attempted to drown critical voices with their high-pitch self-praise. They claim to have brought criminal activities under control, and, as the president boasted in his maiden media chat, that Nigerian roads are safer than they were in the pre-Tinubu era. However, the epicentres of attacks by bandits are not our highways, it is rural villages, farming communities, mountainous locations and abandoned forests.
No doubt, our security operatives are not unaware of these vulnerable areas. In our decade-long battle against banditry, our security strategies have been ineffective in securing such territories. The data released by the NBS clearly states that of the 2.2 million Nigerians kidnapped in one year, 1.7 million were rural dwellers, compared to 567,850 urban dwellers. If anything, the data points to one fact: For our security strategies to be relevant, they must be targeted at securing our rural communities. Highway patrols by our security operatives may not be enough.
From the data, it is clear that the majority of the victims of banditry are from northern Nigeria. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, in recognition of this situation, appointed northerners to sensitive security positions.
The National Security Adviser, Malam Nuhu Ribadu, is a northerner; so also is the Ministers of Defence, Alhaji Mohammed Badaru Abubakar, who was a governor of Jigawa State. The Minister of Defence (State), Dr Bello Mohammed Matawalle, was the governor of Zamfara State, where bandits control many villages and gold-mining sites. History will be kind to them if the region becomes safe during their time in office.
In the 2025 budget, about 10 per cent of the total projected expenditure, put at N4.9 trillion, will be spent on defence and security. That is quite substantial, but if poorly applied, the funds may not change our results in the fight against insecurity.
There must be a shift in the country’s approach to insecurity in rural areas. The use of hunters and other auxiliary security operatives have failed us. The challenge is beyond what our so-called community policemen can handle. When bandits and terrorists approach their victims, they do so in large, overwhelming numbers. They bear sophisticated weapons, not the barren dane-guns, blunt cutlasses, sticks and charms paraded by local vigilante groups.
We call for the recruitment of more security personnel trained to deal with insecurity in unconventional settings in our rural communities. It will not be out of place to prioritise the recruitment of security personnel in the application of the 2025 budget for defence and security. Such operatives must be well-equipped to counter the fire-power of criminals. It is strange that non-state actors pride in being better equipped than our security operatives. This trend must be reversed if the NBS statistics on deaths in the hands of criminals in 2025 must not embarrass us.
In the same vein, we call on the government to change the bureaucracy around the evaluation and speed of action on intelligence reports. There is no lack of intelligence about the activities of bandits and terrorists. Again and again, victims of attacks would claim to have obtained intelligence which were passed on to security agencies, but to their dismay, the police or military did little to forestall many of such attacks.
We call for an urgent review of how intelligence information is handled, from the field to the high offices in the security sector, to ensure that Nigerians are not slaughtered like orphans and dispossessed of their wealth like those who are stateless. The NBS report is a wake-up call for a drastic change in our security strategies.