Across Nigeria in mid-2026, a shift is occurring that is being felt more than formally acknowledged: the security crisis that was for years geographically confined to the far north is now pressing against the borders of the cities and the south.
In Berger, on the edge of Lagos, traders close early.
In Abuja, an April 2025 Customs Service memo warned of terrorist (ISWAP and Boko Haram) infiltration of the Federal Capital Territory, with planned attacks on the international airport and a correctional facility.
In Kwara State, which the Institute for Security Studies has identified as a geographical bridge between the insecure north and the relatively stable southwest, kidnapping incidents now employ tactics previously associated exclusively with Zamfara and Katsina.
The storm has reached the gate even though it has not yet been formally named. The unending tales of different colours of kidnap with astronomical ransom, negotiation, victim release/corpse discovery have recently become more consistent rather than isolated. The banditry story follows a different horrific cycle.
The statistics demand more than naming. In the first half of 2025 alone, at least 2,266 people were killed by bandits and insurgents, already exceeding the total for all of 2024 (2,194), according to the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. In 2024, 2,452 people were kidnapped, a 31 per cent increase over the 1,878 recorded in 2023, according to Human Rights Watch.
Between 2023 and May 2025, at least 10,217 people were killed by armed groups in northern Nigeria. SBM Intelligence recorded 2,938 abductions, a figure over 60 per cent of national totals, in the northwest region alone between July 2024 and June 2025.
In November 2025, at least 402 people, predominantly schoolchildren, were kidnapped across four north-central states in a single month. According to Global Rights Nigeria, in the first quarter of 2026, tracking data reveals that at least 2,063 people and 1,048 people were killed and abducted respectively across Nigeria with rural banditry remaining the main driver of violent incidents, accounting for at least 739 distinct deaths.
With 31.8 million already classified as food insecure at the end of 2024, the FAO projected that 34.7 million Nigerians face acute food insecurity (at least Crisis Phase 3) by mid-2026.
Against this backdrop sits a fiscal paradox that is not merely embarrassing but structurally enabling. The federal government’s 2025 security and defence budget aggregates to N6.57 trillion (approximately $4.78 billion), according to BudgIT’s breakdown of appropriations.
Beyond the federal allocation, Nigeria’s 36 state governors collectively receive what Transparency International estimates at over $600 million annually in unaudited, unaccountable “security votes.” In Osun State alone, the governor receives N600 million ($437,000) per month in security votes translating into N28.8 billion ($20.96 million) over a four-year term.
In addition, states collectively received N5.81 trillion ($4.23 billion) from the Federation Account in 2024 alone, following the post-subsidy-removal FAAC surge. In June 2025, SERAP issued Freedom of Information requests to all 36 governors demanding disclosure of security vote expenditures since May 2023.
The silence was comprehensive. The EFCC Chairman stated publicly in late 2025 that security votes had become “slush funds,” with billions “siphoned abroad monthly.” In the Obiano case in Anambra, the EFCC documented over N4 billion in allegedly diverted security votes from the dedicated account.
The institutional dimension compounds the crisis. The Nigeria Police Force has approximately 371,800 officers for a population of about 236.7 million. This is far below the UN-recommended ratio of one per 400 citizens, which would require at least 591,750 officers. More damaging than the headline shortfall are the moral decay, abashed institutional and official corruption and the deployment structure.
On the headline shortfall of deployment structure, according to a European Union report in November 2025, over 100,000 police officers, just below one-thirds of the entire force, are assigned to protecting politicians and VIPs rather than patrolling communities or responding to emergencies.
President Tinubu’s directive is underway to correct this anomaly but is stalled by reality. While the government executed high-profile crackdowns and phased pullbacks, systemic evasion by Nigeria’s political and corporate elites remains highly visible.
The Inspector General of Police has publicly stated that an additional 190,000 personnel are needed. New recruitment is underway, including a plan for 30,000 new constables in 2026 but recruitment without deployment reform does not solve the crisis. Nigeria’s military, meanwhile, is constitutionally empowered under Section 217(2)(c) of the 1999 Constitution to assist civil authorities in maintaining order and is already deployed domestically through multiple operational designations.
The question is not whether it should be involved but why joint urban military-police operations remain absent from the southern states now facing documented spillovers.
The economic consequences are no longer projections. Foreign direct investment fell by 70 per cent quarter-on-quarter in the first quarter of 2025, dropping to $126.29 million from $421.88 million in Q4 2024, according to the Serrari Group.
The World Bank reported FDI at just 0.6 per cent of GDP in 2024. NBS records that multinationals such as Shell, GlaxoSmithKline, Procter and Gamble, Unilever Nigeria, and Sanofi have all exited or curtailed operations. In agriculture, highlighting a critical bottleneck, ActionAid Nigeria estimated post-harvest losses at N3.5 trillion ($2.55 billion) annually, approximately half of total food production, with insecurity a primary driver.
Between 2020 and 2024, at least 1,356 farmers were killed in violent attacks, and farmers in Zamfara and Katsina paid ₦139 million ($101,000) in combined levies to armed groups simply to access their own farmland. In mid-June 2025, coordinated raids by armed militants were concentrated in agrarian communities within the Middle Belt.
Lagos State’s Rapid Response Squad (RRS) offers the clearest available evidence that state-level political will can produce measurable security improvement. The approximately 2,000-officer unit, funded in part through the Lagos State Security Trust Fund, a public-private financing vehicle, deploys motorcycle patrols, patrol vehicles, helicopter surveillance, and riverine gunboats.
In May 2024, the RRS launched 24-hour motorcycle patrols on the Third Mainland Bridge, producing a documented reduction in incidents and, critically, a visible reassurance to the public that the state is present. The psychological dimension of visible policing, which is the confidence that comes from knowing a response exists, has direct economic value in maintaining market hours, transport activity, and commercial operations. The model is replicable in every state capital at a fraction of the funding governors already collect in security votes.
The framework for emergency response requires several concurrent actions. A formal state of security emergency must be declared in the most severely affected states of Zamfara, Katsina, Borno, Plateau, and Benue at minimum as a legal and operational framework for enhanced resource mobilisation and military deployment.
The National Assembly must pass comprehensive security legislation, among other provisions, mandating quarterly public disclosure of security vote expenditures, disaggregated by category, with mandatory EFCC and ICPC audits of all disbursements from 2023 onwards and prosecutorial action against governors who cannot account for the funds in states with deteriorating security outcomes.
And the legislation must be given rottweiler-teeth, immunity notwithstanding, as at least two exemplary punishments will set a clear tone. Every state government must immediately establish motorcycle-mounted rapid response units of no fewer than 200 officers in state capitals and major towns, an affordable and proven intervention relative to existing security vote receipts. Joint military-police mobile patrols must be formalised and extended to the southern states where the northern spillover is now documented.
A formal, funded community intelligence network with anonymised tip lines, verified response protocols, and financial rewards for actionable intelligence, must be established across all 36 states. And urban surveillance technology of CCTV with licence-plate recognition, coordinated dispatch systems, and real-time crime mapping must be treated as critical infrastructure under a phased national programme.
Citizens are not spectators in this framework. Communities that know the local bandit network and remain silent are part of the enabling environment. Business leaders who can invest in local security infrastructure through trust fund mechanisms, as Lagos has demonstrated, are part of the solution.
Traditional rulers and religious leaders who can organise early-warning networks and identify at-risk youth before armed groups recruit them are part of the intelligence layer. The Azare, Katagum LGA in Bauchi state’s approach confirms that robust community policing framework, if given legal and operative backbone, can serve as a first line of defence and work for locations outside cities. And the press and civil society that hold officials accountable, refusing the comfort of access in exchange for silence, are the accountability mechanism that makes all other reforms politically necessary.
The scenario analysis presented in this article, across kidnapping and banditry incidents, FDI as a share of GDP, and acute food insecurity illustrates two trajectories to 2030 as shown below based on Human Rights Watch World Report 2025/2026; Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect; FAO Nigeria 2025; World Bank’s WDI; SBM Intelligence 2025.
The status quo path leads to kidnappings that are embedded in the economic baseline of both north and south, FDI that is negligible in practical terms, and about 40 million Nigerians in acute food insecurity. The reform trajectory leads to a measurable reversal across all three indicators, achievable within the constraints of Nigeria’s existing institutional and fiscal capacity.
The gap between the two paths is not resources or knowledge. It is the political will to deploy what already exists, account for what has already been collected, and treat the citizens who are dying and living in economically constrained fear as something more than a constituency to be addressed at campaign time.
The morning after a real security response begins is available. It is waiting behind a set of decisions that those in power have so far chosen not to make. The question, as always in Nigeria, is how many more funerals and starker adverse economic numbers it will take before they do.
- Akinola Morakinyo (Ph. D) writes on MINT economies from the Department of Economics, Finance & Quantitative Analysis, Kennesaw State University, GA, USA
