Nigeria grapples with spiralling kidnapping crisis

At 6pm on August 7, Ada Chukwu, an apprentice tailor in Apo, a district in Nigeria’s capital city Abuja, packed her bag and walked to the main road to flag down a shared taxi to take her home.

A few minutes into the journey, another passenger put a gun to her face, threatening to kill her if she did not co-operate. Ms Chukwu was driven to a cash machine and forced to empty her account.

Her kidnappers then made her call her mother, demanding 500,000 naira ($649) to spare her life.

“They withdrew it [the cash] immediately, then told me to enter the car. I didn’t know how I slept but when I woke up, I found myself in a hut,” Ms Chukwu, 22, told The National.

“They called my father and told him he'd have to pay another two million naira [$2,595] before I can get my freedom back. They told him not to call the police or they will kill me.”

On the second day, a distressed Ms Chukwu begged to be released.

She said she was physically assaulted.

Her father negotiated a 400,000 Naira [$519.14] reduction in the ransom and paid on the third day of her ordeal. But after the money was paid, her captors kept her for another two days.

News of kidnappings dominates Nigerian airwaves and social media platforms.

People are abducted by armed bandits, who demand extortionate ransoms before their victims are freed. Captors routinely torture, beat and starve victims until their relatives, who in most cases have to solicit donations or sell property, can pay.

Last December, Esther, who used an assumed name for fear of being targeted, was travelling from Lokoja, in the west of the country, to Warri in the south by car when she and six other passengers were abducted.

They were held for five days, suffering daily beatings, until each family were able to raise one million naira ($1,297) as a ransom payment.

“We spent the first night outside. It rained and we were out in the rain. The next morning, they started with flogging the men,” Esther said.

They were not fed and given contaminated water to drink.

Between July 2022 and June 2023, 3,620 people were abducted in 582 kidnapping incidents across Nigeria, with ransom payouts amounting to 302 million naira ($387,179), according to SBM Intelligence, a Lagos-based geopolitical analytic research company.

In August last year, the International Committee of the Red Cross reported that 25,000 people were missing in Nigeria, more than 14,000 of them children.

Climate of fear

The situation has created a climate of fear in Nigeria.

Experts say the rise in kidnapping is mainly driven by lack of security, unemployment and a spiralling economic crisis.

The kidnapping epidemic can be attributed also to a lack of social investment in the country’s youth, according to Confidence McHarry, a security analyst at SBM Intelligence.

“Many of the young people who pick up arms would tell you that their cattle was stolen. The theft led them to poverty and unemployment and so they had to look out for other means of survival,” Mr McHarry told The National.

Although authorities have assured the country that it was curtailing kidnappings, criminal activity continues.

More than 24 university students were kidnapped in Zamfara on September 22 in another sign of the government's failure, said Isa Sanusi, country director of Amnesty International in Nigeria. A dozen of female students were later freed.

Federal University Gusau said at the time that the attack had caused tension at the institution and students were worried about their safety.

Mr Sanusi said that the ease and frequency of abductions showed that the government had not learnt from previous abductions.

“Authorities must carry out investigations on the inexcusable security lapses that enabled the abduction of dozens of students at Federal University Gusau,” he said.

People in rural areas live in fear, he said, “bracing themselves for the next round of kidnapping”.

“Whatever measures authorities put in place to deal with the problem are not working,” Mr Sanusi concluded.

Despite several attempts, The National could not get a response from police on the issue.

Ransom payments encourage kidnappings

Paying ransoms emboldens criminals to kidnap and will impoverish more people whose income hardly meets their needs, Mr McHarry said.

“You have a main economy that is tanking and a shadow economy that is thriving … the success of one means the loss of the other. It is a zero-sum game where one side wins and the other side definitely loses,” he said.

To reduce the number of kidnappings, Mr McHarry said the government must make serious efforts to maintain sustainable economic growth, and that until the basic necessities, such as employment, education and healthcare are provided, more people are likely to be lured into this shadow economy.

‘Survivors never recover’

Long after being freed, survivors continue to suffer from the traumatising experiences of kidnapping. Some struggle for the rest of their lives.

In Abuja, Ms Chukwu does not want to leave her room and refuses to socialise with anyone outside of her family.

She speaks to a therapist once a week to help her deal with her trauma, but the memory of what happened lingers.

“I still can't believe all that happened,” she said. “I hope these people get caught somehow.”

After Ms Chukwu returned home, she discovered that her abduction had exacerbated her mother’s high blood pressure. One week later, her mother died.

“I have not been myself since then, I don’t even go out or talk to most people any more. I will never go back to my former self,” Ms Chukwu said.

Months after her release, Esther said that flashbacks of what happened still trouble her when she goes to sleep, bringing tears to her eyes.

“I tried going back to the way things were before the kidnap but I couldn't. I still have this pain in my chest when I think of it,” she said.

“They said with time it will get better, but they lied because it didn’t.”

The victims need to be “brought back into safety and they must be provided with standard psychosocial care that will help them recover from the atrocities they were subjected to”, said Mr Sanusi, who added that far too many incidents go unreported.