How misdiagnosis, narratives are fuelling Nigeria’s banditry escalation

By: Zagazola Makama

Nigeria’s banditry crisis is no longer escalating simply because armed groups are growing bolder. It is escalating because the country continues to misdiagnose the threat, apply blunt policy tools to differentiated actors, and unintentionally feed a violent criminal economy through ransom payments, politicised narratives and delayed state consolidation.

Across the North-West and parts of the North-Central, banditry has evolved beyond rural violence into a structured, profit-driven security threat. Yet public debate remains trapped between emotional appeals for dialogue and absolutist calls for force, leaving little room for the strategic clarity required to halt the violence.

At the heart of the escalation is money. Banditry today survives on a diversified revenue architecture that includes ransom payments, cattle rustling, illegal mining, arms trafficking, extortion levies on farming and mining communities, and collaboration with transnational criminal networks. Each successful kidnapping or “peace levy” reinforces the viability of violence as a business model.

Data released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) in December 2024 underlined the scale of this economy with the North-West accounting for the highest number of kidnap incidents and victims.

Zagazola argue that as long as communities remain unprotected and ransom payments continue as a survival strategy, banditry will regenerate faster than military operations can suppress it. This is not ideology-driven violence at its core; it is cash-flow-driven criminality as every payment funds the next attack.

Another accelerant is Nigeria’s persistent failure to differentiate categories of armed actors. Security assessments increasingly point to at least two distinct groups operating within the banditry ecosystem.

The first consists of low-level, defensive armed actors, often rural residents who acquired weapons after suffering attacks and whose violence is reactive rather than predatory. The second group comprises entrenched, profit-driven bandit networks responsible for mass kidnappings, village destruction, sexual violence, arms trafficking and territorial control.

Yet public discourse and policy responses frequently collapse these actors into a single category of “bandits,” resulting in indiscriminate dialogue offers, blanket amnesty rhetoric or, conversely, broad-brush security operations that alienate communities. This conceptual error, allows high-value criminal leaders to masquerade as aggrieved actors while exploiting negotiations to buy time, regroup and rearm.

Dialogue has repeatedly been applied in contexts where the state lacks coercive leverage. Experiences in Zamfara, Katsina, Sokoto and Kaduna states and parts of the North-West show a consistent pattern: temporary reductions in violence following peace deals, followed by rapid relapse and escalation. Officials who participated in the dialogue have openly acknowledged that many agreements collapsed within months.

The negotiations conducted without sustained military pressure, intelligence dominance and post-agreement enforcement mechanisms merely incentivise armed groups to pause tactically. When criminals negotiate from a position of strength, dialogue becomes appeasement.

Perhaps the most dangerous accelerant is the ethnicisation of banditry. Although criminal gangs include actors of identifiable ethnic backgrounds, the violence itself is not driven by ethnic grievance. Nonetheless, selective media framing and political rhetoric like what had been witnessed in Plateau have increasingly cast banditry through identity lenses, particularly in farmer–herder contexts.

This framing obscures the criminal logic of the violence and deepens mistrust between communities that are themselves victims. In Nigeria today, the fulani herdsmen and pastoralists communities are being weaponized and stereotyped as bandits. This dangerous persecution has strengthens bandit recruitment narratives, allowing criminal leaders to cloak profit-driven violence in claims of ethnic persecution or genocide.

Historical records and sociological studies show that Fulani, Hausa, Tiv, Berom and other communities coexisted for decades through complementary economic systems. The breakdown of this coexistence has been exploited by armed groups seeking cover, recruits and informants. Security agencies possess significantly more intelligence on bandit networks than is visible in public debate. Lawful interceptions, human intelligence and post-operation assessments routinely reveal financial motives, supply routes and internal hierarchies within armed groups.

However, public advocacy for dialogue often relies on forest-level engagements that security officials describe as “theatrical performances” by bandits choreographed grievances designed to elicit sympathy and concessions. The disconnect between classified intelligence and public narratives has allowed emotionally compelling but strategically flawed arguments to dominate national discourse.

Another escalation factor is the emerging convergence between bandit networks and ideological terrorist groups as Nigeria’s internal security landscape firmly indicates that what has long been treated as banditry especially in the North-West and parts of North-Central Nigeria has evolved into a hybrid jihadist campaign, driven by Boko Haram (JAS faction) and reinforced by JNIM elements operating from Sahelian-linked forest sanctuaries. Shared arms supply chains, training exchanges and joint operations could transform banditry from criminal violence into full-spectrum insurgency if unchecked. Nigeria’s past experience with Boko Haram demonstrates the cost of dismissing such convergence as isolated or exaggerated.

Military operations have succeeded in degrading bandit camps in several corridors, but the absence of immediate governance has allowed violence to recycle. Clearing operations not followed by permanent security presence, functional courts, reopened schools, healthcare and markets leave vacuums that criminal actors quickly refill. Bandits and other criminals thrive where state authority is episodic rather than continuous. Security victories without governance consolidation merely displace violence spatially and temporally.

Therefore, Nigeria must urgently reset its approach by formally adopting threat differentiation, choking financial lifelines, regulating community defence structures, and ensuring intelligence-led, precise enforcement against high-risk criminal networks. Dialogue, they say, must be selective, conditional and embedded within formal disarmament and reintegration frameworks not deployed as a moral reflex.

Above all, the state must reclaim narrative control by defining banditry clearly as organised criminal violence, not a sociological misunderstanding. As one senior official put it, “Banditry escalates where sentiment overrides strategy. The cure begins with honesty.”

Without that honesty, Nigeria risks allowing a violent criminal economy to entrench itself deeper into the country’s security architecture at a cost measured not just in money, but in lives, legitimacy and national cohesion.

How misdiagnosis, narratives are fuelling Nigeria’s banditry escalation