The anniversary of the abduction of the Chibok girls from school was on 14 April; 90 are still missing. Today is another anniversary: the abduction from Greenfield University. The 20th of April 2021 was like any other day for students of Greenfield University, Kaduna. Muslim students observing Ramadan prepared for iftar in the company of friends and classmates, while other students perambulated between hostels and the cafeteria.
At about 8.15 p.m., gunshots rang out; for some, the sound was not perturbing. The school was in close proximity to a major highway where motorists were frequently attacked by armed robbers. This time was different: armed men, some in camouflage, that students mistook for Nigerian military personnel, rounded up 23 people – 18 students and five administrative staff – took their phones and herded them into the bushes. Some female students were half dressed; many had no shoes on. They trekked for hours, then were driven in twos and threes on waiting motorbikes, to a camp where other kidnapped Nigerians were held.
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Three days later, on Friday, 23 April, the kidnappers told parents that they had a message for them: the remains of Dorathy Yohanna, Precious Nwakacha and Sadiq Yusuf Sanga were left on the side of a road. Yohanna, a third-year student of Political Science turned 23 days before she was kidnapped. The night before her death, she cried and prayed, fretting over her mother’s reluctance to let her go back to school because of insecurity concerns. 20-year-old Nwakacha, in her third year of Accounting, was outspoken and articulate. This was why her classmates thought she was a good choice when she was selected by the kidnappers purportedly to take a message to the parents – they knew she would be a good ambassador of their cause. Sanga, who was in his third year of a cyber security course, woke the morning he was killed to share his dream: three people were going home and he was one of them.
In Nigeria we often say: when you wake up is your morning and you cannot wake a person pretending to be asleep. I did not know these details when I woke up to the news that three of the students kidnapped from Greenfield had been killed, but it was a morning of sorts for me. The Greenfield story was only one more reality of schools as soft targets for terrorists and mercenaries and not more horrific than the murder of 59 students in Federal Government College Buni Yadi in 2014. Part of what shook me was that unlike the attack on Buni Yadi, which was ideological terror, killing Yohanna, Nwachaka and Sanga was part of a negotiation for money; calculated to put pressure on families to pay the N800,000,000 ($2 million) ransom.
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Channeling the desperation that I imagined families were feeling, I reached out to Olubukunola Williams and Chioma Agwuegbo, feminist activists in civil society to find out what could be done. It was unfathomable that Nigerians or women would not be mobilising around this. Williams, Agwuegbo and I conceived of responding to the Greenfield kidnapping by centring women as influencers in their homes and communities to organise Nigerians to demand that the Federal Government delivers on its responsibility to secure our lives in accordance with Section 14(2)(b) of the 1999 Constitution: “the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government”. The campaign had a name, slogan and demand: ‘Secure our lives’. Our goal was acknowledgement by government of the toll kidnapping was taking on Nigerians and a response to bring an effective end to what had become an industry.
Maybe we were unconsciously tapping into the culture of women-for-hire for claps and cries; the exploitative narrative of women as nurturers of the nation who cannot be relied on for formal power in government but who are useful for tugging on emotions. We thought only of the inspiring histories of women championing social justice reforms, such as the often-mentioned Aba Women’s War and Abeokuta Women’s revolt against excessive taxation during Britain’s colonial rule. The Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace who brought an end to Liberia’s brutal civil war and other inspiring examples of women mobilising effectively across the world.
Six weeks after we started the process, the campaign received donor funding. By then, two more students had been murdered: Feso Osunlalu, a third-year student of International Relations; tall, witty and irreverent, and Shaheed Abdulrahaman, a first-year student who arrived in school on the day he was kidnapped. On 29 May 2021, all the survivors of the Greenfield kidnapping were released reportedly after a ransom of N150,000,000 (US$375,000) and eight new, fuelled motorbikes had been paid.
We built a coalition of feminist, civil society, media and faith-based organisations involved in security, gender equity, human rights protection, and access to education to plan how best to capture the attention of the public and government. We agreed on a day of mass action with millions of Nigerians making noise, at a particular time of the day reminiscent of banging pots during the pandemic. We would also use artistic expressions to engage i.e. a poem (‘how much blood will this land drink before we say enough’) by Dike Chukwumerijie, a renowned spoken word and performance poet, and installations of rows of shoes or cups in public places to speak visually to passersby who were outside our circle of communication about the human costs of kidnapping. Finally, we decided to create and publish a red list of Nigerians who were killed and unaccounted for from kidnapping and disappearances because as we planned, kidnappers continued to attack schools.
The day of action – 28 July 2021 – came and went with various activities across the country but the impact came not even close to what we had initially imagined and eventually settled for. We continued advocating through online activities on X Spaces, anchoring our engagement to global recognition days such as International Day of the Girl Child and 16 Days of Activism and by end of 2021, the campaign petered out. There was still a balance from the first tranche of funds which, with funders approval, we contributed to the 2022 campaigns for the passage of five gender bills in the National Assembly, which were aimed at closing gender inequality gaps.
Years later, my reflections about this campaign and the escalating insecurity in Nigeria have been partly shaped by continued observation of attempts to organise around insecurity (and other issues) and reading the works of Anthea Lawson (Entangled Activist), Professor Issa Shivji (Silences in NGO Discourse) and others. Lawson theorises that, “activists are part of and injured by and survivors of the very problems that we are trying to change in the world and our tactics and organisations often mirror the same frameworks for operating that we say we want to change. Some of that entails how we center ourselves as subjects and see those we are trying to help (with our superior knowledge) as objects”. Shivji identifies NGOs as handmaidens of a neo-liberal purpose i.e., replacing a degraded state no longer charged with social goods and welfare and pretending to be ‘pro poor’ while maintaining the capitalist, globalisation hegemony.
Why did our Secure Our Lives campaign make little impact and why is it difficult for donor/philanthropy funded organisations to build organic movements?
The first challenge is tied to Shivji’s accusation that activists try to change the world without understanding it. ‘How can you make poverty history without understanding the history of poverty’, he asks? In our case, how could we successfully demand that government secure our lives without understanding the nature of our state and sources of insecurity? Assessing the roots of insecurity in Nigeria would have intersected with another observation of Shivji’s that NGOs ignore geopolitical realities. In our case this would be the breakdown of governance in Nigeria; deep state capture for plundering public resources; the politics of West Africa and the Sahel in the context of the Cold War and foreign military bases; decades long conflict with jihadists in north east Nigeria indoctrinated in Saudi Arabia; and the impact of global warming on traditional economic activity.
In 2021 we were reacting to a fire of sorts and in retrospect, we would probably have agreed that we did not have time to build theoretical knowledge about the extractive, neoliberal nature of the Nigerian state and the influence of geopolitics. We might have argued, that we did not have to interrogate the drivers of insecurity and why the raison d’etre of our security forces is regime security not securing citizens – we live the realities. Besides, civil society have hosted dozens of conferences since 2010, some in collaboration with the military, about the drivers of insecurity in Nigeria including the massive defense budgets which no one accounts for. If we had taken time for this analysis, we might have ended up with a different strategy for how to engage on insecurity.
The second challenge to organising by NGOs comes from the observation of both Shivji and Lawson about the politics of aid and funding which create dependencies and, in some cases, makes it harder for people and institutions to collaborate. This was our experience. When the Secure Our Lives campaign received funding, we agreed not to spend on individually mobilising citizens to join the activities. We partly sealed the failure of the campaign with this decision but we were not going to follow industry norm or politicians and organise people by paying them. We wanted an organic campaign – like Bring Back Our Girls, where people went to the sit outs and marched because of shared humanity and experience, not because they had been promised N1000. Civil society justifies paying people to organise: ‘people earn daily; they should be compensated for that loss of income; they need to eat’. What this does is attract widely, without building a base of conscious citizens.
However, because there are no secrets in the civil society space and people follow the money, our plans became political by virtue of funding and focus. As Almut Rochowanski in Rethinking Foreign Aid says, “Money is never just money. It is power incarnate.” Soon our strategy sessions became battles about representation and identity and the pathologies of organising in a traumatised community where everything mirrors the political economy of power rose to the surface: subterfuge, competition for power intertwined with who gets resources and recognition, co-option and infiltrators. In this Shivji is right about paying attention to existing power structures around which societies are organised. For instance – in hindsight, our attempt at drawing in the Catholic Women’s Organization (CWO) and Federation of Muslim Women Association of Nigeria (FOMWAN) was misplaced and mishandled. Misplaced because religious influencers in Nigeria tend to defend status quo and eschew anything radical. I might have botched our chances of signing up CWO by leading that engagement. ‘I hope our sisters in the north have joined’, the CWO’s president said to me the first time we spoke. I understood the concern and should have made way for other women in the coalition to lead on this. As a Muslim and from the middle belt which has historically, for political reasons, been captured as geographically North, I was probably not the best interlocutor for building alliance with catholic women, but I was not successful with FOMWAN, so being of the same religion did not help either. Possibly, regardless of all we could have done better, including meeting with them in person and not relying on the COVID recovery sense of the virtual being equal to the physical, they would not have joined us.
Our campaign barely made a dent in the consciousness of women that we claimed as our primary target. Is the daily wage earner, the one civil society pays to attend meetings and protests, the same person that Shivji and other advocates for grassroots campaigners expects to lead organically and to theorise? The women outside the formal NGO sector, who took part in the actions were largely affiliated with civil society organisations working in urban and rural areas. Where we preaching to the converted or were our messages unwittingly designed for them? Whatever the case, we could hardly say that educated, professional women supported the action in larger numbers than working-class women.
The recent suspension of United States Agency for International Development (USAID) puts aid politics in focus. As one of Africa’s major recipients of U.S. foreign aid estimated at $1.02 billion in 2023 alone, the suspension has sparked debates in Nigeria about the politics of aid. The positions range from blaming international aid for dulling and dissipating civic dissent and lowering citizens expectations of government to provide public goods, to aid being a form of repayment of the debt owed from colonialism, neocolonialism and neoliberalism. Others insist on acknowledging the positive impact of aid particularly on public health services while others point out that the US is the biggest beneficiary of its aid – building global soft power and supporting US businesses and organisations for instance in 2017, 60 per cent of USAID funding went to 25 US organisations.
The third challenge is tied to an assumption that we made which has been a popular theory of change of civil society for decades: that informed citizens act. It is why millions of dollars have been spent on various ways of informing citizens and awareness raising. Wrong. The majority of Nigerians have no faith that the government will ever act the way it is supposed to. So near complete is government’s abdication of responsibilities, that some Nigerians have no concept that government is supposed to provide public goods. My orientation towards liberal, representative democracy i.e., one based on a social contract where as a tax payer and voter, I can demand accountability from my elected representative, is a fiction in practice and not the reality for many Nigerians. As a primarily resource-based economy reliant on extraction and trade of raw mineral resources, our government revenue does not depend on the well-being of Nigerians and as much of the tax is informal, there is no sense of a contract with the majority.
With this understanding, I had at least one answer to an unresolved question that has nagged me for years: if funded NGOs are a corrupting influence, what prevents the majority of people outside the NGO bubble from mobilising and organising?
I had been unable to explain the inertia from citizens uncorrupted by donor funds who presumably had aspirations for a better society. But it is not apathy, that was my framing. Those who want better security for instance are not demanding anything from a government they have no expectations for, they are hiring vigilantes, bandits, sometimes groups like Lakurawa, designated terrorists by the government, to protect them.
2024 started with the murders of 13-year-old Folorunsho Ariyo and 21-year-old Nabeeha Al-Kadriyar. They had been kidnapped from their homes on 2 January. When their families failed to meet the deadline to raise millions for their release, they were killed and their bodies left on the side of a road. It was morning for a few more people in Nigeria. Ariyo and Al-Kadriyar lived in the Federal Capital Territory, mere kilometers away from the Presidency. If the home of the federal government is unsafe, how is the rest of the country faring? Across WhatsApp groups I observed people waking up (could be ground-hog day for some) and attempting to organize around the new year 2024 kidnap and murder spree. ‘Let women lead the charge’, someone said. I closed my eyes.
Within the first 10 days of January 2025 close to 300 Nigerians had been kidnapped. Despite generous defense budgets ($4.47 billion in 2021) and global support to tackle insecurity, Nigeria has remained amongst the top 10 countries most impacted by terrorism since 2011. In 2014, it was ranked third globally for impact of terrorism, and in 2015 when Buhari was sworn in, it was second. By 2021 Nigeria’s rating had improved two places but while terrorism declined, kidnapping was rising. Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics reported recently that between May 2023 and April 2024, 2.2 million Nigerians were kidnapped, over half a million were killed by kidnappers and N2.2 trillion ($1.4 billion) paid as ransom.
As insecurity ramps up – with Boko Harm attacking in Borno on a daily basis and Benue and Plateau in the news for fresh waves of cyclical terror, it is clear that it is impossible to address insecurity as a single issue. Kidnapping is only one arm of insecurity in Nigeria. Cattle rustling, armed robbery, terrorism, gang violence, illegal gold mining, secessionist movements, police predation, crude oil bunkering and drug smuggling, defense contract abuse, government corruption, and corporate fraud are happening across the country; feeding into each other. It is possible, as deduced in security analysts reports that kidnapping funds other transnational organized crime, but it is plausible and there is anecdotal support that as the economic situation in Nigeria worsened, kidnapping became a business. The recent rise in the kidnapping of medical personnel some say, is an indication that the kidnapping industry is evolving, requiring the services of doctors and nurses for kidnap camps.
It is unlikely that there will be successful attempts to organise around insecurity in Nigeria as we tried to do. Asides Nigeria being more politicised and polarised – which results in us being less organised, typical donor funding is unlikely to provide a critical requirement to successfully organise: time. If many Nigerians have given up on or never held the belief that government owes them a duty of care, information alone cannot wake them up. Without an anchoring, magnetising ideology or philosophy that provides a culture around which people identify and organise, appeals to enlightened self-interest and an assumption that ‘we all want to be secure’ will not be enough.
However, organising and mobilising a critical mass of citizens is still one of the few ways to exert pressure to reform systems and structures maybe more so during these times of global upheaval. As civic spaces constrict and social media algorithms and cacophony make it harder to engage, reaching into our past of organising tactics might be necessary but also accepting that it can take years to organise people effectively especially when part of the process is trying to wake people who do not know what it means to be awake.
Ayisha Osori is the author of Love Does Not Win Elections.
