Who profits from prolonged instability?Who benefits from endless emergency procurements? Who feeds the protection economy? Who launders the proceeds? Who keeps supplying operational intelligence to criminal groups?.. These questions are uncomfortable. But nations that refuse to interrogate uncomfortable realities eventually become captive to them… Perhaps the gravest danger is not merely that Nigerians are paying ransom. It is that the country may gradually be normalising ransom as part of the everyday economic life.
For decades, governments taxed citizens to provide security.
Today in Nigeria, citizens increasingly pay criminals for the absence of it.
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That may be the most frightening economic transformation quietly taking place across the country.
The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) revealed that Nigerians paid approximately ₦2.23 trillion as ransom between May 2023 and April 2024 alone.
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Pause on that figure. ₦2.23 trillion.
Not investment capital. Not industrial funding. Not agricultural expansion. Not infrastructure financing.
Ransom. Fear has become a parallel taxation system.
Entire households now budget not only for food, rent, transport, school fees, and healthcare, but increasingly for survival contingencies in a country where kidnapping has evolved into an organised economic sector.
That is the tragedy Nigeria has not fully confronted. For years, kidnapping was treated as an episodic criminality; disturbing, violent, but isolated. What exists today is something far more dangerous: an entrenched criminal economy with supply chains, negotiators, informants, logistics networks, territorial operations, and sophisticated financial extraction mechanisms.
The forests are no longer merely hiding places. They are becoming economic zones. Across large parts of the country, fear now influences movement, investment, agriculture, property value, education, transportation, and social behaviour.
Businesses close early. Night economies are shrinking. Transport operators add invisible “risk premiums” to fares. Farmers abandon cultivable lands. Entire rural economies contract under the weight of insecurity.
Yet somewhere within the same ecosystem, criminal enterprises flourish. This is where the conversation becomes uncomfortable.
If citizens reportedly paid ₦2.23 trillion in ransom within one year, one must ask: Where is this money going? How is it circulating? Who launders it? Who supplies the weapons? Who purchases the fuel? Who moves the food? Who provides intelligence? Who protects the networks?
No criminal economy survives on that scale without layered support structures. And perhaps that is the most disturbing aspect of the crisis: the extraordinary confidence now displayed by kidnappers and bandits across Nigeria. These are no longer criminals operating merely from desperation.
Increasingly, they operate with the behavioural confidence of economic actors who believe the system around them is weak, penetrated, compromised, frightened, or predictable.
They issue deadlines. They negotiate prices. They impose levies. They relocate populations. They dictate movement.
Sometimes they kill even after payment. This is no longer random violence. It is organised extraction.
The Defence Chief, General Christopher Musa, himself acknowledged that bad intelligence and misleading informants have hampered operations against kidnappers.
That admission is significant because it suggests the problem may not merely be military insufficiency, but systemic intelligence compromise and local collaboration networks deeply embedded within affected communities and operational corridors.
Families sell land. Businesses liquidate assets. Communities crowd-fund negotiations. Savings disappear into forests. Education plans collapse. Medical care is postponed. Investments are abandoned… Fear itself is now consuming capital. And while this underground economy expands, legitimate sectors suffer contraction… Farmers flee agricultural zones. Interstate trade weakens. Tourism disappears. Transport routes become economically unreliable. Schools shut down temporarily in vulnerable areas.
A criminal economy of this magnitude cannot function without information.
Someone tracks movement. Someone identifies targets. Someone monitors negotiations. Someone supplies logistics. Someone cleans the proceeds.
These are not invisible ecosystems. This is why growing allegations and public suspicions surrounding certain operational corridors and vulnerable states must no longer be dismissed casually. Persistent criminal entrenchment in some areas raises difficult questions about the negligence of governance, intelligence compromise, local collaboration networks, and the possible existence of protection structures sustaining criminal operations over prolonged periods.
The questions are uncomfortable but unavoidable.
How do heavily armed groups sustain movement for years across forests and highways without supply routes?
How do food, fuel, communication devices, and ammunition consistently reach criminal enclaves?
Why do some operational zones repeatedly regenerate, despite repeated military offensives?
These are not merely security questions. They are economic and institutional questions.
Yet public conversation often remains trapped at the surface level of outrage after abductions, while the deeper architecture behind the violence remains insufficiently interrogated.
That architecture matters. Because every naira diverted into ransom is money withdrawn from productive national circulation.
Families sell land. Businesses liquidate assets. Communities crowd-fund negotiations. Savings disappear into forests. Education plans collapse. Medical care is postponed. Investments are abandoned.
Fear itself is now consuming capital. And while this underground economy expands, legitimate sectors suffer contraction.
Farmers flee agricultural zones. Interstate trade weakens. Tourism disappears. Transport routes become economically unreliable. Schools shut down temporarily in vulnerable areas.
Entire communities become psychologically un-investable. No economy grows sustainably under those conditions. The frightening irony is that Nigeria simultaneously spends trillions on formal security structures, while citizens increasingly fund informal criminal structures through ransom payments.
A dual economy is quietly emerging: One governed by law, another governed by negotiated survival.
And perhaps the most unsettling question is whether government fully understands the scale of this transformation. Because kidnapping in Nigeria is no longer merely a security problem. It is gradually becoming macroeconomic. It affects inflation. Food supply. Rural productivity. Commercial confidence. Internal migration. Investment behaviour. And national psychology itself. A society constantly negotiating with fear cannot fully develop.
Government must also confront another dangerous public perception now spreading quietly across the country: that prolonged insecurity may have created informal economic incentives around deployments, procurement cycles, operational allowances, emergency contracting, and conflict management itself.
The boldness exhibited by criminal groups today should alarm every serious policymaker. Criminals who openly bargain, relocate hostages across territories, impose deadlines, and sustain long-duration operations are often responding to one dangerous perception: Those consequences are inconsistent and state penetration is weak. This is where government must rethink the crisis beyond military deployments and ceremonial security meetings.
Nigeria may need to treat kidnapping not merely as violent crime, but as organised economic insurgency.
That requires:
– aggressive financial intelligence tracking,
– telecom surveillance integration,
– rural governance reconstruction,
– border control enforcement,
– anti-money laundering expansion,
– and deep infiltration of logistics and supply chains sustaining criminal networks.
Government must also confront another dangerous public perception now spreading quietly across the country: that prolonged insecurity may have created informal economic incentives around deployments, procurement cycles, operational allowances, emergency contracting, and conflict management itself.
In many theatres of conflict, citizens increasingly speak cynically about some postings as opportunities for “shooting and eating” — a disturbing phrase reflecting public suspicion that insecurity has become economically beneficial to certain actors within the broader conflict ecosystem.
Whether exaggerated or not, such perceptions are corrosive to the national trust.
No serious nation can sustain confidence in its security architecture if citizens begin to suspect that elements within the system benefit more from managing insecurity than ending it.
This is why the political economy around insecurity itself requires urgent scrutiny.
Who profits from prolonged instability?Who benefits from endless emergency procurements? Who feeds the protection economy? Who launders the proceeds? Who keeps supplying operational intelligence to criminal groups?
These questions are uncomfortable. But nations that refuse to interrogate uncomfortable realities eventually become captive to them.
Perhaps the gravest danger is not merely that Nigerians are paying ransom. It is that the country may gradually be normalising ransom as part of the everyday economic life.
And once fear becomes taxation, the authority of the state itself quietly begins to erode.
Lanre Ogundipe, a public affairs analyst, former president of Nigeria and Africa union of journalists, writes from Abuja.
