School Closures Deepen Across Nigeria’s North as Bandits Target Children for Ransom

Nigeria’s school-abduction crisis remains a grim instrument of terror, ransom and psychological pressure on communities and government alike.

Jihadist factions and armed bandit groups have learned that children make especially valuable hostages, their capture paralysing entire communities and forcing authorities into difficult negotiations.

ValidViewNetwork reports that the pattern traces back to Boko Haram’s seizure of 276 girls from a government secondary school in Chibok, Borno State, on April 14, 2014, an event that put Nigeria’s school-security failures on the global stage.

More than a decade later, mass abductions from schools continue to recur, most recently a 56-day mass kidnapping from three schools in Oyo State earlier this year that ended with a rescue operation and the arrest of eight suspects.

A ransom economy that keeps outpacing enforcement

Security researchers point to a wider pattern behind the closures; SBM Intelligence recorded 2,938 kidnapping incidents across the north-west alone between July 2024 and June 2025, more than 60 per cent of all reported cases nationwide, with Zamfara accounting for 1,203 abductions on its own, followed by Kaduna, Katsina and Sokoto.

A separate academic estimate put nationwide kidnapping incidents and associated ransom payments at roughly ₦2.2 trillion in a single year, a figure that has turned banditry into what one security scholar has bluntly called a “ransom economy” with its own internal logic and cash flow.

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Government responses have included troop deployments, US-Nigeria security coordination, and periodic successful rescues, but each new attack pushes more communities to close their schools rather than risk another mass abduction, disrupting the education of thousands of children already contending with an overstretched public school system.

Until enforcement outpaces the ransom economy’s profitability, the choice facing many northern communities remains stark: keep classrooms open and risk another Chibok, or close them and lose a generation’s schooling to fear.