New appeals have been launched from many quarters – including from the Nigerian Catholic Church – to put an end to a plague that has become a real business for terrorist and criminal groups. Since the beginning of Bola Tinubu’s mandate, more than 4 thousand people have been kidnapped, including many students and priests
Kidnapping continues to be a dramatic emergency in Nigeria. Even in recent weeks, in fact, there have been several mass kidnappings at the hands of terrorist and criminal groups. A drama that the country has been trying to combat for years, but which in reality seems to be expanding and worsening more and more, without the government being able to intervene effectively.
From May 2023, when the tenure of current President Bola Tinubu began to January 2024, there have been almost 4,000 cases of kidnapping, according to risk management consultancy SBM Intelligence. To these must be added the latest cases such as that of Kuriga, in the state of Kaduna, where 287 students and a teacher were kidnapped on 7 March. In the following days, some of them – all between eight and fifteen years old – managed to escape. Only three days later, on Sunday 10 March, another case occurred: this time 15 children and 4 women were kidnapped in the village of Gidan Bakuso, in Sokoto State, near the border with Niger. According to theFides Agencyin the first case the main suspect is a group of shepherds fulani who allegedly acted on behalf of Dogo Gide, a criminal specialized in kidnapping, who had already organized a similar mass kidnapping of 126 pupils from the Bethel Baptist school in Maraban, also in Kaduna state, in July 2021.
These latest events pushed Bola Tinubu’s government to mobilize to begin a vast search operation for the kidnapped people. Kidnapping, however, is a real plague that has never been adequately combated. And if in the past the main culprits were the Boko Haram terrorists, who asked for ransoms or forcibly recruited new militiamen and very young sexual slaves, today we are talking both about criminal groups and gangs who have turned it into a real business, and about terrorists of Province of the Islamic State in West Africa (Iswap) who finance themselves and arm themselves with the proceeds of the ransoms.
Islamist terrorists are also believed to be responsible for another kidnapping that occurred on March 6, of a group of displaced people in the camp near the town of Gamboru Ngala, in the state of Borno, north-east of Nigeria. According to testimonies, the people kidnapped at the beginning of March were mainly women, caught while they were collecting firewood or to sell. Mohamed Malick Fall, UNICEF representative in Nigeria, claims that at least 200 people have been kidnapped. In this case, the responsibility was attributed to the Ansaru group, a separatist faction of Boko Haram, which in 2014 had implemented the first sensational mass kidnapping – with international echoes and campaigns – namely the kidnapping of more than 270 schoolgirls in Chibok school.
It is not only schools or student residences that are targeted, but also the camps they house 2.3 million internally displaced people – especially women and children – who have fled due to the attacks and violence of armed groups and who live in conditions of great vulnerability and humanitarian emergency.
Currently, the seizure alert concerns 14 states of Northern and Central Nigeria, particularly those of Adamawa, Bauchi, Borno, Benue, Yobe, Katsina, Abuja, Kebbi, Sokoto, Plateau and Zamfara and the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja.
In 2022, the Nigerian government passed a law prohibiting victims’ families from paying ransoms and providing for up to 15 years in prison. Even the Catholic Church has always publicly declared that it will not pay for the release of the hostages; despite this, many priests, men and women religious continue to be kidnapped for the purpose of extortion. The latest case concerns two Claretians – Father Ken Kanwa, parish priest of the church of St. Vincent de Paul Fier, diocese of Pankshin, and his assistant Father Jude Nwachukwu – kidnapped last February 1st and then released after a few days in the State of the Plateau, in central Nigeria.
Regarding these recent events, the Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle and theNigerian Archbishop Fortunatus Nwachukwu, both members of the Dicastery for Evangelization, expressed their closeness to the victims: «Nothing can justify the crime of kidnapping – they write in the message -. The violence undermines the pillars of civil and social harmony, as it traumatizes the people involved, their families and society in general.” They also launched an appeal to request further intervention from the authorities: «Likewise, We call on the Government of Nigeria to act quickly to address this threat and stop the ongoing crisis.”
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