The plague of mass abductions of children is worsening in Nigeria. One hundred pupils between the ages of eight and 15 from a school in Kuriga, in the central-north of the country, were taken away together with a teacher by dozens of men armed to the teeth who entered the school complex on motorbikes with weapons drawn while the whole school was gathered in assembly, after injuring at least one child: a raid attributed – writes the BBC – to armed gangs of common criminals who kidnap to enlist baby soldiers and to ask for cash ransoms. For several years these gangs seem to have imitated the techniques of jihadist terrorists such as Boko Aram, whose heirs still operate in some areas in the north-east of the country. As in the infamous state of Borno, where just a few days ago over 200 women and girls were kidnapped from a camp for displaced people in Gamboru Ngala, who had abandoned their villages to escape jihadist violence and were taken by force while they were in the forest looking for wood to cook.
An episode, the severity of which in numbers grows hour by hour and is not yet quantifiable and for which the authorities accuse the Islamic State in West Africa (ISWAP), which split from Boko Haram in 2015 when the leader of the original group, Abubakar Shekau, swore allegiance to the Islamic State. Furthermore, the number of abductees has not yet been clearly quantified. The two episodes, of a different nature, do not appear to be connected to each other, although, according to many observers, Islamists occasionally appear to have worked together with common criminals.
The plague of kidnappings has afflicted Nigeria for over a decade. And the authorities, in an attempt to discourage the lucrative criminal industry, have imposed controversial measures, such as the one that came into force in 2022 which prohibits family members from paying ransoms against the risk of a 15-year prison sentence: a provision that has effectively fallen into disrepair. empty because it was never applied, but which sheds light on the seriousness of the phenomenon of kidnappings. A violence that remains out of control, despite the promises of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who came to power in 2023 with the promise of a crackdown against the rampant violence and its three branches: ferocious Islamic terrorism, the equally ferocious violence of criminal gangs and inter-ethnic and inter-religious violence, which still explodes in vigorous flare-ups especially in the central regions of the country, where there is a precarious coexistence between Islamic and Christian communities.