Nigeria’s School Kidnapping Crisis Enters a Dangerous New Phase

Nigeria’s latest school abduction has once again shown how quickly armed groups can overwhelm communities that lack basic state protection.

This was made evident last week Friday with the seizure of more than 300 children and staff from Saint Marys Catholic School in Papiri by militants. This is clear evidence that large areas of north-central Nigeria are no longer effectively governed.

Before dawn last Friday, armed men entered the school, forced 303 students and 12 staff members into surrounding forest areas and disappeared along routes that security forces have struggled to control for years. Roughly 50 of the children have escaped, while 265 people remain in captivity. This is one of the largest mass kidnappings Nigeria has recorded in more than a decade.

To understand why this continues to happen, one must understand the environment in which these groups operate. Much of the region consists of forest corridors, river systems, and scattered rural settlements which create natural shelter for bandit groups.

State capacity is limited, police numbers are thin, intelligence coverage is weak, and militant bandit groups exploit these gaps with ease.

These bandits are criminal groups that grew out of rural cattle rustling gangs, local defence militias, and groups that raided rival villages. They operate from forest camps, use motorcycles for mobility, and rely on ransom kidnapping as one of their principal sources of income. Their operations have become large and organised enough to replace the authority of the state in many areas of Nigeria’s northern regions.

The growth of these groups has coincided with the pressures facing ethnic Fulani nomadic herding communities, majority of which are practising Muslims, whose grazing routes have contracted as farmland expanded and localised drought conditions intensified. As available grazing land gets smaller, Fulani herders move into cultivated fields, and this is the point at which most conflict begins. Farmers defend land that they rely on for food and income. Herders push through because they have few remaining areas capable of supporting their livestock.

In many documented attacks the violence is not symmetrical. Fulani militant elements, often influenced by Islamic fundamentalist preaching, have deliberately targeted Christian farming communities. The combination of shrinking land access and religious radicalisation has created a pool of young Fulani men who are vulnerable to recruitment by jihadist movements across the Sahel. That fusion of local pressure and ideological messaging feeds directly into the conflict now spreading into other parts of Nigeria.

These are the conditions that allowed the Papiri attack to occur. The attackers knew the terrain. They followed well-established bush routes. They operated with speed and confidence because the surrounding area offers predictable escape paths and limited state surveillance. Nothing about their method was improvised.

The Common Sense reported earlier this week that the Papiri attack shows how local criminality and wider militant influence have begun to merge. The evidence now available supports that assessment. It is increasingly clear that Nigeria is dealing with a layered security crisis rather than isolated outbreaks of violence.

The official response has escalated accordingly. The state in which the attack occured has closed all schools indefinitely and several neighbouring states have followed suit. Nigerian president Bola Tinubu has ordered expanded police recruitment, reassigned officers from elite protection duties to rural patrols, and increased aerial monitoring over the forest belt that stretches across the region. Tactical units are now focused on search operations in the areas surrounding Papiri.

These steps were necessary but they raise a broader question. Why did years of warnings about vulnerable schools not produce earlier reforms. International human rights groups including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have repeatedly pointed out that many high-risk schools lack even basic early warning systems.

The United States government has condemned the attack and called for the immediate release of all captives. The Pope has issued an appeal emphasising the need to protect educational institutions.

The deeper reality is straightforward. Nigeria is losing effective control of large rural areas. Armed groups fill the vacuum. Jihadist elements from the surrounding Sahel region move south through these gaps. Local conflicts over land and water escalate in the absence of credible justice or policing. Rural communities carry the cost. Schools become targets because they are undefended and symbolically significant to radicalised Islamic jihadist groups who want to sow fear and terror in the local population.

The Papiri abduction shows what happens when institutions fail to adapt to this new landscape. It will not be the last such attack unless the Nigerian state is able to rebuild capable policing, regain control of large areas of rural terrain, and disrupt the networks that sustain kidnapping. Until that happens families in places like Papiri will continue to live with risks that no society should consider normal.