“If they hear you say anything about them, before you know it they’ll come for you. They’ll come to your house and take you into the bush.” A father in Niger state said that to the BBC about the men who had taken his son. The BBC withheld his name and called him Aliyu.
His boy was one of more than 300 students abducted before dawn on 21 November 2025, when gunmen burst into the grounds of a Catholic boarding school, St Mary’s, in the village of Papiri. Some of the children were as young as five. About 250 were still reportedly missing ten days later, though state officials said that number was exaggerated. Many parents were too frightened to speak to the authorities or reporters at all.
A run of attacks
Papiri was one of several. Two days later, 12 teenage girls were seized from Mussa District in Borno state. The army blamed Iswap, the Islamic State’s West African arm, for taking them while they harvested crops on family land, and that they were rescued in an “intelligence-led” operation. A few days before Papiri, 25 girls vanished from a school at Maga, in Kebbi state, 200km (125 miles) further north. One escaped; security forces freed the rest from what officials called a “farm settlement”.
Remote boarding schools count as soft targets for groups chasing a big ransom. The gangs known locally as bandits camp with their cattle far out in the bush and are mostly ethnic Fulani. Nobody claimed the two school attacks, and the government told the BBC it believed jihadists, not bandits, were responsible. Yusuf, who looks after some of the Maga girls, said such raids “can only happen with the connivance of someone from the community”.
What a ransom costs a family
Paying is illegal in Nigeria, but hostages can be killed when money does not arrive. Relatives tend to crowdfund, and after mass school abductions officials are at times suspected of bargaining behind the scenes.
Outlook India, writing on 8 October 2026, described the financial wreckage for families in Borno: livestock sold, money borrowed, savings gone. When a victim stays in captivity, months can pass without knowing if more will be demanded. Amnesty International documented cases in the north where relatives sold possessions to meet demands, and where repeated attacks disrupted farming and drove people from their livelihoods.
The Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit calls kidnapping for ransom a significant source of illicit finance, with proceeds moving through cash, bank accounts and cryptocurrency and sometimes converted into livestock. A 2026 record in the National Library repository cited estimates of about N2.23 trillion paid in ransom over the period from January 2021 to June 2025.
Roads, classrooms and local deals
On the Buratai-Kamuya road in Borno, troops said insurgents stopped civilian vehicles in May and seized passengers. A rapid-response unit got 92 people out, seven of them children, and came across three roadside bombs. In July, four vehicles were stopped on the same road, and thirty-one civilians were rescued. In September troops freed 14 captives in Gwoza. One of them, Chief Imam Mallam Sadiq, had been snatched in March. Some people simply stop using such roads.
In the north-west, some communities have gone their own way. SBM Intelligence analyst David Nwaigwe told the BBC that badly hit villages struck “peace deals” with bandits in exchange for access to mines, and attacks seem to have declined where they hold. Katsina state is a case in point, and Jibia reached a deal in March.
Sources
- Nigerian villagers 'too scared to speak' after hundreds of schoolchildren kidnapped
- Ransoms, Lost Livelihoods, Empty Classrooms: How Kidnapping Is Changing Nigeria
