The northwestern, north central, and northeastern states of Nigeria are facing a security crisis that has not been experienced before in the history of this region. Decades of insurgency, jihadism, and banditry have turned into a daily affair with gunmen killing people in villages and on highways, whole farmlands have been evacuated, and even schools are a battleground. The Human Rights Agency of Nigeria claimed to have had more deaths of people at the hands of insurgents and bandits in the first half of 2025 (2,266) than in 2024. The bleak numbers are not figures but are fathers, mothers, and children's lives destroyed, as well as livelihoods. Mostly in northern regions, millions of Nigerians see their everyday lives disrupted due to the fevers of famine in their fields, the fear of kidnapping of their children. Ordinary, once-routine activities are a matter of survival everywhere: women are afraid to go out and gather firewood because they live miles away, parents are scared to send their children to school, and farmers are so afraid to sow crops next season. This siege on society requires radical and human-centred modifications and an incredible growth in safeguarding the most at-risk.

Education Under Fire

In the north, children are at high risk of being attacked in schools. Kidnappings of students have become almost routine. In March 2024, gunmen attacked the boarding school in Kaduna state on motorbikes, and over 200 children were kidnapped. Distraught mother Fatima Usman told Reuters, she had two children who were taken away: “They are my only children in the world”. Another father, Hassan Abdullahi, raged: “Seventeen of the students kidnapped are my children. I am very saddened by the fact that the government has abandoned us altogether”.

That is the talk of this region as families in the area are constantly paying excruciating ransoms to release their children; some are selling off land, or even their cattle. Such attacks have disintegrated families and disembowelled learning. There are now reports within UNICEF that more than 10.5 million children in Nigeria, most of whom are in the north, are out of school, representing the highest level globally. Activists have explained that this cost will increase. Isa Sanusi of Amnesty International writes:

“Because of security reasons, schools are closed, and the children lose out on education. Because girls are raped when abducted, most of the girls have been taken out of school and forced into matrimony at an early age.”

Every raid creates more terror. In other communities, the only means of transport for the children to the schools is paying for armed protection or the hurried shift of education through mobile classes. After Reuters investigated, it was discovered that 7,000 individuals have been kidnapped across the country since 2021, with most of them being children and parents simultaneously, and police usually appear to be helpless. There has been less effort to ensure schools stay open and safe. Every time a kidnapping occurs, police officers are quick to assure those concerned that they will bring the children back without demanding a ransom, yet not much can be referred to as a success story. Families usually do part with poor savings or take large loans just to ransom kidnappers. As one Nigerian expert cautions, attacks on schools have now overshadowed other reasons as to why kidnapping should take place, and with every school attack, more children are fleeing in terror. In a nutshell, insecurity has converted schooling into an expensive product, and many northern families cannot afford it anymore or even dare to take it.

Women in the Crossfire

Women and girls have a specific and heavy burden in the Northern War. They are the targets of mass abduction, sexual abuse, forced marriage, and poverty. The bandit gangs around towns such as Zamfara and Katsina have been targeting villages with mass kidnapping raids of women and girls, as a group. More than 50 women and children have been kidnapped by gunmen in Zamfara in a single night raid in December 2024. One of the survivors, Hassan Ya u, stated clearly: “They took away over 50 women and included even women who were already married and girls”. He called on the government, saying: “We are requesting the federal and Zamfara state governments to deploy more soldiers and security agencies… The whole society is suffering.”

This affects the lives of women. It is estimated that many young girls captured are never freed, and some of them are used as sex slaves or marriage partners to the fighters. The region is still haunted by the case of the Chibok girls, 276 schoolgirls who were abducted in 2014. A Reuters follow-up reveals that there is still the threat of trauma even among the releasees: some of the survivors reside in a camp governed by the military, where they are raising children who the captors fathered. Solomon Maina, the father of Debora, who was kidnapped in Chibok and has not been found, could not stop crying and said, “I will never forget her”. Desperate to get back home, one of the teenage captives merely explained to Reuters: “There is no place like home”.

Mental and social traumas are way beyond physical damage. During the Ebola-era lockdowns in Nigeria, domestic abuse escalated rapidly, and in the north, the armed upheavals have also proliferated gender-based violence. According to medical NGO reports and the press accounts, during raids, women would flee into the bush or fail to receive maternal care and safe deliveries as they avoided hospitals. In the meantime, being poor and losing the male breadwinners has left many women as de facto heads of household with little wherewithal. According to a single study, women and children have been the primary victims of insecurity in northern Nigeria, who have been thrown further into poverty and child marriage as the families struggle to maintain a smaller number of dependents who can be fed (as being the only option).

Sadly, even the people who manage to survive the terror attack may also be unsafe at home. An Amnesty International inquiry concluded that dozens of girls rescued by the armed forces of Nigeria were treated instead as victims of the Boko Haram group after spending weeks or years locked up by their military units. It appears to be common within the military that it suspects escapees of collaborating with insurgents. Amnesty International's regional director sounded a warning that the government has failed to ensure proper protection and catalyze care for these girls and young women. In effect, one of the survivors of Boko Haram can face stigma and possible arrest, on the one hand, and an apprehensive society that does not quite know how to deal with the potential contamination of the legacy of conflict, on the other. This heartbreaking fact reflects how all levels of a system, including forests of Borno to barracks of Abuja, leave women unprotected.

Fields and Livelihoods on Fire

The economy is being distorted by insecurity in the north, particularly in agriculture. Northern Nigeria is the country's granary; most staple grains and yams are grown here. Yet, farmers are now afraid. Some of the villagers, who were farmers, were gunned down as they went to work on their farms in Katsina State in June 2024, at least 50 of them. They did nothing, except fail or refuse to pay some tax imposed by the bandits. Hassan Ya’u described that foodstuffs worth 4 million naira were taken away. “I cannot reach my farm as bandits have occupied the place. It is all gone to pot,” he said. The anxiety was mirrored by his friend Musa Nasidi, who said, "The situation is beyond our control. Since our lives were in jeopardy, I had no alternative but to depart Kankara.”

Whole fields are burning in the northwest and north-central regions of Nigeria. Villages must pay millions of naira in taxes to bandit gangs and are even forced to organize themselves in self-defence vigilante groups. However, they are still unable to maintain control of the land. The flight out of the countryside is frightening, economists say that it is pushing food prices over the top. According to a Reuters report, farmers are fleeing fields because of insecurity, a situation that has led to increases in food prices and that has been seen to usher in a worst-ever cost-of-living crisis in Nigeria. At the fundamental level, such staple foods as rice or maize are becoming less available, increasing the country's grocery costs. Now the World Food Programme cites Nigeria as one of the most dangerous worldwide hunger hotspots, with clearly stated reasons concerning violence in the farming regions and the cost of seed, fertilizer, and fuel prices.

The crop losses are not the only ones. Bandits also habitually steal cattle and other animals, which the pastoral groups depend on for their wealth. On June 17, 2025, the cattle farmers were ambushed by the herders in Bauchi State, in which 19 people were slaughtered and hundreds of herds taken away. An international think tank observes that armed banditry has… taken over vast swathes of farmland, forcing the farmers to leave their land in fear of being attacked. The spillover effects are apparent: grains, milk, or meat shelves are empty in markets of the further southern towns, and millions of hungry households are to be found.

The general economy, in addition to agriculture, is impoverishing people with low incomes. Kidnapping is what can be called a business of its own and has robbed people in society of community savings in the form of ransoms. Northern small companies are afraid to grow and expand under curfew and turmoil; trucking companies are so scared to go down the highway. Many roads are just not safe, as Boko Haram asserted in the northeast, a nightmare in terms of trade logistics. The international crisis group documents that in mineral-endowed regions in the northwest, criminal gangs have taken over transit routes, effectually levying their shadow tariffs on business. Conclusively, many northern Nigerian people who previously had to scrape by in marketplaces or on fields all over the country now find themselves being robbed or otherwise having their livelihoods taken away. The lack of the Man-on-the-Street survey is difficult to locate, although the newspapers and the aid agencies inform the story: crops left unharvested, empty stalls in the market, and inflation of any residual earnings.

What the Authorities Are Doing (and Failing to Do)

The reaction of the Nigerian government has been a combination of crackdowns by the military, declaration of parks an emergency, and sometimes a policy change- critics say that the results have been poor and primarily punitive. However, on the defensive side of the argument, critics of the ongoing war say that the army is spread thin and is engaged in numerous wars on numerous fronts. They are bragging about new special task forces in Zamfara and increased joint task forces around villages. The Buhari and Tinubu regimes have made ransom payment illegal and, in some cases, they boast that they conducted a no-dime operation. President Tinubu declared a national state of emergency on food security in July 2025, an ominous reflection of the severe farming and hunger crisis.

The aim of these moves has not been effective in calming the victims. They are ordinary Nigerians who have constantly lamented that the government has neglected them, as one father in Kaduna put it. Family members of kidnap victims are still using unofficial channels to bail families out. Even untrained civilian protection groups in the northwest have taken up arms to resist field protection themselves.[i] Appeals are mostly ignored until blood is shed: Local appeals to stop kidnapping or massacre often do not even bear much fruit until blood has already been shed. After large kidnappings or massacres, a promise of investigation may be given, but little prosecution of bandits happens.

The problem is that even government action can potentially exacerbate the issue. Campaigns to combat crime can go wrong. Abuja's Durumi camp developments demolished families who ventured outside in September 2023. Human rights groups like Amnesty International have maintained that there was no resettlement plan and that most of the evictions were unlawful. Since some vulnerable persons receive two punishments, some citizens are being punished simultaneously by both city officials and militants. After all, someone has desired to fall prey to extremists, while somewhere another has desired to fall prey to the opulent city authorities.

Conclusion: A Cry from the Margins

The people of northern Nigeria are not just statistics in policy documents or footnotes in breaking news reports. They are farmers who once tilled the land with pride, girls whose futures now hang in the balance, boys who never return from school because the roads have become hunting grounds, and women who mourn in silence after their homes have been raided. These losses are too heavy for any society to carry without breaking. It is with deep pain and unrelenting sorrow that I write these words. How long will the lives of poor Nigerians be treated as expendable? How many villages must be sacked, how many classrooms abandoned, how many women violated, before the state and its partners act with urgency and sincerity?

This is not just a security issue; it is a moral catastrophe. The Nigerian government can no longer afford to offer recycled promises or underfunded military campaigns as solutions. A comprehensive, multi-layered response is required: community-based peacebuilding, reinvestment in rural education and agriculture, psychosocial support for survivors, and the active prosecution of those who perpetrate violence. Civil society organizations, religious institutions, media platforms, and the international community must rise above silence and complicity. We must center the voices of those most affected, support grassroots-led recovery efforts, and hold power to account.

This is a plea not just for justice, but for dignity. Northern Nigerians have endured years of brutality with resilience that should not be mistaken for consent. They deserve protection, they deserve investment, and above all, they deserve to live. The time to act was yesterday. The time to act is now.