THE REPUBLIC OF RANSOM
How Nigeria Was Surrendered To The Gun, And Why 16 January 2027 Is The Day We Take It Back
By Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
There is a sound that now defines the Nigeria of Bola Ahmed Tinubu. It is not the hum of factories. It is not the laughter of children walking to school. It is the wail of a mother at a school gate, clutching a uniform whose owner will not be coming home tonight.
That sound is everywhere. It rises from Kuriga in Kaduna. It rises from Papiri in Niger. It rises from Maga in Kebbi. And now, in a development that should have shaken this government to its foundations, it rises from Esiele and Yawota in Oriire, deep inside Oyo State, in the supposedly secure South West, the President’s own political heartland.
We are no longer a federation. We have become a Republic of Ransom.
A GOVERNMENT THAT PROMISED EVERYTHING AND PROTECTED NOTHING
On 29 May 2023, standing at Eagle Square, this President made a vow to the Nigerian people. He declared that security would be the top priority of his administration, that prosperity and justice could not prevail amid insecurity and violence, and that he would overhaul the entire security architecture of the nation.
Three years later, let us measure the man against his own words.
In the first 12 months of this presidency alone, between May 2023 and May 2024, the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project recorded more than 4,556 Nigerians killed and over 7,086 abducted. That is not a statistic. That is a small city wiped from the earth while a government looked the other way.
The killing did not stop. Independent trackers counted more than 800 lives lost to violence in the first six weeks of 2025 alone, 805 fellow citizens dead in just 42 days, among them soldiers and police officers sworn to protect the rest of us. Whichever way the yearly graph is said to bend, no nation on earth should accept 800 funerals in six weeks as the baseline of ordinary life.
Between 2019 and 2025, the risk firm SBM Intelligence documented roughly 15,000 kidnappings, the overwhelming majority in the northern states. In the single year between July 2024 and June 2025, the North West region accounted for 2,938 of those abductions, more than 60 percent of every reported incident in the entire country.
This is the overhaul we were promised. This is the top priority. A nation bled white while the men paid to defend it issued press statements.
THEY CAME FOR OUR CHILDREN
Every government is finally judged by one cruel test. Can it keep a child safe in a classroom.
This government has failed that test again, and again, and again.
After the abduction of the Chibok girls in 2014, the Nigerian state created the Safe Schools Initiative and committed a reported 145 billion naira to it. The promise was simple. Never again would armed men walk into a school and walk out with our children.
Now hear the record. On 17 November 2025, 25 schoolgirls were seized from Government Girls Comprehensive Secondary School in Maga, Kebbi. On 21 November 2025, bandits raided St Mary’s Catholic School in Papiri, Niger, and carried off 315 schoolchildren and staff. On 6 May 2026, students of the Federal University, Lafia in Nasarawa were taken hostage. And on 15 May 2026, gunmen stormed three schools in the Esiele and Yawota communities of Oyo State and abducted 39 pupils and seven teachers, 46 souls in total, in a region this government swore was beyond the reach of the bandit.
By the count of the national press, in seven mass school raids between March 2024 and May 2026, more than 600 students and teachers have been stolen under this President. Six hundred childhoods, interrupted by the barrel of a gun, under a 145 billion naira programme that exists, it now appears, mostly on paper.
And what was the answer of the government to the agony of Oyo. The children were taken on 15 May. The President’s words did not arrive until 27 May, twelve days later, and the nation’s security chiefs did not reach the forest until 31 May, sixteen days after the raid. When action finally came, it came as an approval to recruit 1,000 forest guards, announced long after the children were already gone. This is not security. This is a fire brigade arriving to photograph the ashes.
WHEN THE RANSOM IS PAID, THE HORROR HAS ONLY BEGUN
Do you imagine that the kidnapper simply holds his captive in some quiet place and waits politely for the money to arrive. Banish that comfort from your mind. The ransom is not the price of the crime. It is merely the receipt.
Human rights investigators have documented it for years. Women and girls seized in these raids are routinely subjected to sexual violence in captivity, forced into so called marriages with their abductors, passed between fighters as though they were spoils of war. This is not rumour. It is the settled, sworn record of what happens in the camps, and it is happening now, while a government that pledged to protect these women looks away.
Among the accounts that have reached the public this year is one that should be read aloud in every chamber of power in this country. A young woman, an ordinary woman with an ordinary job, was seized on her way home from work, on a road that should have carried her safely home.
Her family fell into a frenzy of despair. The kidnappers first demanded 10 million naira, then, after weeks of pleading, lowered it to 7 million. There was no such money in that household. So relatives emptied their savings. Friends gave the little they had. Others took on loans they may spend years repaying. For nearly two months they scraped and begged and borrowed, while their daughter lay somewhere in the bush in the hands of men without mercy.
At last the money was raised. At last she was freed. And here the nation likes to tell itself the story has a happy ending.
It does not.
What she carried home was worse than any wound the eye can see. Day after day in that camp, the women were violated, handed to their captors as property, one assigned to two men, another made to serve three or four. That was not captivity. It was an organised atrocity, and it was visited upon her while a nation that had promised to defend her did nothing.
Two weeks after she walked free, the young woman took her own life. The ransom had bought her body back. Nothing on this earth could buy back what they had stolen from her spirit.
She appears in no official tally. She was released, and so the record files her away as a success, a survivor, a happy ending. The truth is that the bandit killed her in that camp. It simply took two weeks for her to fall.
Now multiply her by the thousands. Behind every cold figure in every report is a face like hers, a mother like hers, a grave that should never have been dug. This is the true currency of the Republic of Ransom. It is not counted in naira. It is counted in daughters.
I SOUNDED THIS ALARM SEVEN YEARS AGO
I do not write of these horrors as a distant observer. I write as a Nigerian who has watched this evil reach into his own family.
Seven years ago, in the Nigerian Tribune of 4 August 2019, I published an essay titled “Nigeria’s illness: Why Buhari must rise to the occasion now.” Read it again today and weep, for every warning in it has come to pass, and worse.
In that essay I told of my own brother, seized along the Akunga Akoko road in Ondo State, between two police checkpoints, on his way to Abuja. His family coughed out 5 million naira for his freedom. A relative travelling with him paid another 5 million. Ten million naira, torn from one family in a single ordeal, between two checkpoints manned by the very state that was meant to protect them.
What my brother carried home was not relief. But some of that evil I did not need him to describe, because I was there for it. During the negotiations, with the phone on speaker beside me, a woman pleading for another captive invoked the name of God, and the abductors laughed down the line and answered that if they knew God they would not be kidnapping. They mocked us as Yoruba people for running to pastors and herbalists, warning that we would only waste our money while they killed our brothers. And to those they held, they paraded the corpses of the victims who had refused to pay, so that all would understand the price of defiance. My brother came home saying he would not wish such men upon his worst enemy.
I wrote also of a young woman ambushed on the eve of a family wedding and carried into the bush, where she was violated by her captors before the police recovered her. And I wrote of what a policewoman whispered to me at the station, while the kidnappers sat there smiling, untroubled, certain. She told me those men were regular customers, that they would soon be released unless I reached someone in higher authority. The criminals knew it. That is why they smiled.
That was 2019. That was under President Muhammadu Buhari, and I begged him then to rise to the occasion. He did not. Seven years and a new President later, the checkpoints still stand, the camps still fill, the women are still broken, and the men with the guns still smile. The disease I named in 2019 was never treated. It was left to fester until it became the Republic of Ransom.
A NATION TAXED BY TERROR
Understand what insecurity has done to the ordinary Nigerian. It has become a regressive tax on the poorest among us.
In the North West, families now sell their farmland to raise ransoms of two million to five million naira for the safe return of a relative. Across the country, analysts estimate that ransom payments worth around 15 million dollars changed hands between 2017 and 2025, money torn from the hands of widows and farmers and handed to criminals.
The damage does not end with the ransom. Insecurity empties the farms, so food production collapses and prices soar. It shuts the markets. It closes the highways. Whole regions have watched their local economies shrink because no man will plant a crop he cannot live to harvest. This is the hidden architecture of the hunger now stalking Nigerian homes. You cannot feed a nation you cannot defend.
THE LIE OF INEVITABILITY
The government and its army of paid apologists want you to believe that this carnage is simply the weather. That Nigeria is too big, too complex, too cursed to be governed safely. That insecurity is a force of nature no leader could tame.
That is the most dangerous lie of all, and history exposes it.
Between 1999 and 2007, under the administration in which Atiku Abubakar served as Vice President, this same nation grew its economy from 58 billion dollars to 270 billion dollars. The apologists will say it was merely the price of crude. They are wrong. That era delivered the negotiated exit from roughly 30 billion dollars of crippling Paris Club debt, a deliberate expansion of the non oil economy, the reforms that built our banking and telecommunications industries, and the strongest institutional discipline this country has seen in a generation. A nation that can multiply its wealth nearly fivefold in eight years is not a nation incapable of governing itself. It is a nation that was, for a season, actually governed.
Insecurity is not destiny. It is a choice. It is the predictable harvest of a leadership that lacks the competence to plan, the will to act, and the courage to lead from the front.
WHAT ATIKU ABUBAKAR WILL DO
Let no apologist insult the public memory. Atiku Abubakar left federal office in 2007, before Boko Haram fired its first major shot, before the word bandit entered our daily vocabulary, before a single Nigerian school had ever been emptied at gunpoint. The Republic of Ransom was not built on his watch. He is the man now offering to dismantle it.
The Narrative Force does not deal in empty consolation. We deal in solutions. And on 16 January 2027, the Nigerian voter will hold in his hand the single most powerful security weapon in this republic, the ballot. A President Atiku Abubakar does not arrive with slogans. He arrives with a blueprint already on the table.
First, he will break the deadly monopoly of the centre. Today a single Inspector General in Abuja is expected to police a herder in Zamfara, a fisherman in Bayelsa and a trader in Aba through the same distant, blinded eye. Atiku has championed state policing for longer than this President has pretended to consider it, and he has assembled constitutional lawyers to draft the restructuring legislation he intends to lay before the National Assembly. Where Tinubu convened a one day talking shop on state policing in 2024 and then did nothing, Atiku offers the bill itself. The men who know the terrain, who speak the language, who can name the stranger in the village, will at last be empowered to defend it.
Second, he will make our security forces see in the dark. His plan is specific. A Counterterrorism Fusion Centre in each of the six geopolitical zones, where intelligence from the military, the police, the Department of State Services, civil defence, immigration, customs, local vigilantes and community leaders is pooled, analysed and acted upon in real time. Beside it, a Terrorism Violence Peer Review Mechanism that compels the state to study every attack and learn from it, because as Atiku has rightly warned, the terrorists learn from every raid while this government repeats the same failure on an endless loop.
Third, he will choke the money. The bandit does not fall from the sky. Somebody funds him, somebody arms him, somebody transports him, somebody shelters him. Atiku has called for the deliberate dismantling of those financial lifelines, the hidden networks that bankroll terror, because no army ever won by chasing foot soldiers while the paymasters slept soundly. And he will drain the recruiting pool itself, for the bandit harvests his men from a vast army of the jobless and the hopeless, and Atiku’s record is the record of a builder of enterprise and a creator of work.
Fourth, he will treat our borders and the flood of illegal weapons crossing them as the open wound they are, the pipeline that arms every raid on every school.
This is not theory. It is a documented plan from a man who has built and governed, set against an administration that has presided over the most violent and frightening period of our recent national life.
THE CHOICE BEFORE US
Nigeria, the question on 16 January 2027 is not partisan. It is existential.
Do we renew a government under which our children are stolen from their classrooms, our daughters are broken in the bush and our farmers are slaughtered in their fields. Or do we hand the mandate to a man with the experience, the plan and the will to give Nigerians back the one thing this administration has stolen from them, the freedom to sleep without fear.
The Republic of Ransom was not decreed by God. It was built by bad leadership, and what bad leadership builds, the ballot can tear down. It will not fall by accident. It will not fall by prayer alone. It will fall on the day Nigerians walk to the polling units in their millions and end it with their thumbs.
So let it be ended. For the young woman who came home and could not stay. For the 46 of Oyo. For the 315 of Papiri. For every grave that should never have been dug. Let the school gates fall silent of weeping. Let the farmer return to his field and the child to her desk. Let 16 January 2027 be remembered as the day Nigeria walked out of the Republic of Ransom and refused, ever again, to live there.
Vote for your safety. Vote for your children. Vote to close the Republic of Ransom for good.
On 16 January 2027, vote Atiku Abubakar.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
5 June 2026
