From hostage-taking in the Niger Delta to mass school abductions, highway attacks and multimillion-naira ransom demands, kidnapping has evolved into one of Nigeria’s most persistent and profitable security threats. A recent case in Abuja, in which police allege two women used hijab as a disguise while abducting children, shows how far the crime has adapted.
The arrest of two women accused of abducting a four-year-old girl in Abuja has again drawn attention to a disturbing reality: kidnapping in Nigeria is no longer confined to particular regions, social classes or even familiar methods of operation.
The suspects, identified by the Federal Capital Territory Police Command as Rose Daniel and Blessing John, were arrested in Kuje on 27 August while allegedly attempting to escape with four-year-old Ummi Mariam Abdullah. Police said a member of the community raised the alarm, allowing officers to rescue the child and arrest the women.
More disturbing for Muslim communities was the police allegation that the suspects had used hijab as part of their method of approaching and abducting children. FCT police spokesperson SP Josephine Adeh reportedly said one of the suspects was Christian but wore hijab while targeting children sent on errands, using the garment to conceal both herself and the child. The investigation into the latest case remains ongoing.
The significance of the allegation goes beyond the clothing itself. If established, it illustrates how criminals can exploit the trust associated with religious and cultural familiarity. A garment associated with Muslim modesty and identity would, in such circumstances, have been deliberately appropriated as camouflage for a criminal act.
But the Kuje case also provides an entry point into a much bigger question: how did kidnapping evolve from a crime concentrated in particular areas into a national criminal economy affecting farmers, schoolchildren, travellers, businessmen and entire communities?
From militancy to ransom
Kidnapping existed in Nigeria long before the present crisis, but the foundations of the modern ransom economy became especially visible in the Niger Delta during the late 1990s and 2000s.
Armed and militant groups operating in the oil-producing region began abducting expatriate oil workers amid wider struggles over environmental degradation, poverty, political marginalisation and control of the region’s enormous petroleum wealth.
Hostage-taking initially had a strong political dimension. Foreign workers and oil infrastructure represented pressure points through which militants could draw attention to grievances against both the Nigerian state and multinational oil companies.
But ransom changed the economics of kidnapping.
As large payments were made for the release of hostages, criminals increasingly recognised that abduction could generate substantial income. The pool of victims expanded beyond expatriates to wealthy Nigerians, politicians, businesspeople and members of their families.
Research into organised crime in the Niger Delta has documented this transition from politically motivated hostage-taking towards kidnapping for ransom and other forms of organised criminality.
The federal government’s 2009 amnesty programme helped reduce the intensity of militancy in the Niger Delta, but kidnapping did not disappear. The knowledge, networks and financial incentives that had developed around hostage-taking proved far harder to dismantle.
The Evans era
Few cases exposed the sophistication and profitability of Nigeria’s kidnapping industry as dramatically as that of Chukwudumeme Onwuamadike, popularly known as Evans.
Evans did not create Nigeria’s kidnapping economy, but his arrest in Lagos in June 2017 demonstrated how far the business had evolved.
Police accused his network of targeting wealthy businessmen and holding victims while large ransoms were negotiated. Reporting at the time described properties used to detain captives for days, weeks or even months while their families attempted to secure their release.
His case showed that kidnapping was no longer simply a weapon wielded by militants in remote creeks. It could operate as a sophisticated criminal enterprise in one of Africa’s largest cities, supported by surveillance of potential victims, armed gangs, safe houses and organised ransom negotiations.
In February 2022, a Lagos High Court sentenced Evans and two co-defendants to life imprisonment after convicting them of conspiracy and the kidnapping of businessman Donatus Dunu. Later that year, another court sentenced Evans to 21 years in a separate kidnapping case.
By then, however, kidnapping had already spread far beyond the criminal networks that made Evans notorious.
The crisis moves north
In northern Nigeria, kidnapping acquired another dimension through insurgency and armed banditry.
Boko Haram’s abduction of the Chibok schoolgirls in 2014 became one of the most internationally recognised examples, demonstrating how kidnapping could be used for propaganda, coercion and leverage within an insurgency.
In the North-West and parts of the North-Central region, however, armed groups increasingly developed kidnapping for ransom into an economy of its own.
Farmers, traders, students, villagers and people travelling along highways became targets. Mass abductions meant that wealth was no longer necessarily a prerequisite for being kidnapped. Criminal groups could instead seize large numbers of ordinary people and demand whatever their families and communities were able to raise.
The Institute for Security Studies describes kidnapping for ransom as one of Nigeria’s most pervasive security threats, noting that a phenomenon once concentrated in the Niger Delta has spread across the country and become embedded within the conflict economies of northern and central Nigeria.
The victim profile had fundamentally changed.
Ordinary Nigerians had become part of the ransom economy.
The business of abduction The scale of that economy is now staggering.
According to SBM Intelligence’s August 2026 report, The Capture of Nigeria’s Kidnap Economy, around 7,825 people were abducted between July 2025 and June 2026, with at least ₦7.78 billion paid in ransom during the period.
Premium Times, citing the report, recorded 1,411 kidnapping incidents and noted that actual ransom payments had more than tripled from the previous reporting period, despite a fall in the total amount initially demanded by kidnappers.
Behind those numbers are thousands of families forced into desperate negotiations. Property is sold, savings depleted, businesses disrupted and money borrowed as relatives attempt to bring loved ones home.
The consequences extend far beyond the individual victim.
Fear of kidnapping changes how communities live. Farmers become reluctant to work distant fields. Travellers avoid particular highways. Parents fear sending their children to school. Traders alter routes and operating hours, while families restrict movement after dark.
Kidnapping therefore extracts far more than ransom. It weakens economic life and undermines the basic sense of security upon which functioning communities depend.
A threat that keeps adapting
The allegations surrounding the Abuja case demonstrate another defining characteristic of Nigeria’s kidnapping crisis: its ability to adapt.
From armed militants kidnapping foreign oil workers in the Niger Delta, to organised gangs targeting wealthy businessmen, insurgents seizing schoolchildren and bandits abducting villagers and travellers, the methods and victims have repeatedly changed.
If the police allegation that hijab was used to disguise child abductors is established, it would represent yet another adaptation — the exploitation of religious familiarity and community trust.
Nigeria’s response therefore cannot end with rescuing individual victims or arresting individual kidnappers.
Security agencies must disrupt the wider structures that make kidnapping profitable: the intelligence networks identifying victims, weapons supply chains, safe houses, ransom negotiators, financial channels and criminal networks capable of transporting abductees across large distances.
Rural security and community-based intelligence are equally important. In areas where the state is barely visible, criminal groups thrive not merely because they possess weapons, but because they can operate, move captives and collect money with limited resistance.
Nigeria’s kidnapping crisis is ultimately a story of criminal adaptation — and of what happens when insecurity becomes profitable.
It has moved from the oil-producing creeks of the Niger Delta into major cities, insurgency-affected communities, forests, highways, farms, schools and residential neighbourhoods.
The rescue of a four-year-old girl in Kuje is therefore more than an isolated police case. It is another warning that Nigeria’s kidnapping economy continues to evolve.
Until the networks that sustain it are dismantled and the financial rewards that fuel it are reduced, no community — wealthy or poor, rural or urban, Muslim or Christian — can comfortably assume that it lies beyond the reach of those who have turned human beings into commodities for ransom.
