By ABIODUN RAUFU
As Nigeria enters another volatile year, a chilling pattern of violence that has long haunted the country’s north is beginning to cast a shadow over the south. Banditry, mass kidnappings, and jihadist insurgency, which were once concentrated in the northwest and the Lake Chad basin and regarded as a northern problem, are demonstrating signs of geographic expansion southward. Security analysts, human-rights monitors, and community leaders warn that extremist groups are probing and, in some places, are already embedded in the deep forest of southern states, fuelling fears that a national security emergency could be looming.
For more than a decade, northern Nigeria has been grappling with two intersecting threats. In the northeast, Boko Haram and its splinter, the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), have waged an insurgency that has displaced millions and turned the once bubbling northeastern Nigeria into a virtual wasteland. In the northwest and parts of the middle belt, loosely organized “bandit” gangs have carried out raids, mass kidnappings, and cattle rustling, often exploiting rural grievance, poverty, and porous forested terrain. The outgoing 2025 has seen an intensity never witnessed before. The death tolls have sharply increased, and the groups have become more mobile, confident, and daring. All the signs of a southern invasion are apparent, and this is not to create panic but to push the federal government to give this unprecedented security challenge all the attention it deserves. There is no doubt that the prevailing conditions make southward movement by the jihadists and bandits both possible and likely.
Signs of probing southward incursion are already surfacing. Community leaders and local media in states like Kwara, Oyo, Ondo, Ekiti, and parts of Edo and Delta have reported the presence of armed outsiders operating from forest hideouts, mounting night raids, and staging kidnappings that resemble tactics long used by northwest bandits. Traditional authorities and security chiefs have warned that networks of kidnappers are testing soft targets, schools, highways, and isolated communities, far from their historical bases.
Why the South? There are practical incentives. Southern Nigeria houses denser population centers, wealthier urban and heavily urbanized communities that facilitate a ransom economy. For the bandits and terrorists facing increasing military pressure in the north, moving toward the less-contested terrain of southern Nigeria not only actualizes their expansionist dream but also opens new revenue streams—kidnapping-for-ransom and illegal mining.
The human cost of this southward drift is already visible. National human-rights organizations recorded a grim escalation in fatalities during the first half of 2025, with deaths attributed to bandits and terrorists exceeding totals from the previous year. High-profile abductions still occur in the north, but spillover incidents and arrests of suspected kidnappers in the southern part of the country have stirred panic. A recent case in Edo State, where a lynch mob killed people suspected of being kidnappers after intercepting a vehicle full of men from the north, dramatizes how communal fear can spiral into extra-judicial violence and deepen regional mistrust.
Security officials argue that not all actors in the north are moving south; indeed, insurgent groups are deeply embedded in local dynamics, and some remain focused on territorial control and clashes with rival factions. Yet military setbacks in some northern strongholds, internecine fighting between jihadist factions, are creating both incentives and opportunities for these criminal networks to diversify their operations nationwide.
The implications for large-scale disruption of law and order are staggering. Southern states are less accustomed to prolonged rural insecurity on the scale experienced in the northwest. Police and military structures there are often oriented to urban crime-fighting and oil-sector protection; rural early-warning networks, vigilante groups, and community defense arrangements are uneven. If bandits or jihadists establish logistics bases in southern forests, which appear to be ongoing, the result could be calamitous: Rising fear will prompt the creation of community self-help vigilante responses, which can escalate into ethnic profiling and mob violence, eroding trust in the rule of law and triggering retaliatory attacks across the nation, including the displacement of millions of people running away from the kill zone.
As the bandits and terrorists demonstrate greater mobility and adaptability, Nigeria’s peace will increasingly depend on coordinated political will, smarter security strategy, and programmes that address the economic and social roots of violence across the country
So, what can be done? Or more appropriately, what needs to be done? It would appear that the major obstacle to dealing with the bandits and terrorists is a lack of political will, including the need to weed out spies in the military who are sabotaging military operations against the criminals. Security experts also suggest a multi-pronged strategy. First, intelligence-driven security operations must be tailored to blocking transit corridors and dismantling smuggling networks that facilitate mobility between regions.
Secondly, a renewed emphasis on protecting schools and highways, through better-equipped police, rapid response units, and coordinated military support, could blunt kidnap-for-ransom business models and prevent incidents such as the recent abduction of 25 schoolgirls from the Government Girls Comprehensive Secondary School in Maga, Kebbi State.
Thirdly, the underlying socio-economic factors that facilitate the recruitment of members must be addressed. Investment in social services and livelihoods in frontier communities would reduce the pool of recruits drawn into banditry. Furthermore, measures to prevent communal vigilantism, through better community policing, the rule of law, and public information campaigns, are necessary to prevent the looming south-north tensions from hardening into ethnic conflict.
The point, however, must be unequivocally made. If southern Nigeria is to avoid becoming enmeshed in a national security crisis, the window for preventive action is now. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and his cabinet must treat the changing geography of violence as a national challenge into which it is spiraling, and marshal resources accordingly, including humbly seeking international assistance. As it were, it may not be a bad idea to seek Donald Trump’s help. Knowing Trump, he’ll probably demand an arm and a leg for helping. That is still better than the impending disaster. Otherwise, the violent patterns that have devastated towns and farms in the north may soon become the new normal in communities and cities across the south, forcing millions to live with the menace of violence and undermining Nigeria’s already fragile stability.
As the bandits and terrorists demonstrate greater mobility and adaptability, Nigeria’s peace will increasingly depend on coordinated political will, smarter security strategy, and programmes that address the economic and social roots of violence across the country. The choice for the president and his government is unambiguous. Act decisively to halt the spread or watch a national catastrophe of unimaginable proportions unfold.
*Raufu, former Editor of Nigerian Tribune and ex-Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief of National Mirror Newspapers, is an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at Southern University and A&M College, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in the United States of America.
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