Disrupting the strategic evolution of violence in north-west Nigeria

BY LEKAN OLAYIWOLA

North-west Nigeria’s violence is no longer random or reactive. It has evolved into a strategic system of destabilisation. Tackling it requires more than security deployments; it demands a structural response that understands its logic, geography, and political economy.

What was once dismissed as “banditry” has now matured into a complex web of criminal enterprise, ideological influence, and governance collapse. To respond effectively, Nigeria must see the Northwest not only as a zone of insecurity but as a mirror reflecting deeper fractures in how power, dignity, and protection are distributed.

The New Logic of Violence

According to the Soufan Centre, armed groups in north-western Nigeria are no longer just rural bandits. They operate at the intersection of organised crime, jihadist networks, and local political grievances. Groups once thought to be isolated now coordinate across states, staging larger raids, ambushing security patrols, and enforcing “tolls” on trade routes.

The 2025 Nextier Security and Conflict Outlook identifies entities like the Lakurawa faction near the Sokoto–Niger border operating with no fixed ideology but with an advanced economic structure. Violence has become a decentralised enterprise, self-financing and self-sustaining. Ransom, illegal mining, and cattle rustling now provide the revenue base that replaces external ideological funding.

Attacks are no longer impulsive village raids. They are planned, timed, and economically motivated. These assaults now target security patrols, markets, and transport corridors, symbols of state reach and civilian normalcy. The frequency of mass abductions — once seasonal — has become year-round and profit-oriented.

The Double Ominous Silences

In earlier years, groups like ISWAP or Ansaru often claimed responsibility for attacks. In 2025, they are silent. This anonymity could be strategic, a deliberate choice to avoid retaliation or detection. It also suggests fragmentation into smaller, agile cells, sometimes embedded in local power networks. This “nameless insurgency” creates uncertainty — making accountability, negotiation, or targeted deterrence nearly impossible.

Perhaps the most dangerous pattern is the silence from leadership. When officials attend events linked to militia figures, or when they issue vague statements after massacres, it sends a clear message: impunity is alive. People are dying, and the system is either unwilling or unable to act decisively.

Many local governments in Zamfara, Katsina, Kebbi, and Sokoto remain in limbo. Schools, clinics, and security posts are absent. In some LGAs, community leaders report months without any government presence. The forests of Dumburum, Kamuku, and Sububu function as informal administrative zones, where armed actors regulate movement, trade, and dispute resolution.

Why This Evolution Matters

Understanding this transformation determines whether Nigeria’s next strategy will heal or merely postpone collapse. Once violence becomes an economic system, purely militarised responses lose efficacy. Clearing operations cannot dismantle the financial circuits that sustain armed groups.

As DIIS Research shows, ransom payments, illegal mining, and cattle markets now fund and recycle violence. To end it, Nigeria must treat these economies as seriously as terrorism financing, tracing assets, freezing accounts, and regulating mining concessions.

When attacks target the state, legitimacy is at stake. The growing pattern of attacks on security forces, roads, and trade infrastructure shows that violence is no longer “above the law” but about the law. It challenges who rules — the government or the gunman. Failure to respond decisively creates zones of alternative governance, where fear replaces law and survival replaces citizenship.

As trust in the state decays, people rely on self-defence militias, vigilantes, and prayer camps. Citizens no longer expect protection. This erosion of legitimacy cannot be solved by force alone. It requires rebuilding the belief that the state sees, values, and will not forsake its people.

Mapping the Conflict’s Intelligence

The violence is geographically intelligent. Attacks cluster along roads that connect trade and transit, particularly those leading from Gusau to Zaria, Kaura Namoda to Jibia, and Sokoto to Illela. These corridors allow both economic capture and political signalling.

The Nextier report shows that newer flashpoints correspond with the withdrawal of local administrations or shutdown of public services. When a clinic or school closes, armed actors fill the vacuum, often within weeks.

Thus, governance presence is not symbolic, but strategic infrastructure. Restoring schools, markets, and health posts is as vital as deploying troops.

The Political Economy of Insecurity

Violence in the north-west has become a business model of survival and control. Farmers are extorted for access to land, traders pay passage taxes to move goods through certain routes, and women pay ransom for abducted relatives or safety for their children.

In return, the state spends heavily on kinetic operations but invests little in institutional resilience. Local governments, constitutionally responsible for grassroots security, receive less than 5% of national allocations. This imbalance ensures that violence remains profitable while peace remains underfunded

Rethinking the Response from Reaction to Reconstruction

Decentralise Security Architecture: Empower LGAs to manage security funds, gather intelligence, and coordinate with local communities. Without local control, the national strategy remains blind.

Map Violence as Data: Use geospatial and ethnographic mapping to understand not just attacks, but rhythms of vulnerability — markets, migration routes, displaced populations.

Disrupt Illicit Economies: Integrate financial intelligence into counterinsurgency. Track ransom flows, regulate mining, and monitor cattle markets for suspicious activity.

Rebuild Civic Trust: Launch trauma recovery programmes, rebuild schools and clinics, and create community feedback loops. Visibility is protection.

Demand Accountability: Investigate links between officials and militia networks. Impunity is oxygen for violence; transparency is its antidote.

Beyond Security, Towards Structural Peace

The killings in north-west Nigeria have evolved, and the cost of ignoring that evolution is national disintegration. Violence today is smarter, more connected, and more corrosive. It feeds on silence, thrives on distrust, and multiplies where governance withdraws. To fight last year’s war is to lose this year’s.

Nigeria cannot bomb its way to peace. The Northwest needs engaged governance, not just a troop surge. Peace built on empathy and dignity begins by recognising that security is not the absence of violence but the presence of justice. When citizens see that their suffering matters, and that their government listens, the market for terror collapses.

Reconstruction, reconciliation, and reinvestment (RRR) must move together. The task is not only to end violence, but to restore meaning to the idea of belonging. The question is not whether the violence will continue, but whether Nigeria will adapt and whether empathy, intelligence, and accountability can finally replace denial.

Lekan Olayiwola is a peace & conflict researcher/policy analyst. He can be reached via [email protected]