Nigeria's kidnapping-for-ransom crisis has spiraled to new extremes, with armed gangs and militants collecting roughly $5.8 million in confirmed ransom payments over the past year while abducting nearly 8,000 people, according to a new report from Lagos-based security consultancy SBM Intelligence.

The study, covering July 2025 through June 2026, tracked 7,825 kidnapping victims — a 66% jump from the previous 12 months — and at least 1,142 people killed in related violence. Confirmed ransom payments more than tripled year-on-year to 7.78 billion naira, roughly $5.79 million, a figure researchers stressed is almost certainly an undercount since many families quietly pay and never report it, according to the Associated Press.

A tactic that keeps paying off

The report splits the crisis into two fronts. In Nigeria's northwest and north-central regions, so-called "bandits" — largely former herders who took up arms amid land disputes with farming communities — carry out near-daily raids on villages, farms and highways. In the northeast, Boko Haram militants collected roughly 90% of all recorded ransom money, driven almost entirely by two mass abductions of more than 300 people each, part of a resurgence in school kidnappings that researchers trace back to a November attack in Papiri that seized 315 pupils and staff, as detailed by Japan Today, citing Reuters.

"For every ransom that is paid for a kidnapping incident, you are simply birthing another kidnapping incident," said Kehinde Giwa, a security analyst at SBM Intelligence, who estimated roughly 21 kidnapping incidents now occur across Nigeria every day. "Nigeria is not winning the war."

The human cost behind the statistics is stark. The Associated Press spoke to Abba Bukar, a resident of Maiduguri who was seized near a university in June and held for nearly four weeks. His family sold property and borrowed heavily to raise roughly 2 million naira — about $1,500 — for his release, a debt Bukar says has left the household financially crippled months later.

Nigerian authorities have leaned more heavily on the military in response, and the United States has quietly stepped up its own involvement, sending additional troops and surveillance drones to assist Nigerian forces against the militant and bandit networks. President Bola Tinubu has repeatedly pledged to crush the insecurity crisis, but analysts say the numbers in the SBM report show the opposite trend, with kidnapping now so normalized in parts of the country that it functions as a parallel economy.

Security is expected to be a defining issue heading into Nigeria's next elections, with opposition figures already citing the ransom figures as evidence the government's strategy isn't working. For now, aid groups warn the ripple effects — interrupted schooling, abandoned farmland, and fraying trust in local security forces — are likely to keep compounding as long as ransom payments keep flowing.