30 people were killed over the weekend by armed men on motorcycles in raids on six villages in Nigeria’s north, a region regularly hit by criminal violence and clashes between communities, according to the country’s authorities.
However, residents from two of the affected villages dispute the official figures, saying that as many as 36 people were killed in the attacks which they said were reprisals for their refusal to pay protection money to the bandits. Bandits who terrorize the district launch attacks from their hideouts in nearby Tsauna and Kuyan Bana forests which stretch into neighboring Niger, according to local residents who also complain about the lack of cooperation between the governments of Nigeria and Niger that is needed to effectively fight these bandits who have established hideouts in the two forests. Communal violence is just one of many security challenges facing Nigeria’s new President Bola Tinubu who won a February presidential ballot marred by opposition accusations of vote rigging.
Communities across northwest Nigeria have long been forced to pay protection money to avoid being killed or abducted and some are now even forging local peace deals. The violence perpetuated by the bandits in the affected districts has left nearly three million people critically food insecure. The gangs have now become a constant threat also for the residents of Zamfara, a state in northwestern Nigeria, which has become the centre of the kidnap-for-ransom industry worth millions of dollars each year. Just between October and December 2022, 1,090 abductions were recorded, but since many of the victims do not report their kidnapping — and this is likely the case with many other rural victims — the data inevitably undercounts the true extent of the problem. Some of the hardest-hit communities, who pay protection money to the bandits to avoid being raided, have started turning to more formal peace deals, negotiated directly with local warlords. These arrangements sideline a weak state government, but the authorities still give them their quiet consent.