Chapter 2: The Ungoverned Spaces: Banditry and the Economics of Chaos

The Silence

The silence in Zamfara's rural communities speaks louder than the gunfire that precedes it. It is the silence of the Jangebe market on a Tuesday afternoon, when traders once sold millet and dried pepper under straw awnings. It is the silence of the primary school in Kaya, where the blackboard still carries the date from the last day a teacher stood before pupils—12 March 2021—and no one has dared erase it. It is the silence of a woman in Maradun who still sets an extra plate at dinner for a husband kidnapped nineteen months ago, because giving up hope feels like killing him herself.

In Gusau, the state capital, the government functions. Commissioners hold meetings. The governor commissions projects. Federal allocations arrive and are disbursed. But two hours south on laterite roads that crumble at the edges, the state ends. Not weakens. Ends. There are no police stations with working vehicles, no courts with sitting judges, no hospitals with night-duty nurses. The Local Government Area secretariats still stand, their gates padlocked, their roofs shedding corrugated iron like molting skin. The civil servants who once collected taxes and registered births have either fled to Kaduna or become tax collectors for men on motorcycles carrying Type 56 rifles. The police station in Tsafe has twelve officers on the payroll, but only three reported for duty in November 2023. The others had either transferred unofficially to Gusau or simply stopped coming, their salaries eaten by superiors who never removed them from the roster.

I arrived in Tsafe in the dry season of 2023, when the harmattan dust turns every horizon the colour of old ash. The town's motor park, which once hosted fifty lorries a day carrying groundnuts to Kano, now hosted seven. The drivers sat on their bonnets, playing draughts with bottle caps because no one had fuel to run the engines for air conditioning. A man named Haruna, who had driven the Gusau-Tsafe route for eighteen years, told me the last time he carried a full load was December 2021. “Before,” he said, “the problem was bad roads. Now the problem is no roads. The bandits control the bypasses. The military controls the checkpoints. The traveller controls nothing.”

The schools tell the same story with different numbers. Before 2019, Zamfara had approximately 1,200 functional primary schools across its fourteen LGAs. By 2023, independent monitors estimated that fewer than 400 remained open in rural areas, and most of those operated with reduced hours and no security guarantees. Teachers who stayed did so at personal risk. In August 2022, gunmen attacked the Federal Government College in Birnin Yauri, abducting over eighty students and staff. The attack made national headlines, but the quieter attrition mattered more: the daily decision of a parent not to send a child to school, the weekly resignation of a teacher who could no longer justify the danger for a salary that arrived three months late. An entire generation in rural Zamfara is being educated not in classrooms but in the arithmetic of survival.

Zamfara is not unique in Nigeria for having violence. What makes it the defining case study of this book is the completeness of the state's disappearance. Jos, which the last chapter explored, suffers from a state that is present but paralysed—too many soldiers, too little protection, politics substituting for policing. Zamfara suffers from the opposite: a state that has simply left, creating a vacuum that other forms of power rush to fill. Nigeria does not have a security problem. It has a protection problem. Every armed group—from Boko Haram to pipeline vandals to ethnic militias—is speaking the same sentence to the same deaf state, in the only language the state has taught them to use: force. In Zamfara, that language has become the only tongue spoken.

The Business of Fear

To understand what has replaced the state, follow the money. The armed groups operating in Zamfara, Katsina, Sokoto, and Kebbi are not spontaneous eruptions of ethnic hatred or climate desperation, though both play their parts. They are businesses. They have revenue targets, payrolls, supply chains, and market expansion strategies. The product they sell is survival—the victim's survival, purchased at a price set by men with automatic weapons and excellent intelligence on how much a farming family can borrow from relatives in Lagos.

SBM Intelligence, a Lagos-based geopolitical risk consultancy, spent three years tracking ransom payments across the Northwest. Their finding: between 2021 and 2023, documented ransom payments totalled N4.8 billion. This is not an estimate of bandit wealth. It is a floor. SBM tracked only payments they could verify through court records, family interviews, and leaked negotiation transcripts. The actual figure is certainly higher, but SBM refused to speculate beyond what their notebooks could prove. The N4.8 billion figure is the revenue line of a criminal enterprise that operates with more fiscal discipline than the Zamfara State Ministry of Finance.

The business model has matured since the early days of cattle rustling in the Rugu Forest. A typical kidnapping operation now follows a protocol. Reconnaissance teams—often local youths paid in advance—identify targets with liquid assets: landowners, traders, the adult sons of successful farmers. The assault team strikes at dawn, usually on market days when the target's location is predictable. The hostage is moved across local government boundaries within hours, exploiting the fact that Nigerian security agencies rarely share jurisdiction. Negotiation is conducted through intermediaries, often traders or motorcycle taxi riders who have been drawn into the network. The ransom is delivered in cash, usually old naira notes, at designated drop points. The hostage is released at a second location, minus any vehicle or phone that might contain tracking data. The entire cycle, from abduction to release, averages eleven days.

Where does the money go? Some of it leaves Nigeria in cash, carried across the Niger border by couriers who pose as traders. Some of it is reinvested in the enterprise: new motorcycles, new rifles, new recruits. But a surprising amount stays local. Commanders fund weddings, pay medical bills, and sponsor religious festivals in communities where the government has not built a clinic in twenty years. This is not charity. It is customer retention. The bandits understand what the state has forgotten: protection is a service, and services require relationship maintenance. A commander who sponsors a community's Sallah celebration buys more than goodwill. He buys intelligence, silence, and the next generation of informants.

The supply chain is equally professional. Ammunition enters Zamfara through routes that predate the Nigerian state—caravan trails across the Niger border that once carried salt and now carry 7.62mm rounds. The Nigeria Customs Service seized 3,000 rounds at Jibia in 2023, a haul that made headlines in Katsina but represented perhaps a single week's consumption for the largest groups. The intermediaries who move the rounds are the same traders who move smuggled petrol and rice. They do not care about the cargo. They care about the margin.

The economics are brutally rational. In 2019, the average ransom demand in Zamfara was N1 million. By 2023, it had risen to N10 million. SBM attributes this not to greed alone but to market segmentation: the bandits have learned to price-discriminate based on the victim's known assets. A village headman pays less than a contractor who has built three houses in Gusau. The inflation in ransom prices mirrors the inflation in everything else, but with one crucial difference. While the naira depreciates against the dollar in Lagos banking halls, it appreciates against human life in Zamfara's bush camps. A life is worth exactly what the market will bear, and the market has learned that Nigerians will sell land, borrow from cooperatives, and empty pension accounts to buy back their children.

The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), compiled by the African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD) and published on 8 May 2024, recorded 2,353 fatalities nationwide from 1,410 conflict events in the first quarter of 2024 alone. Zamfara, Katsina, and Sokoto accounted for a significant share of violence-against-civilians events. Behind each of those 2,353 deaths is a family that buried someone, a farm that lost its labour, a debt incurred for a funeral, a child pulled from school because the school fees died with the breadwinner. Statistics are abstractions until you sit in the courtyard of a grieving family and watch them divide a deceased man's shoes among his brothers because there is nothing else left to inherit.

The Other Side of the Gun

The dominant narrative of Zamfara's crisis divides the world into bandits and victims, predators and prey. Dr. Murtala Rufai, a historian at Usmanu Danfodiyo University in Sokoto, has spent a decade living among Fulani pastoralist communities in the Northwest, and he says this narrative is not wrong but dangerously incomplete. “I am a bandit,” he titled his 2021 article in African Affairs, quoting a young Fulani man who had taken up arms not out of bloodlust but out of a calculus Rufai calls “protective predation.”

Rufai's argument, grounded in oral histories collected across Zamfara and neighbouring states, is that many of the men labelled “bandits” by the Nigerian press were, a generation ago, herders whose fathers grazed cattle from Borno to Mali along routes older than the Nigeria-Benin border. The droughts of the 1970s and 1980s reduced those routes. The expansion of farmland, often sponsored by politically connected urban elites who acquired title documents the herders could not read, fenced off what remained. The state's response to herder-farmer disputes was not mediation but criminalisation: herders became “trespassers” the moment their cattle crossed an invisible line on a map drawn in a land registry office they had never entered.

The young men who drifted into the Rugu Forest in the early 2010s were not, in Rufai's account, born criminals. They were born into a livelihood that the Nigerian state had declared obsolete without offering a replacement. Some tried farming and failed because they had no capital for fertiliser. Some tried trading and were robbed at checkpoints by the same police who would later label them bandits. Some watched their fathers murdered in disputes over water access that the local government council refused to adjudicate. The forest offered what the state withheld: protection, employment, and a hierarchy where skill with a rifle mattered more than ethnic origin or educational certificate.

In 2019, Rufai interviewed a nineteen-year-old named Ibrahim in a settlement outside Shinkafi. Ibrahim had joined a bandit group after his family's herd of forty cattle was stolen by a rival faction. The police demanded N50,000 to investigate. His father, a man of sixty who had never held more than N5,000 in cash, could not pay. The case was filed and forgotten. Ibrahim spent six months searching for the cattle alone, armed with a machete. When he found them, they were already sold across the border. He returned to Shinkafi, walked into the Rugu Forest, and offered his services to the first commander who would take him. “I did not go to the forest to become rich,” he told Rufai. “I went to the forest so that next time, I would be the one they fear.”

This is not an apology for kidnapping. Rufai is explicit that the criminal enterprises now operating in the Northwest have mutated far beyond their pastoralist origins. The commanders who negotiate million-naira ransoms via WhatsApp are not misunderstood shepherds. They are warlords running protection rackets. But Rufai insists that labelling them “bandits”—a term that strips away history, grievance, and political context—precludes the only solutions that might work. “You cannot shoot an economy,” he told me in Sokoto in late 2023. “You can only replace it with a better one. And no one in Abuja is offering these young men a better one.”

The Zamfara State government has oscillated between two failed strategies. Governor Bello Matawalle's administration, beginning in 2019, pursued negotiation: amnesty declarations, cash payments to bandit leaders, and promises of grazing land that never materialised. The military response, intensified in 2021 and 2022, deployed fighter jets and ground troops to the Rugu Forest. Both approaches failed. Negotiation rewarded the most violent actors with political access. Military operations killed some commanders but dispersed others into neighbouring states, spreading the crisis rather than containing it. Neither approach addressed the foundational fact that Rufai documents: a generation of young men with no legitimate livelihood, no state protection, and no stake in the formal economy will find employment wherever it is offered.

Two Villages, Two Choices

In January 2022, two villages in Maru LGA faced the same ultimatum. A bandit group operating from the eastern edge of the Rugu Forest sent messengers—boys on motorcycles, unarmed but known to the community—demanding N5 million in “protection fees” from each village. The money was to be delivered within fourteen days. Refusal, the message implied, would be answered with an attack on market day, when the most people would be gathered.

The village of Danjibga negotiated. The village head, Alhaji Ibrahim Tukur, convened a meeting of every household. They sold three lorries, pooled their savings, and raised N4.2 million. An intermediary—a former cattle trader who now ran a provisions store in Gusau—delivered the cash. The bandits accepted the shortfall and issued a handwritten receipt. For eight months, Danjibga was left alone. Children returned to the primary school. Farmers planted sorghum. Then, in September 2022, a new commander took over the territory. He announced that the previous arrangement was void. The village would need to pay N8 million, retroactive to July. They could not raise it. In October, eight men were kidnapped from their farms. The ransom demands totalled N12 million. Danjibga emptied itself. By December, three-quarters of the households had relocated to Gusau, where they slept in a primary school compound and competed with other IDPs for water from a single borehole. Alhaji Tukur stayed behind with four elders. He was killed in February 2023, shot through the window of his parlour while eating dinner. No one claimed responsibility. No one investigated.

The village of Kanoma resisted. The young men organised night patrols, armed with Dane guns and farm tools. They dug trenches across the access roads. They sent runners to the military base in Anka, thirty kilometres away, requesting weapons or at least ammunition. The soldiers never came. What came instead was a Tuesday morning in March 2022, when bandits on motorcycles circled the village and fired into the air for twenty minutes. No one was killed, but the message was surgical. The patrols stopped. The trenches were filled in by the next rains. Kanoma did not empty like Danjibga. Its people stayed, but they stopped farming beyond a one-kilometre radius of the village centre. They planted only what they could harvest quickly and carry home at the first sound of engines. Their diet shrank. Their children's growth stunted. The village survived, but survival became the only crop they grew.

Neither choice was right. Neither was wrong. They were simply the only options available in a landscape where the state had withdrawn every other card from the deck. The people of Danjibga and Kanoma were not participants in a security strategy. They were subjects of an economics experiment they had not designed, conducted by men who measured outcomes in naira and fear.

The Terror Connection

In early 2025, the nature of the Zamfara crisis changed in ways that make Rufai's historical analysis more urgent and more frightening. Operation Savannah Shield, launched by the Nigerian military in February 2025, was the first major operation to explicitly target the cross-regional supply corridor linking Sahelian terror groups to Nigerian bandit networks. The operation ranged from Kwara to Nasarawa, but its intelligence targets were in the Northwest, where the boundary between criminal enterprise and ideological violence had begun to dissolve.

DefenceWeb, reporting on 23 April 2026, confirmed what intelligence analysts had suspected for months: Boko Haram has sent advisors to work with Lakurawa, a militant group operating in northwest Nigeria. Lakurawa fighters had already launched attacks in Benin in December 2024 and Niger in January 2025. The collaboration represents a strategic pivot. For years, Boko Haram and its ISWAP offshoot were consumed by factional fighting in the Northeast. Now, with the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) weakened by Niger's withdrawal in 2023 and 2024, they are exporting expertise to the Northwest. The men who perfected suicide bombing in Maiduguri are teaching kidnapping syndicates in Zamfara how to coordinate multi-village assaults, how to use encrypted communications, and how to turn ransom revenue into military procurement.

The implications extend beyond tactics. Boko Haram's advisory relationship with Lakurawa signals a shift in the geography of Nigerian terror. For a decade, the Lake Chad Basin was the centre of gravity. Now, with the Sahelian states of Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso having withdrawn from ECOWAS in 2024, Nigeria's northern flank is exposed. The Multinational Joint Task Force, which once coordinated counterterrorism across the Lake Chad Basin, has been gutted by Niger's departure. Nigeria now faces a regional security architecture in ruins at the precise moment when its internal armed groups are reaching outward for alliances. Bandits who once operated purely for profit now have access to ideological framing, foreign fighter networks, and the kind of operational security that makes military intelligence nearly impossible. The forest camps are no longer just hideouts. They are training grounds.

This is not yet an alliance. The bandits of the Rugu Forest remain primarily profit-driven. They have not sworn bay’at to Abu Bakr Shekau's successors or adopted Salafi-jihadi ideology. But the distinction between “terrorist” and “bandit” has never been a bright line in Nigeria. It is a spectrum, and the Northwest is sliding toward the darker end. When a group that kidnaps for money begins receiving tactical advice from a group that kidnaps for ideology, the former gains capacity and the latter gains revenue. Both gain something else: legitimacy. A criminal gang that can claim ties to Boko Haram becomes harder to negotiate with and harder to defeat, because it can frame its violence as political rather than merely predatory.

Operation Savannah Shield has had limited public results. The Nigerian military claims to have destroyed several camps and killed “significant numbers” of fighters, but no independent verification is available. No updated security assessment has been published by the Defence Headquarters since the operation's launch—itself a measure of institutional opacity. What is visible is the continued displacement. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre estimates that over 500,000 people have been displaced in the Northwest since 2020, though precise figures are impossible to verify because the National Commission for Refugees, Migrants and Internally Displaced Persons has not conducted a comprehensive survey since 2021.

The Hunger Calculus

There is a third party in every ransom negotiation, though its name is never spoken: the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). In May 2024, the NBS Consumer Price Index recorded national inflation at 33.95%, with food inflation at 40.53%. These are not abstract percentages. They are the reason a farmer in Anka LGA, whose millet harvest might have fetched N80,000 in 2022, received N120,000 in 2024 while the price of a bag of fertiliser climbed from N25,000 to N47,000. The arithmetic is simple and devastating: the more expensive farming becomes, the more attractive banditry looks as an alternative livelihood.

Consider the budget of a smallholder in Bukkuyum LGA. In 2019, he planted two hectares of groundnuts with N45,000 in inputs. He harvested eight bags, sold them for N120,000, and cleared N75,000 after transport. In 2024, the same two hectares cost N82,000 in inputs. He harvested six bags because he could not afford the fertiliser that would have carried him through the delayed rains. He sold them for N144,000 but paid N38,000 for transport because the lorry driver charged a security premium. His net was N24,000—one-third of what he earned five years earlier, against inflation that had more than doubled the price of everything his family needed to buy. The young man watching his father do these calculations does not need a degree in economics to understand that the forest offers a better return on investment.

The macroeconomic crisis of 2023 and 2024—fuel subsidy removal in June 2023, naira depreciation exceeding 90% year-on-year, and the collapse of the parallel exchange market—has not caused the Zamfara crisis. The crisis predates these shocks by a decade. But the economic collapse has accelerated recruitment into armed groups in ways that military planners in Abuja seem not to comprehend. A young man in Maru LGA who might have endured poverty in 2020 cannot endure it in 2024, because poverty in 2024 includes the knowledge that his cousin in Lagos is also struggling, that the remittance pipeline is dry, and that even the hope of escape has been devalued.

FEWS NET, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, reported in mid-2024 that Crisis (IPC Phase 3) and Emergency (IPC Phase 4) food insecurity outcomes would persist in Northwest and Northeast states through early 2025. By 2025, humanitarian agencies estimated that over 8 million Nigerians faced acute food insecurity. In Zamfara specifically, the agricultural output decline since 2016 has been catastrophic. Groundnut production, once the state's economic backbone, has fallen by more than half in the most conflict-affected LGAs. Markets that connected Zamfara to Kano and Sokoto have closed or moved to urban centres where bandits dare not operate in daylight. The Kaura Namoda cattle market, which once drew traders from Niger and Mali, now opens only when the local vigilante group can guarantee security, which is roughly eight days per month. The cost of transporting goods has risen fourfold on some routes, not because fuel is scarce but because drivers demand hazard pay for roads where every bend might hide an ambush.

The relationship between hunger and violence is not deterministic. Most hungry people do not become bandits. But hunger changes the recruitment conversation. A commander in the Rugu Forest does not need to promise wealth. He needs only to promise regular meals and a share of whatever the next ransom brings. In a state where civil service salaries are irregular and pension payments arrive six months late, the forest's payroll looks reliable by comparison.

The Accountants with Kalashnikovs

On a market day in late 2023, I sat with a trader in Tsafe who had paid three ransoms in two years: N3.5 million for his brother, N2 million for a nephew, and N800,000 for a cousin's son. He kept a notebook. Every payment was recorded with the date, the intermediary's name, and the denomination of notes delivered. When I asked why he documented everything so meticulously, he said, “Because when this ends—if it ends—someone must account for what was taken.”

His notebook is a mirror image of the ledgers kept by the men who took his money. The bandit economy runs on documentation. Commanders track which families have paid, which have resisted, which have fled. They calculate the optimal ransom for each community based on harvest yields and remittance flows. They maintain supply chains for ammunition, medicine, and food that are more reliable than the state's own logistics. In some territories they control, they have begun collecting “taxes”—a percentage of farm output, a levy on market traders, a fee for safe passage. The tax collectors issue receipts. The receipts are handwritten, but they exist.

The parallel justice system operates with similar efficiency. In one camp near the Niger border, a commander named Bello—not his real name, but the one his men use—maintains a council of five advisers who hear disputes between traders, herders, and farmers operating in his territory. The council meets on Thursdays. Judgements are delivered by Friday evening. Appeals are permitted once, to a council of three elders from neighbouring camps. Execution of judgement is guaranteed by the commander's fighters. Compare this to the formal justice system in Gusau, where a single civil case can spend four years on the docket before the first hearing, and where the judge may be transferred to Borno before delivering a ruling.

This is what governance without legitimacy looks like. The bandits do not claim to represent the people. They do not hold elections or write manifestos. But they provide, in the state's absence, the basic functions that make collective life possible: dispute resolution, security guarantees, and economic coordination. The trader in Tsafe hates them. He also knows that the last time he had a dispute over a damaged motorcycle, the bandit-appointed mediator resolved it in two days. The state court in Gusau has had his cousin's land case on its docket since 2019.

The comparison is unfair, of course. The bandit mediator's authority rests on the threat of violence. The state court's authority rests on law. But when law exists only on paper and violence exists in the next village, unfair comparisons become the only comparisons available. The people of rural Zamfara are not choosing between good governance and bad governance. They are choosing between governance that arrives on a motorcycle with a rifle and governance that does not arrive at all.

The Niger Delta, which the next chapter examines, presents the inverse of this problem. There, the state is present everywhere—in the pipelines, the military checkpoints, the amnesty stipends, the HYPREP contractors. It is present but predatory, extracting oil while poisoning water, paying militants to stop shooting while ignoring the conditions that made them pick up guns. Zamfara is the negative image: a state so absent that its citizens have learned to live without it, and in learning to live without it, have created alternative structures that the state may never displace. The Delta shows what happens when the state protects extraction. Zamfara shows what happens when the state protects nothing at all.

Zamfara is not a failed state. It is a state that has been replaced—by accountants with Kalashnikovs, who keep better books than the government they displaced.

Sources

1. SBM Intelligence, The Economics of Kidnapping in Nigeria (2023). Cited for N4.8 billion cumulative ransom payments across the Northwest, 2021–2023.
2. Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), compiled by African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD), published 8 May 2024. Cited for 2,353 fatalities nationwide from 1,410 conflict events in Q1 2024.
3. National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), Consumer Price Index, May 2024. Cited for national inflation at 33.95% and food inflation at 40.53%.
4. Rufai, M. (2021). “I Am a Bandit: A Decade of Research in Zamfara.” African Affairs, 120(480), 429–452.
5. DefenceWeb, “Boko Haram Sends Advisors to Lakurawa in Northwest Nigeria,” 23 April 2026.
6. Nigerian Military, Operation Savannah Shield launch announcement, February 2025.
7. FEWS NET, Nigeria Food Security Outlook, June 2024–January 2025. Cited for Crisis and Emergency food insecurity outcomes in Northwest and Northeast.
8. Peace News Network, citing humanitarian agencies, 2025. Cited for 8 million+ Nigerians facing acute food insecurity.
9. Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), estimates cited for 500,000+ displaced in the Northwest since 2020.
10. Nigeria Watch Report, 2024. Cited for 567 farmer-herder/banditry-related deaths across 20 states and the FCT.