Why Violence Persists in Nigeria: The Data, the Beneficiaries, and the Forces Keeping the Country at War With Itself

Start with the numbers, because the numbers are the most honest part of this story.

Nigeria ranks in the extreme category of ACLED’s Conflict Index in the 2024 update, one of the most severe designations the world’s most comprehensive conflict-monitoring system applies to any country. ACLED ranked Nigeria the fifth most dangerous country in the world in terms of political conflict in 2025. In 2021 and 2022 alone, ACLED recorded over 4,500 armed conflicts in Nigeria in each of those years, with fatalities exceeding 10,000 annually, a death toll comparable to civilian casualties in the Russia-Ukraine war in the same period, yet receiving a fraction of the global attention, the international advocacy, and the foreign policy urgency that the European conflict commands.

Between 2009 and 2025, just under 53,000 civilians have been killed in targeted political violence in Nigeria, comprising Muslims and Christians alike. In 2022 alone, nearly half of all people killed in West Africa as a result of battles, violence against civilians, or remote violence were in Nigeria, accounting for 47 per cent of the region’s conflict fatalities. The three subnational conflict zones that emerged in Nigeria since the 1990s, the Middle Belt, the Niger Delta, and the Lake Chad Basin, have coalesced into one gigantic cluster of violence that now covers more than half of the country.

A 2024 NOI Polls survey found that seven in ten Nigerians describe the country’s security situation as dreadful.

These are not the statistics of a country that is losing a war it is genuinely trying to win. They are the statistics of a country whose relationship with its own violence is more complicated, more profitable, and more deliberately sustained than any government press conference has ever acknowledged.

The Six Faces of Nigerian Violence: Mapping the Battlefield

Understanding why violence persists requires first understanding that Nigeria’s insecurity is not one conflict with one cause. It is at least six distinct but interconnected crises, each with its own geography, its own drivers, its own armed actors, and its own set of people who benefit from its continuation.

The Boko Haram and ISWAP insurgency in the Northeast is the oldest and most documented of the six. In December 2015, President Muhammadu Buhari declared Boko Haram technically defeated. As of 2025, the insurgency continues, with the group and its faction, the Islamic State West Africa Province, ISWAP, maintaining control over rural territories and conducting deadly raids in the northeast. A Boko Haram attack in Yobe State in September 2024 resulted in 170 deaths. Boko Haram and ISWAP attacks were responsible for 66 per cent of all violent deaths in Nigeria in 2024. In March 2025, ISWAP began a renewed offensive in Borno State, carrying out sophisticated assaults on military installations, towns, and roadways, seizing control of strategic sites.

The banditry crisis in the Northwest has become, by some measures, the most economically devastating form of insecurity in the country. The willingness of governments and families to pay ransoms has turned mass kidnapping into arguably the most lucrative criminal enterprise in the northwest zone. In March 2024 alone, nearly 400 people were kidnapped in Kaduna State, including 287 schoolchildren, many of them girls, at the government secondary school in Kuriga town. In 2024 alone, at least 580 civilians, primarily women and girls, were kidnapped across several states.

The farmer-herder conflict in the Middle Belt has killed more Nigerians over the past decade than either Boko Haram or banditry in absolute terms in certain years. Of the 36,056 civilian killings across Nigeria between 2019 and 2024, 47 per cent were directly linked to Fulani militias, according to findings from the Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa. The violence in Benue, Plateau, Taraba, and Adamawa has taken on a cyclical, seasonal character, peaking at planting season and harvest time, that suggests not spontaneous communal rage but a patterned competition over land and water that neither the federal nor the state governments have developed the political will to structurally address.

The separatist and cult violence in the Southeast has deepened significantly since 2021, with IPOB-linked attacks on security forces and government infrastructure creating conditions of intermittent civic paralysis in parts of Anambra, Imo, Ebonyi, and Enugu states. The IPOB-led secessionist conflict has escalated, with the group conducting targeted killings of security personnel and attacks on electoral infrastructure.

Oil theft and militancy in the Niger Delta drain Nigeria’s primary revenue source while sustaining an ecosystem of criminal enterprise, political patronage, and environmental destruction that has made the Delta one of the most polluted and most armed places in West Africa.

Electoral violence, which peaks every four years but never fully recedes, was documented in peer-reviewed research as having killed dozens in the 2019 general elections alone, with a geospatial pattern showing concentration in competitive constituencies where political stakes are highest and institutional oversight weakest.

Each of these crises has its own momentum. But they share a common structural condition that explains why none of them, despite trillions of naira in security spending, has been resolved. That condition is the political economy of insecurity: the network of interests that profit from violence continuing and that lose something if it stops.

The Political Economy of Perpetual Crisis: Who Benefits

On December 1, 2025, former Chief of Defence Staff, General Lucky Irabor, gave an interview on Channels Television that contained the most explicit official acknowledgement of political complicity in Nigeria’s insecurity that any senior security figure has publicly made.

Irabor disclosed that some politicians in the country are exploiting and even fuelling insecurity to gain political advantage. He said some political figures have weaponised insecurity for personal gain, noting that some want to give the impression they can do better, while others instigate crises to score political points about poor governance.

His remarks came, critically, one day after Presidential aide Daniel Bwala had announced that the Federal Government was preparing to publicly name individuals financing terrorism in Nigeria. That announcement has not, at the time of this report’s publication, produced a public list of named individuals. The threat of naming and the silence that followed it are themselves informative.

PDP chieftain Gbenga Olawepo-Hashim, speaking on Arise Television in November 2025, was more direct than the former defence chief. He said there are many members of the political elite on various sides profiting from the instability. He specifically identified two streams of political profit: the illegal sale of solid minerals in northern states, where anyone who finds gold or lithium also finds bandits and arms, and factions within the military involved in the resulting business. He said: “Somebody has to stop this mess right now. People are dying in their thousands.”

The connection between illegal mineral extraction and armed groups is not speculative. A peer-reviewed study on the proliferation of small arms and light weapons in Nigeria specifically identified individuals, including named bandit leaders, as beneficiaries of illegal movement of weapons to perpetrate kidnapping, armed banditry, and different forms of crime and noted their connection to informal mining networks in the country’s north.

At the political level, insecurity serves several documented functions. It provides governors and federal politicians with a perpetual emergency narrative that justifies securitisation budgets and suppresses accountability for development failures. It creates patronage opportunities through contracts for private security firms, transport logistics for military deployments, and food supply chains for IDP camps. It suppresses voter turnout in the most opposition-leaning constituencies during elections, as documented by researchers studying the geospatial patterns of electoral violence. And in some documented cases, it has been used by local political actors to physically eliminate opponents under conditions where attribution is impossible.

Since 2014, over 2,000 children have been abducted or kidnapped in mass abductions largely targeting schools. Armed extremist groups, including Boko Haram and ISWAP, as well as local bandits, are implicated, often using kidnappings to generate ransom or recruit children. The ransom economy that has developed around these abductions is not a side effect of insecurity. It is an industry. And industries have supply chains, middlemen, and beneficiaries who have built their economic security on the continuation of the activity that generates them.

The N32 Trillion Question: Where Did the Money Go

Nigeria has committed an estimated N32.88 trillion to defence and security over the past 15 years, representing approximately 12.5 per cent of total government expenditure across that period. The trajectory has been consistently upward. From N2.41 trillion in 2022 and N2.98 trillion in 2023 to N3.85 trillion in 2024 and N6.57 trillion in 2025, Nigeria’s defence and security allocation became the single largest budgetary category in the national budget.

On December 25, 2025, United States Africa Command conducted airstrikes in Sokoto State against ISIS-affiliated targets. While Nigerian officials confirmed their involvement in the operation, the incident underscores a troubling reality: Nigeria’s military, despite billions in defence spending, required American precision strike capabilities to hit targets within its own borders.

The question of where the money went has a partially documented answer, and the answer is not reassuring.

CISLAC and Transparency International Nigeria have reported that from 2016 to 2022, Nigeria spent over $19.9 billion on security, but results on the battlefield remain minimal. The Centre for Democracy and Development estimated that $15 billion was lost to fraudulent arms procurement deals over two decades.

In May 2025, 18 soldiers and 15 police officers were arrested for selling military weapons to armed groups, demonstrating that the corruption was not only high-level but embedded at multiple layers of the security apparatus. Former National Security Adviser Babagana Monguno admitted in 2020 that the president had provided enormous funds, but equipment was not purchased. As recently as 2024, Transparency International Defence and Security reported that $8.9 million in stolen defence funds had been seized by the Royal Court in Jersey, money that had been designated for Boko Haram-related military equipment that never arrived.

The 2025 Government Defence Integrity Index placed Nigeria’s defence procurement risk at 23 out of 100, rating it as Very High risk in Band E, the most dangerous category. The assessment found corruption risks deeply embedded across Nigeria’s defence sector, with significant gaps in defence spending transparency, secret expenditures, and military-owned enterprises.

The National Bureau of Statistics reported that Nigeria spent over N777 billion on importing arms and ammunition between 2020 and the first half of 2025 alone, with defence spending surging sharply in 2023 and 2024. Nigeria remains the largest arms importer in Sub-Saharan Africa, accounting for 16 per cent of the region’s arms imports between 2019 and 2023.

Every naira of that expenditure that was diverted, stolen, or paid for weapons that were never delivered represents a soldier who went to the battlefield without the equipment he needed, a community left without the protection it was promised, and an armed group that remained active because the resources to confront it were redirected into someone’s private account.

CISLAC warned that Nigeria now accounts for roughly 70 per cent of illicit weapons circulating in West Africa and that concerns about terrorism financing contributed to Nigeria’s ranking as 8th among the top 10 countries most affected by terrorism in the 2024 Global Terrorism Index. A country that imports 16 per cent of the region’s legal arms and generates 70 per cent of its illegal weapons is a country where the legal and illegal arms markets are connected by a pipeline that runs through the same procurement system that the defence budget is supposed to fund.

The Structural Failures That Make Violence a Rational Choice

Behind the political economy of insecurity and the corruption in the defence sector lies a deeper set of structural conditions that make violence not just profitable for elites but rational for the young men who carry the guns.

Economic reforms introduced in 2023 contributed to inflation, which surged to 34.19 per cent by June 2024, with food inflation exceeding 40 per cent, pushing many deeper into poverty. A young man in Zamfara or Kebbi or Kaduna who cannot find a farm to work because the land is in dispute, cannot find a job because the nearest town has no economy, cannot find a school because the one in his village has a collapsed roof and no teacher, and cannot find security because the nearest police post is a forty-minute drive away, faces a choice between destitution and the armed group recruiting in his ward. That is not a moral failure. It is a structural one. And it is one that Nigeria’s political leadership has consistently chosen to manage through security spending rather than development investment.

International Crisis Group has stated unambiguously that the violence in different parts of Nigeria is driven largely by failures of governance. Those governance failures are not accidental. They reflect decades of deliberate choices about where public resources go, who they reach, and whose lives are considered worth protecting.

The Federal Office of Statistics data for the first half of 2025 showed that the number of killings associated with kidnappings and violence doubled compared to the entire year of 2024. Amnesty International’s 2025 report recorded 10,215 people killed in the past two years, with 80 percent of those deaths occurring in Plateau and Benue states.

The Human Rights Watch World Report for 2025 documented the full circle of this structural failure. Authorities responded to rising public criticism of insecurity and economic hardship by arresting and prosecuting journalists, social media commentators, and protesters, replacing the accountability that public pressure demands with the repression that removes it. When the space to demand accountability closes, the structural conditions that produce violence lose even the pressure that public discourse can apply to them.

What It Would Take to Actually Stop It

The analysis this investigation has assembled points to five specific interventions without which no defence budget, no military deployment, and no presidential declaration of technical defeat will change the fundamental trajectory.

The first is a transparent, independently audited defence procurement system. Every naira spent on weapons, personnel, equipment, and logistics must be publicly documented, independently verified, and reportable to the National Assembly’s Defence Committee with the authority to sanction non-compliance. The admission by the former NSA that money was provided but equipment was not purchased and the arrest of 18 soldiers and 15 police officers for selling weapons to armed groups in 2025, are evidence of a procurement system that currently serves those who steal from it more reliably than those who depend on it.

The second is a direct confrontation with the political beneficiaries of insecurity. The Federal Government’s announcement through Daniel Bwala that it was preparing to publicly name those financing terrorism must produce an actual list, with evidence, filed before a court. The credibility of every other security intervention depends on whether the people who profit from insecurity face consequences for doing so.

The third is a land reform framework for the Middle Belt that addresses the grazing route and agricultural land dispute at its structural root, rather than responding to each killing as though it arrived without a cause and cannot be prevented. This investigation has documented in prior reporting that communities in Adamawa, Benue, Plateau, and Taraba are ready to participate in mediation frameworks when those frameworks are functional and trusted. The evidence from successful mediation pilots, including the IOM COMITAS II programme, shows that 2,775 disputes can be resolved in eighteen months when institutions show up to facilitate.

The fourth is a youth investment programme at the ward level that makes legitimate economic activity more accessible than armed recruitment. The specific communities producing the most recruits for banditry and insurgency are documentable, identifiable, and reachable. The gap between destitution and recruitment is not a character gap. It is an economic one. It responds to economic intervention.

The fifth is press freedom and civic space. Despite huge investments in defence, insecurity persists. A 2024 NOI Polls survey found that seven in ten Nigerians describe the country’s security situation as dreadful. A government that responds to that assessment by arresting journalists who report it and protesters who demonstrate against it is a government that has chosen to manage its image rather than its performance. Image management does not stop a Boko Haram attack. It only delays the moment when the failure becomes undeniable.

Nigeria is not a country without the capacity to end its violence. It is a country whose political and economic structures have, for decades, made violence more profitable for those in power than peace would be. The soldiers dying in the field, the farmers who cannot return to their land, the children taken from schools in Kebbi and Borno and Kaduna, and the families in Plateau counting their dead after Christmas attacks are the people paying the price of that arrangement.

Olawepo-Hashim put it plainly: “Somebody has to stop this mess right now.” He is right. The question is not whether it can be stopped. The question is whether the people with the power to stop it have more to gain from stopping it than from letting it continue.

On the evidence assembled in this investigation, the answer to that question is the reason violence persists in Nigeria.