There is a particular kind of silence that follows a kidnapping. It is not the absence of sound, but the absence of certainty. Phones stay charged. Families stop sleeping. Every unknown number becomes both hope and dread. In that silence, the Nigerian citizen is reduced to a negotiable asset—waiting, not for justice, but for a price.

In the concluding part of last week’s The Sunday Stew, I had promised that today we would take a deep dive into the paradox of living under the shadow of self-inflicted disasters. In reflecting on the approach to adopt, my mind went back to the world-acclaimed scholar, Ali Mazrui.

In 1986, Mazrui — then a towering figure at the University of Jos and Binghamton — released his seminal documentary, The Africans: A Triple Heritage. Mazrui argued that the African identity was a product of three interlocking legacies: the Indigenous, the Islamic, and the Western.

Nigeria, however, appears to be shaped by a far more dangerous convergence of forces.

We are currently shadowed by what I call The Insecurity Triad—a three-headed monster of Kidnapping, Banditry, and Terrorism that threatens to dismantle the very heritage Mazrui celebrated. We begin today with kidnapping, what I have chosen to call the “Ransom Economy”.

From Global Origins to the Nigerian Evolution

Kidnapping is not a Nigerian invention. Historically, it has evolved from sporadic opportunism to structured enterprise. In the 19th-century United States, abductions were mostly local or motivated by personal vendettas. However, the 1932 abduction of Charles Lindbergh Jr. marked a global turning point, demonstrating the potential for ransom at a national scale and prompting the US Federal Kidnapping Act.

Today, the more pressing parallels lie in the “narco-states” of Latin America. In Mexico, cartels use “express kidnappings” to drain bank accounts and mass-abduct migrants to extort their families.

In Colombia, what began as a tool for political “taxation” by groups like the FARC eventually became an outsourced criminal market. Whether it is a drug lord in Michoacán or a bandit leader in the Kuyambana Forest, the logic is identical: kidnapping is the “venture capital” or liquidity that funds larger insurgencies.Politics

Nigeria’s journey followed a similar, albeit accelerated, trajectory. Prior to the year 2000, incidents were sporadic. By the early 2000s, the Niger Delta became the first laboratory for industrial-scale abductions.

It is essential to note that the genesis of this trend was rooted in grievance rather than simple greed. In those early days, the targeting of oil workers was a violent form of protest against multinational oil companies accused of systemic environmental degradation and the utter neglect of oil-bearing communities. What began as a desperate cry for resource control, however, soon mutated. The “grievance model” of Niger Delta provided the blueprint for the “profit model” we see today nationwide, as criminal networks realised that human liberty was the most liquid asset they could trade.

The Human Face of the Ransom Economy

Behind the statistics are real people, real trauma, and real negotiations. In 2021, a friend of Sundiata Post, Mrs. Elsie Iloelunachi, a businesswoman, travelled from Abuja to Onitsha to purchase goods. On her return journey, somewhere in Kogi State, her vehicle was hijacked. While a few passengers managed to escape, she was not so fortunate. She was marched into the forest and held for a few days.

According to her account, she survived partly because she could communicate in the language of her abductors. She pleaded. She negotiated. Eventually, the kidnappers sent an account number to her husband. He raised the money and transferred it.

When she later came to my office to recount her experience, the psychological toll was unmistakable. She was visibly shaken, emotionally and mentally scarred, yet she still counted herself lucky. She had returned alive, without physical injury or molestation—a “best-case outcome” in a system where survival is increasingly uncertain.

In another case, a past president of the Rotary Club of Abuja CBD travelled to Lagos on official duty. On his return journey to Abuja, his vehicle was hijacked in Ondo State. What followed was panic—not just within his family, but across the Rotary community. The club and district mobilised. Funds were raised. Networks were activated. For weeks, uncertainty loomed until he eventually regained his freedom.

There is also the growing pattern of attacks on schools and religious institutions—spaces once considered sanctuaries. One particularly harrowing case involved St. Mary’s Catholic Primary and Secondary School in Papiri, Niger State, on November 21, 2025. Gunmen abducted 315 people, including nursery pupils as young as five. Parents received intermittent, terrifying calls from the abductors, alternating between threats and negotiation. Some students escaped into the surrounding forest, while others were released in staged groups over the next month. Families, like that of 62-year-old Dauda Chekula who lost four grandchildren, endured unimaginable trauma, with no immediate government support.

Another alarming example occurred in Sokoto, where a cleric and his students were abducted during a nighttime raid. The cleric negotiated tirelessly to secure the children’s release, demonstrating the terrifying human calculus families now face in a system where trust in protection is fragile.

The Ransom Economy has moved from the lonely highway to the family dinner table. The early 2024 abduction of the Al-Kadriyar sisters in Bwari, FCT, remains a scar on the national psyche. The subsequent killing of one daughter, Nabeehah, to “accelerate” payment proved that even the seat of power in Abuja was no longer a fortress. From coordinated street-level raids in Katampe to the surgical, contract-style snatching of professionals in Port Harcourt, kidnappers have weaponised the doorstep.

The systematic targeting of the clergy represents a war on the soul of the nation. In the last year alone, at least 17 Catholic priests were abducted. Kidnappers demanded a total of ₦460 million with approximately ₦70 million verified as paid by desperate parishioners and families. The case of Fr. Mikah Suleiman in Sokoto and the heroic sacrifice of Fr. Thomas Oyode in Edo—who reportedly traded his own liberty for that of his students—illustrate that for the kidnapper, the Church is not a house of God, but a guaranteed source of crowd-funded negotiation.

These stories are not isolated. They are fragments of a larger system—one that has turned fear into currency and human beings into collateral.

Why Kidnapping is ‘Attractive’

We must ask: why is Nigeria a global outlier in this menace? The answer lies in the collapse of the legitimate economy. When a state cannot provide viable means of income, the ‘Ransom Economy’ fills the vacuum. For a youth in a marginalised rural community or an urban slum, the return on investment (ROI) of a kidnapping raid far outweighs years of manual labour.

However, we cannot ignore the role of greed. The industry has attracted “investors”—informants, logistics providers, and even rogue elements within formal structures—who see kidnapping as a high-reward, low-risk business. This combination of economic despair and predatory greed has turned a crime into a career path.

The Ransom Economy by the Numbers

To understand the financial scale of this crisis, we look to data provided by SBM Intelligence for the period of July 2024 to June 2025. During this window, the total ransom demanded by criminal networks reached a staggering ₦48 billion (approximately $31 million), reflecting a high-volume strategy. Out of this, ₦2.57 billion (roughly $1.66 million) was verified as paid—a 144% year-on-year increase in actual payments.

These funds were extracted from 4,722 victims across 997 reported incidents. Most chilling is the lethality rate: 762 deaths were recorded, meaning nearly one person died for every reported incident. This reveals a “naira-to-dollar trap”; as the naira devalues, kidnappers become more aggressive, demanding higher sums simply to maintain their purchasing power for black-market arms and logistics.

Why Nigeria?

How can a country with so much promise and capacity be reduced to a state where it cannot protect its citizens? The answer lies in our “ungoverned spaces” and a centralised policing structure that has created a dangerous intelligence gap. When the state is physically absent, the criminal becomes the de facto sovereign.

Ali Mazrui’s Triple Heritage was about the synthesis of culture to build a future.

Our Insecurity Triad is about the collision of forces that destroy it. To protect her citizens, Nigeria must re-occupy her own land.

We must:

•Decentralise Intelligence

•Close Ungoverned Spaces

•Bankrupt the Triad

Every abduction is a withdrawal from the fragile bank of national trust. If we do not act decisively, the Ransom Economy will continue to fund even more destructive forces.

Join me next week for Part II, where we examine the Rural Siege of Banditry.

Don’t miss it.

Trust it is sacred. Stay seasoned

• Max Amuchie, CEO of Sundiata Post, writes The Sunday Stew, a weekly syndicated column on faith, character, and the forces that shape society, with a focus on Nigeria and Africa in a global context. X: @MaxAmuchie | Email: [email protected] | Tel: +234(0)8053069436.

The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.

By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

“Minor judges have been known to abuse the contempt of court jurisdiction in an attempt to enhance their own dignity.” — David Pannick QC, Judges, 119 (1987)

Sardar Tejendrasingh lived in England but, by his own admission, was devoid of “respect for this country or its civilization or its courts.” In 1982, as plaintiff in a case for debt recovery at the Cambridge County Court, he chose to address the court sitting down. The court registrar, who took the view that this was contempt of the court, decided in August 1982 to pause proceedings in Mr. Tejendrasingh’s case until he was purged of this contempt. One year later, in September 1983, Alan Garfitt, the trial judge, informed Mr. Tejendrasingh of the court’s decision to indefinitely suspend hearing of his case unless and until he provided a written undertaking to stand while addressing the court.

Mr. Tejendrasingh appealed against this to the Court of Appeal which affirmed the decision of the trial judge. In its decision in November 1985, the Court of Appeal reasoned: “if a court orders somebody to stand when addressing it or giving evidence, that order is not different from any other order of the court. It is something which has to be obeyed.”

The nature of orders that courts can give or which suitors in court are obliged to obey in such situations has varied through the ages. In his book on The Lives of the Lord Chancellors and Keepers of the Great Seal of England, John Lord Campbell tells a story from the first quarter of the 17^th century of a “Catholic gentleman nearly eighty years old” who was sentenced to “be fined £1000, lose his ears, stand on the pillory at Westminster and Lancaster, and suffer perpetual imprisonment, for merely presenting a respectful petition to the King, praying for inquiry into the conduct of one of the judges of assize, who had condemned to death a neighbour for entertaining a Jesuit.”

Others have been even less lucky. In 1631, Chief Justice Richardson of the Court of Common Bench was on his way out of court after pronouncing a sentence of death upon a suspect on trial for a felony when “the prisoner found himself able to express his dissent from the sentence pronounced upon him by hurling a brickbat at the Chief Justice’s head.” For his contempt, the prisoner, was reportedly “immediately hanged in the presence of the court.”

Recent events in Nigeria have extinguished any misapprehensions that these flashes of judicial savagery may have ended with the transition from the Medieval to the early modern period. In the past week, a judge of the Federal High Court, Mohammed Umar, reopened the question as to what kind of orders a judge may be at liberty to give in seeking to uphold his or her judicial authority or dignity.

The circumstance was the trial of publisher and politician, Omoyele Sowore, who is being prosecuted by the State Security Service on the charge of having called Nigeria’s president, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a criminal. At the resumed trial on Monday, 16 March 2026, contretemps reportedly erupted between the judge and the defence counsel, Marshall Abubakar, over the scheduling of a date for the defence to argue its no-case submission at the end of the prosecution’s case. The defence apparently desired a longer adjournment than the court was willing to grant.

Ordinarily, this should not have been raucous. In the midst of the exchanges over the dates, however, the judge reportedly took exception to the inflection or tone of counsel and threatened to cite him for contempt. Almost immediately, it appears, the judge thought the better of it or lost his temper “and ordered the lawyer to step forward and kneel down as punishment for what he described as contempt of court.”

In response, Marshall Abubakar is reported to have informed the court that “kneeling before a judge was unknown to Nigerian law and could not be imposed as a lawful punishment.” At this point, other lawyers present in court, fearing the onset of a judicial meltdown, reportedly rose in collective de-escalation. They eventually managed to stay the hand of His Lordship from also asking the lawyer to raise his hands over his head, close his eyes, and expose his buttocks for licks from a judicial Sjambok.

The Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), through its president, Afam Osigwe, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), took a serious view of the matter. In a statement issued the following day, the NBA president cautioned that “directing a legal practitioner or indeed any person whatsoever to kneel in court is not a recognised judicial sanction under our laws and does not align with the standards of judicial conduct expected on the Bench.”

At the heart of the objection by the NBA is the guarantee of the right to human dignity in section 34 of Nigeria’s constitution, reinforced by the prohibition of torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. The Uganda Law Society (ULS) also weighed in. Their reaction issued through its president, Isaac Ssemakadde, warned that “no judge possesses the legal power to order a legal practitioner to kneel. That directive was not discipline; it was humiliation.”

This episode raises important questions concerning both the limits of judicial power and standards of professional comportment for participants in the judicial and legal process.

For advocates of rule of law, judicial orders are to be obeyed at all times. So, should the lawyer (not) have obeyed the order to kneel down even if he could then have appealed against it subsequently?

The pivotal question here is when is an order judicial? The exercise of the power to punish for contempt of court or to preserve the authority of the judicial office is not at large. In exercising it, a judge is not precluded from the obligations to observe the basic rules of fair hearing or respect for constitutional guarantees.

In this case, the order to “kneel down” was a sentence issued without the opportunity of a hearing, formal conviction, or even a record. To be quite plain, there was nothing judicial about it. Even if the lawyer was minded to obey and then appeal later, the likelihood is that there would have been no record on the basis of which to appeal for, surely, the judge could not have written: “I hereby convict Mr. Abubakar and sentence him to kneel down.”

Whether or not the facts justified the judge in invoking the power of contempt is not in dispute at this time. For present purposes, that point is conceded. However, having done so, the court thereafter chose to sacrifice its power on the altar of abuse. In the circumstance, regrettably, Mr. Abubakar was well within his rights to be slow in complying with “kneel down”. Put differently, there was no order to obey.

It is not as if the judge was without options in the circumstance. He could have referred the lawyer to the Legal Practitioner’s Disciplinary Committee or, indeed, tried and convicted him for contempt before deciding what sentence to impose.

Even better he may be been better served if he had read Brian McKenna’s famous lecture at the University of Durham in February 1969.

In the lecture, McKenna, a judge, tells the story of the conclusion of one of his earliest trials as a judge following which “a temperamental Irish lady flung her handbag in my direction after I had sentenced her delinquent brother to a period of training.” In response, he writes, “I gave her the benefit of doubt; I assumed that her target was the Clerk of the Court sitting beneath the throne, no myself.”

Mr. Justice Kneel Down may one day discover virtue in judicial forbearance.

A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at [email protected]

The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.

Although structural, political, and economic conditions appear to constrain any credibly concerted impediment to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s 2027 reelection chances, at least from my admittedly imperfect reading of the auguries, Tinubu still seems so insecure that he is borrowing a leaf from former Head of State Sani Abacha, his arch enemy, to annihilate the opposition and smooth his path to reelection.

There are at least three reasons why I think the odds are, at least for now, in Tinubu’s favor.

First, the opposition hasn’t coalesced around a single, powerful, unifying candidate, such as the APC did with Muhammadu Buhari in 2015, less than a year before the next presidential election. Meanwhile, Tinubu is already the undisputed candidate of his party and has effectively been in campaign mode, with all the advantages that incumbency confers.

Second, Tinubu’s economic policies have so pauperized a vast swath of the electorate that many voters are even more susceptible to financial inducement in exchange for their votes than at any time in recent memory. In a context where hunger and desperation shape electoral behavior, the moral calculus of voting changes.

Given that Tinubu commands a larger financial war chest than any individual opposition figure and perhaps more than all of them combined, he is better positioned to prevail in a contest defined by voter inducement. It often makes little difference to voters that the source of their hardship is also the source of the money offered to temporarily alleviate it.

Third, the institutions of the state that determine electoral outcomes inspire little confidence in their independence. INEC, which showed flashes of autonomy during Professor Attahiru Jega’s tenure, particularly in overseeing the 2015 transition, no longer enjoys the same level of public trust.

The judiciary, which ought to serve as the final arbiter of electoral disputes, is widely perceived as susceptible to political manipulation. Whether this perception is entirely fair is beside the point; what matters is that it is widespread and shapes expectations about electoral outcomes.

Given these seemingly insurmountable advantages, one might expect Tinubu to sit comfortably and await what could amount to an electoral formality. Yet his actions suggest a deep, crippling anxiety about 2027. He appears determined not just to win an election but to eliminate the possibility of a meaningful contest.

He is stealthily but systematically weakening all the political parties that could provide viable platforms for his opponents in 2027.

The Labor Party, which rode the crest of the wave of Peter Obi’s popularity to emerge from near obscurity to national prominence in 2023, has been mired in irresolvably debilitating internal crises. These crises may have internal origins, but their persistence and intensity have effectively neutralized the party as a coherent opposition force.

The Peoples Democratic Party is also deeply fractured.

Through the outsized influence of FCT Minister Nyesom Wike, who retains significant leverage within the party despite serving in an APC administration, the PDP has been thrown into a prolonged internal dissension that has eroded its capacity to function as a credible opposition platform.

It would be an exaggeration to say that only APC sympathizers remain in the PDP, but it is accurate to say that its internal divisions have weakened its ability to mount a coordinated challenge.

The African Democratic Congress (ADC) had begun to present itself as a refuge for politicians displaced from the PDP, the Labour Party, and even factions within the APC. That possibility now appears imperiled by an emerging leadership crisis.

While David Mark is widely recognized as the party’s national chairman, Nafiu Bala Gombe, a former deputy national chairman, is contesting that leadership in court. Given how the courts have ruled in the past in respect of the PDP and LP, which many people suspect is induced from the Tinubu camp, it won’t come to me as a surprise if Gombe gets judicial imprimatur to displace Mark.

Allegations that Gombe is aligned with Tinubu or with interests sympathetic to him come primarily from partisan sources within the ADC and have not been independently substantiated. Still, given the pattern observable in other opposition parties, such suspicions are not entirely surprising. If the courts eventually validate Gombe’s claim, the ADC could become inhospitable to the very opposition figures who had begun to see it as a viable platform, as a safe political asylum.

The cumulative effect of these developments is that major opposition figures such as Atiku Abubakar, Peter Obi, and Rotimi Amaechi may find themselves without stable or credible party platforms on which to base presidential bids. Even if parties remain on paper, they risk becoming hollow shells, fielding “dummy” candidates who pose no real threat and merely sustain the illusion of competition. That’s banana-republic-level perversion of basic democratic norms.

This trajectory calls to mind the 1998 transition program under Sani Abacha. In that case, the regime licensed and controlled the only legal political parties, suppressed dissent, and orchestrated a process in which all five parties eventually adopted Abacha as their sole presidential candidate. It was a carefully managed political ritual dubiously designed to legitimize continued rule. Abacha didn’t get elected because he died before that could happen.

Nigeria is not under military rule, and the present circumstances are not, by any means, wholly identical. But the logic of narrowing the political field to the point where competition becomes illusory bears an uncomfortable resemblance.

There is no point in pretending to be a democracy if something as basic as the latitude to run for the office of president is strewn with avoidable cataracts and oxbow lakes, to paraphrase Nigeria’s most famous sesquipedalian Patrick Obahiagbon.

The danger for Tinubu is that such a strategy, even if it succeeds electorally, could strip his reelection of the faintest scintilla of credibility and render his administration vulnerable to an enervating crisis of legitimacy, including possible international scrutiny. Electoral victory is one thing; perceived legitimacy is another, and the latter is harder to manufacture.

It is true that incumbents often seek every available advantage. Olusegun Obasanjo’s 2003 reelection was marred by widely reported irregularities. He was so intent on extracting electoral insurance against Muhammadu Buhari in 2003 (even though Buhari was actually unelectable at that time) that he got more votes in native Ogun State than there were registered voters. But at least he allowed Buhari to run against him on a prominent political platform.

Goodluck Jonathan also benefited from incumbency advantages. Like Obasanjo, he faced recognizable opposition candidates on functioning party platforms. Even in 2019, when Atiku Abubakar mounted a serious challenge to Muhammadu Buhari, the contest, despite its controversies, retained the basic structure of competitive politics.

Tinubu risks earning a dubious distinction as Nigeria’s only civilian president who appears unwilling to tolerate even the minimum conditions for credible electoral competition. That is a striking departure for a man whose political reputation was built, in part, on opposition to military authoritarianism.

He still has time to recalibrate. The more prudent path is to allow opposition parties to organize freely and to make his case for reelection on the basis of his record. That, more than any tactical maneuvering, is what confers durable political legitimacy.

The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.