Kidnapping crisis spreads to southwest Nigeria, schools and families on edge

Aduke Balogun noticed a masked man in military fatigues walking toward her children’s school in Yawota, a sight that now captures how Nigeria’s kidnapping crisis has pushed into the southwest. The May 15 attack in Oyo state, carried out alongside two other nearby school raids, ended with more than 30 students and a teacher seized and taken into the bush near Yawota.

For Balogun, the assault was not abstract. Her six-year-old daughter Feranmi escaped, while her eight-year-old daughter Kausarat was among those abducted. Videos of kidnapped children later circulated online, though it was not clear whether they showed pupils from Baptist Nursery and Primary School. The fear has spread beyond one family to parents, teachers and neighborhoods that had long regarded the southwest as relatively secure.

Security analyst Cheta Nwanze of SBM Intelligence said the Oyo abductions marked a dangerous escalation of a crisis once concentrated largely in Nigeria’s north and Middle Belt into the southwest. That matters because the region is among the country’s most populous and economically important, and any sense that schools there can be targeted so easily raises the stakes for public confidence, local commerce and travel. With Nigeria’s next national elections due in January 2027, insecurity is becoming a political test as much as a security one.

The numbers underline the scale of the emergency. SBM Intelligence said kidnappers demanded more than 48 billion in ransom between July 2024 and June 2025, while families paid about 2.57 billion over the same period. It recorded 4,722 abducted people in 997 incidents and 762 deaths. Amnesty International said in April 2024 that more than 1,700 children had been abducted by gunmen in Nigeria since 2014, and Save the Children said more than 1,680 schoolchildren had been kidnapped since the Chibok abduction.

As attacks spread into communities that once felt safer than the north, schools are under pressure to tighten security, shut down or move instruction online. For families in Oyo state and beyond, the question is no longer whether kidnapping is a northern crisis, but whether the state can still protect children in places that have now been pulled into its center.