Long before bandits preyed on schoolchildren, long before ransom notes began to read like market lists including palm oil, dried fish, onions, and yam tubers, Nigeria itself had been taken hostage.
Thus, what we now call an epidemic of abductions is merely the physical manifestation of captive Nigerianness: with our consciences bound, institutions gagged, and the citizenry caught between fraying morals and failing structures.
Truth is, the hostage crisis did not begin at gunpoint. It began in the dumbing down of Nigerian character; in the fragmentation of our family systems; in the erosion of public trust, and in the corruption that has become as ambient as the air we breathe.
Nigeria's kidnap-for-ransom enterprise has matured into a grotesque industry, sprawling from forest corridors to the fringes of urban life. Between July 2023 and June 2024 alone, SBM Intelligence reports that 1,130 kidnapping incidents were recorded, involving no fewer than 7,568 victims.
In that period, abductors demanded N10.99 billion, but received only N1.048 billion, a mere 9.5 per cent of their outrageous demands. This gap reveals a frightening evolution: rather than targeting only business magnates, politicians, or oil barons, kidnappers have shifted their sights to the masses: to farmers, market women, students, commuters, villagers, minors, and the elderly.
Yet the absurdity has assumed darker shades. In one widely reported case in the South-West, kidnappers demanded N3.5 million plus a carton of Schnapps, 30 litres of palm oil, 10 tubers of yam, and a keg of vegetable oil before releasing three captives. Elsewhere, abductors have asked for cooking oil, dried fish, garri, power banks, phone chargers, items required to restock a household inventory rather than a ransom ledger.
This is what happens when criminality fuses with hunger; the consequence is a madness that confounds profit logic. It feeds, ultimately, an ever-widening maw of need.
Yet, beyond the abductions that dominate news cycles, Nigeria suffers from a deeper, subtler captivity. Every Nigerian, in some form, is a hostage: hostage to creed, weaponising faith to justify bigotry; hostage to ethnic and religious loyalties; hostage to greed, that turns public office into a private empire.
Many are hostage to hypocrisy, condemning loudly in public what they cuddle in private; hostage to poverty, which renders dignity an unaffordable luxury; hostage to materialism, chasing wealth with the desperation of a drowning man gasping for air.
Some are hostage to sexual lust, weaponising desire to destroy marriages, careers, and destinies; hostage to rage, exploding at the slightest provocation because Nigeria heats everyone, like a pressure cooker; hostage to daily needs, locked in a battle that yokes survival to the next meal.
Many more are hostage to imperialist agendas, gorging on colonist doctrines at the expense of indigenous wisdom. And perhaps most tragically, we are hostage to sentimentality, defending leaders who impoverish us, praising institutions that betray us, and romanticising the very dysfunctions that hold us captive.
Amid this moral malaise, corruption manifests as a social ill and a vehicle of national dysfunction. Recent 2023 data reveal that 32.3% of Nigerians reported personal experience with bribery while dealing with public officials. In total, an estimated 87 million bribes were exchanged that year -- approximately 0.8 bribes per adult. Among those who admitted paying bribes, the average number paid within 12 months was 5.1.
The import is alarming: about US $1.26 billion in cash bribes changed hands in 2023; that is roughly 0.35% of Nigeria's GDP.
The citizen pays bribes to secure what is already his by right. The official extracts bribes to perform what he is already paid to do. And the system, greased by these transactions, chugs out detritus of misgovernance.
To mend all that we have broken, we must rejig our cultural foundations. No society reforms itself without reshaping its stories; the narratives it consumes often become the beliefs it normalises, and the beliefs it normalises form the culture it lives by.
Essentially, patriotism thrives on cultural standards. The politics we espouse and our lore of nationhood manifest the kernel of our sovereignty. A similar dynamic undergirds our politico-literary traditions. Politics thrives on artistic vistas and vice versa.
What shouldn't we do for an evergreen story? What shouldn't we give? The evergreen story, if progressively spun, yields fresh insights through the imagination of the writer or filmmaker, who milks history and recalibrates reality to espouse a positive national lyric.
What is the Nigerian lyric? What is our reality? What do our artists project about us to our internal and external publics? Filmmakers, for instance, possess a critical tool: storytelling. But too often, this instrument is pointed inward to glamorise crime, trivialise trauma, and distort our image in the pursuit of box office glory. A recent film, for instance, irresponsibly romanticised kidnap-for-ransom while maligning Islam, thus reinforcing stereotypes that worsen social fissures. This is artistic sabotage masquerading as creativity.
It's about time the government partnered with filmmakers to produce hard-hitting political thrillers, social dramas, and moral epics that diagnose Nigeria's ailments and offer a path to healing.
Hollywood perfected this strategy decades ago. Between 1911 and 2017, over 800 feature films received support from the U.S. Department of Defence. More than 1,100 television titles enjoyed Pentagon backing. These ranged from Iron Man and Transformers to Homeland, 24, NCIS, and others.
The United States' democratic enterprise is one of the most profitable constructions via art, in its bid to "make America great again," at any cost. It is both music and philosophy, a sensory stream of thought feeding generations of writers, political activists, filmmakers, politicians, gender rights activists, academia, and so on.
Hollywood, democracy and foreign aid do for America what painting and sculpture did for the Italians. They are potent tools for wooing and recolonising the world. Also, both China's and South Korea's cultural ascents were deliberately constructed around cinematic narratives aligned with national philosophy. Likewise, Nigeria must birth an artistic movement that elevates, not erodes, the collective psyche. The country's creative economy stands at an inflection point. With projections estimating a leap from $5 billion in 2022 to $25 billion by the end of 2025, there is an undeniable hunger for indigenous storytelling. Yet, economic prosperity must not overshadow ideological direction.
Nigeria must fuse state power with cultural influence to dismantle the criminal economy, using cinema, storytelling, and public-facing art to drive awareness while strengthening intelligence systems with drones, satellite surveillance, digital tracking, and community-powered reporting tools that predict and prevent abductions.
The government, in partnership with the creative sector, must spotlight the importance of state policing, securing forest corridors and rural communities, using film, radio dramas, and digital content to mobilise public vigilance, while a national forest security command, integrated with trained community vigilante units, constrains bandits' operations.
Through socially conscious art and nationwide cultural programming, the government must help citizens understand that no crime thrives where jobs, education, and social welfare exist, and the government must walk in virtual lockstep with what it preaches.
A nation's heart beats in its stories. A country without a socially responsible literary and artistic community is a body without a soul. Our filmmakers must move beyond the monotonous tropes of gender wars, feminist-misandrist vendetta-laden plots. Our novelists must cease writing solely for Western patronage and pity.
Shall we script a new national narrative? One that does not lament Nigeria but reimagines her. One that does not beg for Western approval but commands global reverence.
It's about time we resolved the maladies that make the Nigerian dream the fantasy of thieves, kidnappers, and blinkered murderers.