How kidnapping became a lucrative business in Nigeria

Just after midnight, strange noises interrupted the uneventful evening. Folarin Banigbe went downstairs to investigate the clanging sound that was piercing through the hum of active generators, the soundtrack to power cuts in Nigeria.

Banigbe headed towards the kitchen and looked up to see three men cutting through the iron bars on his window. His first impression was that these were “local, community thieves” who he could scare away. That was enough to be unnerving on any day — and not least that day, his wedding anniversary — but there are worse fates than being robbed in Port Harcourt, capital of the oil-rich Rivers state where he lived.

A worse fate was about to befall him.

It was the blinding light and loud bang that clued him up that something had gone seriously awry. He wasn’t hit by the explosion that broke through the bars. But soon the men forced their way into the kitchen and smashed a bottle on his head. Reeling from the pain, he was marched from room to room so they could ransack the house and grab everything they could find, from jewellery to electronic devices. Then one man hurled him downstairs and dragged him into their waiting van while the others carted away his valuables in his own car, another thing stolen.

At the time, almost a decade ago, the Nigerian national was managing director of an IT consulting company he had founded after a 15-year career as a global IT portfolio manager at energy giant Shell; this job had included stays in the UK, US, Netherlands, Russia and Nigeria. He also moonlighted as a pastor at his local church — he was preparing his Sunday sermon when he heard the break-in happening — and was the publisher of a community free sheet he had launched to “push the narrative” of a city he thought was more than the headlines of death and dismay typically associated with it.

His ordeal was terrifying, he tells the Financial Times from the safety of a Lagos restaurant, where he sips on a ginger-infused drink. For more than 36 hours, he was blindfolded and transported in a car, then across a river in a canoe, before being marched barefoot through farms as they headed towards his unknown destination. His abductors kept up pressure on his family to send a ransom, having extracted contact details from Banigbe, at one point demanding as much 50mn naira (about $252,000 at the time).

After five nights in captivity, Banigbe was freed by his captors. His family had paid a ransom — he declines to say how much exactly — to secure his release. He only describes it as “several millions” of naira.

“They didn’t beat me or physically torture me,” Banigbe says. “Of course, they threatened me, and the emotional and psychological torture was a lot.”

Banigbe’s experience offers a window into the booming business of kidnapping for ransom in Nigeria, an industry of pain causing havoc as authorities in Africa’s most populous nation struggle to contain the epidemic.

Kidnapping as an act of organised crime was relatively rare in Nigeria before the 1990s. Abductions were typically tied to political rivalries, intercommunal conflicts or ritual practices. But since the mid-1990s, kidnappings have become more widespread, beginning in the Niger Delta, where much of Nigeria’s oil wealth resides.

It was around this time that environmentalists and local activists began to denounce the practices of international oil companies operating in the delta. Oil spillages were polluting rivers and farmlands, depriving locals — many of whom tilled the land as farmers or worked in fishing — of their livelihoods. Tensions were threatening to boil over between oil companies and locals and, when environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others were executed by Nigeria’s military government on trumped-up murder charges, the situation deteriorated.

Local armed groups began abducting foreign oil workers and blowing up pipelines around the turn of the century to make a political statement, realising they could embarrass the Nigerian government — by now a nascent democracy — and also strike at its chief money-maker. Soon enough, they figured out they could make a third point: kidnapping expatriate workers for ransom could fund their cause — and their extravagant lives. Local and international oil companies tapping Nigeria’s crude reserves have operational headquarters in Port Harcourt and work in the oilfields that dot the Niger Delta, making the entire region a target-rich environment. Kidnappings soon became headline news.

“It was mostly the elite that was the target,” says a Nigerian politician who served as a governor and later as a federal minister. “Naturally, it drew media attention if you took a commissioner or foreign oil worker.”

A government amnesty, offered to the armed groups of the Niger Delta in 2009 as Nigeria sought to take back control of its oil wealth, led to the disbanding of many of the groups. Some of their leaders went into politics and became bigwigs.

But many of the underlings had acquired a taste for easy cash and began kidnapping wealthy and middle-class Nigerians for ransom. Foreign oil workers had largely fled home by this point.

According to a new report by Lagos-based risk advisory company SBM Intelligence, kidnappers in Nigeria demanded nearly $1.7mn in ransom in the year to June 2025, underlining its growth as a profitable enterprise in a country with few economic prospects. Numbers are probably higher, since many victims and their families, such as Banigbe, do not disclose the exact sums that secured their release, often to avoid making them targets for another group. Ransom demands typically begin from eight-figure naira sums that can be negotiated downward.

The richest people have 20 police officers in their houses — so the kidnappers come for people like us

If foreign expatriates and wealthy Nigerians were the first victims of kidnappings, the window has shifted in recent years to include just about everyone in the country. From the terror group Boko Haram abducting large numbers of schoolchildren to gangs in the north known locally as “bandits” taking villagers and students for ransom, nearly all parts of the country are now blighted by kidnapping, including its relatively secure south-west.

“As time went on, the pool of oil workers and rich Nigerians dwindled,” says Confidence MacHarry, senior security analyst at SBM Intelligence. “Currently, it is hard to say that richer Nigerians face more kidnap risk, since it has become a free-for-all that involves even the poorest members of society. But the rich pay more in ransom than the average person.”

In April 2022, the Nigerian senate passed a bill outlawing the payment of ransom to kidnappers, but the former governor says it is an ineffectual law. “Even when government says, ‘Don’t pay ransom,’ it’s the police that will advise you in the background to pay ransom, because they know they rarely arrest kidnappers.”

Nigerian elites occupy a unique, stratospheric position in society. Despite the grinding poverty that marks everyday life for the average citizen, the country’s richest seem to float above it all as they jet off on expensive holidays and enjoy the country’s exclusive private members’ clubs and restaurants.

In many ways, the realities of the haves and have-nots are so divergent that they might functionally live in different countries. The children of Nigeria’s elite attend the best schools abroad and now those schools are coming to Nigeria. The UK’s Charterhouse opened its doors in Lagos last year; Rugby school started operations last month, located at Eko Atlantic City, the futuristic “city within a city” (per its website) built on land reclaimed from the sea. Eko Atlantic’s other occupants include the US consulate in Lagos, a gargantuan $537mn project that will be the largest American consulate in the world when completed.

But despite the elite’s attempts to wall themselves off, the harsh realities of Nigeria — the threat of kidnapping and other violations of personal safety — still exist outside their gates, leading the richest people to take measures to protect themselves. Companies now take out kidnap insurance for senior executives, according to local media reports.

Private security coverage is on the rise, and it is not uncommon for the wealthiest Nigerians to move around town with gun-toting uniformed members of the national police as their personal security guards. International and local companies also deploy armed police, referred to as “protocol”, to escort their staff around. On a recent reporting trip with an international organisation just outside Lagos, I asked why their van was being escorted by armed guards through a relatively safe area. “New York wouldn’t allow us to go without them,” came the response.

Nigeria has an estimated 370,000 police officers for its more than 220mn citizens — approximately one for every 600 citizens, lower than the UN-recommended level of one for 450. Because Nigerian police are poorly remunerated, a secondment to a wealthy individual or private company is a much better gig. While the country’s poorest have to make to do, the elite have a praetorian guard. It is yet another way inequality manifests itself here.

“You’re dealing with a collapsed system, because you have now privatised official security,” says the former governor about Nigerian elites and their armed police guards. “Why should a minister or governor have a battalion of officers? It is because the general policing has broken down. Everything collapses when you don’t address security and welfare.”

The scourge of kidnapping is now a daily reality that Nigerians have learned to live with — like incessant power cuts and having West Africa’s best jollof rice. There seems to be a weariness among citizens, too, that authorities are overwhelmed with the problem and a realisation that not much will change without an improvement in the economic conditions of the country.

“We’ve now gotten to a point where you have a bit of money but no security,” Banigbe says. “The richest people have 20 police officers in their houses and so the kidnappers can’t go there. So they will come for people like us, middle-class Shell boys with money but no private security.”