247ureports

PLATEAU STATE, September 2026 — A two-year-old girl who survived an August 18 massacre in Plateau State — found alive beneath the bodies of her parents and siblings after gunmen wiped out her entire household — has become a haunting symbol of a security crisis that now spans Nigeria’s Middle Belt, its North-Central states, and increasingly, its highways.

The child, identified in reports circulating online as Success Confidence, was among survivors of a night attack on Bin-Per community that left at least 24 people dead, according to community sources cited by Vanguard. Gunmen struck local vigilantes first before splitting into groups and moving house to house between roughly 11:30 p.m. and the early hours of Tuesday, August 18. In one compound alone, eight members of a single family were killed, leaving behind only the two-year-old, who survived with gunshot wounds. By sunrise, victims from across the community were given a mass burial. A faith-based advocacy organization, Equip & Empower Persecuted Christians, has said it covered medical costs for the toddler and three other survivors of the attack, though that specific claim rests on the organization’s own account.

The Plateau Indigenous Development Association Network (PIDAN) responded to the massacre with unusually sharp public criticism of the government’s security response. “Condolences are no substitute for security. Expressions of grief cannot resurrect the dead,” the group said, calling the scale of the crisis a matter requiring “extraordinary, immediate and unequivocal action,” and specifically urging the state government to declare a state of security emergency in vulnerable communities.

A Pattern, Not an Isolated Tragedy

Bin-Per was not an isolated incident. Plateau State has endured a string of similarly devastating attacks over the past 18 months. In April 2025, back-to-back massacres in Bokkos and Kimakpa communities left more than 100 people dead in the space of two weeks, with survivors describing gunmen who spoke Fulani language storming homes at night and killing indiscriminately — attacks with no reported arrests and no proven motive established by authorities, despite President Tinubu’s public order at the time for security agencies to “thoroughly investigate” and identify those responsible. Then-Governor Caleb Mutfwang, visiting affected communities after that wave of killings, admitted the government had fallen short: “All arrangements were put in place to avoid this, yet we failed you.”

That admission has aged uncomfortably. Sixteen months after Bokkos and Kimakpa, and following repeated presidential condemnations and federal assurances, Bin-Per shows the underlying dynamic — communities attacked at night, security forces arriving after the fact, and no clear accountability for perpetrators — largely unchanged.

Kogi: A Different Threat, the Same Sense of State Failure

While Plateau’s crisis has centered on nighttime massacres tied to longstanding farmer-herder and religious tensions, Kogi State has developed its own, distinct reputation — as ground zero for Nigeria’s kidnapping-for-ransom economy, particularly along its highways.

The characterization of Kogi as Nigeria’s “kidnapping capital” is not new; local commentary has used that description for close to a decade, tracing back to a wave of high-profile abductions beginning in 2013 that included relatives of a sitting governor and a former governor’s family. What has changed is the persistence and visibility of the problem. Data compiled by security-tracking organizations shows Kogi consistently ranked among the top five most kidnapping-affected states nationally in recent years, with dozens of documented incidents annually concentrated along the state’s major highways — particularly the Okene-Auchi and Anyigba-Lokoja corridors, and areas bordering Kwara, Ekiti, Osun, and Niger states.

Recent incidents illustrate why the label persists. On August 27, 2026, gunmen struck along the Ojuwo-Olijo axis of the Anyigba-Lokoja road — a route connecting Anyigba to the state capital, Lokoja — in an attack an opinion columnist described as further evidence that “our roads” have become “their hunting ground.” In May 2025, the agrarian community of Okoloke in Yagba West LGA was hit three times in a single week, with eight people abducted in total, including a 90-year-old traditional ruler whose family faced an initial ransom demand of ₦100 million. In December 2025, gunmen attacked a church during Sunday service in Ejiba, Kogi State, abducting twelve people including the presiding pastor.

Kogi State authorities have not been entirely passive — the state government launched a crackdown in mid-2025 that led to 26 arrests — but the recurrence of attacks along the same corridors, often within days or weeks of each other, has fed a persistent public perception that the state’s security apparatus is being outpaced by the criminal networks operating there.

A National Pattern the Numbers Bear Out

Kogi and Plateau are not exceptions; they are data points in a nationwide trend. According to a report released this month by SBM Intelligence, titled “The Economics of Nigeria’s Kidnap Industry, 2026,” at least 7,825 Nigerians were kidnapped in 1,713 separate incidents between July 2025 and June 2026 — a 66 percent increase in victims from the previous 12-month cycle. At least 1,142 people were killed during the same period. While total ransom demands fell from ₦48 billion to ₦22.9 billion, the amount actually paid by victims’ families more than tripled, from ₦2.56 billion to ₦7.78 billion, as the collection rate — the share of demanded ransom criminal networks actually succeeded in extracting — rose sharply from roughly 5 percent to 34 percent.

That trajectory — more victims, more successful extortion, despite lower headline demands — points to criminal networks becoming more effective, not less, even as the federal government continues to publicly frame insecurity as a top national priority.

A Government Struggling to Match Its Own Rhetoric

President Tinubu has repeatedly condemned individual attacks in strong terms and ordered investigations, as he did after Bokkos and Kimakpa in 2025. But the recurrence of similar attacks in Plateau in August 2026, and the unbroken cycle of kidnappings along Kogi’s highways over the same period, has left critics — including PIDAN and independent commentators — arguing that federal and state security responses remain reactive rather than preventive. Arrests following individual incidents have occurred, as in Kogi’s 2025 crackdown, but broader networks enabling both the Middle Belt’s ethno-religious violence and Kogi’s ransom economy have continued operating largely unimpeded, with SBM Intelligence’s national numbers suggesting the overall trend is worsening rather than improving.

For a two-year-old girl recovering from three gunshot wounds in a Plateau hospital, and for families in Kogi negotiating ransoms for kidnapped relatives along roads they can no longer safely travel, the gap between federal condemnation and facts on the ground remains, for now, the defining feature of Nigeria’s security crisis.