On 26 November 2025, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu signed a statement and told Nigeria there would be “no more hiding places for agents of evil.” He declared a nationwide security emergency. He ordered security agencies to match the forests and catch criminals. He ordered 20,000 additional police recruits. He said, in the language of a man who believes language is enough: this is a national emergency, and we are responding.
I want to ask a question, and I want the President’s office to sit with it: what exactly does a security emergency mean to a poor man in Nigeria who wakes before dawn, works until he cannot, and is asking for nothing more extraordinary than the right to return to his family at the end of the day? What does it mean to him that you deployed forest guards when he is in a forest that your guards have not reached? What does an emergency declaration mean to a family sitting in a room, speaking in whispers, calculating a ransom they cannot pay, waiting for a state they fund with their taxes to remember that they exist?
I know what it means. It means nothing. It has meant nothing for the three weeks my uncle has been in captivity. My uncle, and 9 others are still in captivity. The evil found hiding places. It found several. And the forest guards could not spot them.
I am writing this not only as a grieving nephew. I am writing this as a journalist who has spent the better part of a decade documenting exactly this failure. And several other failures. The kidnapping economy, the ransom infrastructure, the security budgets that produce press releases and kill counts but not rescued hostages, the particular mathematics of a state that has decided the lives of the Talakawa are not worth the operational cost of saving them. I founded WikkiTimes in 2018 to expose these things. I was arrested for it. I was beaten in detention for it. I fled Nigeria for it. None of my efforts, nor those of many courageous Nigerian journalists and activists over the years, have protected my uncle and many others.
Let me tell you who my uncle is, so you understand precisely whose life I’m writing about. He is not a politician. He is not a contractor. He does not own land in Abuja, has no generator, and has no cousin in government. He is a poor man in the truest sense of that word. Trust me, not poor as a metaphor, not poor as a class label, but poor as a daily negotiation, a life measured in the distance between hunger and enough. He works hard. He provides. He asks the Nigerian state for nothing except the basic security that the1999 Constitution defines as the primary purpose of government. The primary purpose. Not a secondary purpose. Not an aspirational purpose. The primary one.
He did not get it. He was taken.
The kidnappers were initially almost reasonable about it. They had done their surveillance — they always do, this is documented, this is how the enterprise operates. They knew where he lived. They knew what he owned. They knew what he could plausibly raise. A man who has spent his life negotiating between hunger and enough does not present as a profitable target in the conventional sense. So, they held him. Days became a week. A week became two. Two became three. And then they changed their minds.
They are now demanding N100 million.
I will not leave that number on the page without doing what it deserves. At Nigeria’s current minimum wage of N70,000 per month, a figure most rural Nigerian workers never actually receive, N100 million is 119 years of earnings. Do you understand what I am saying? One hundred and nineteen years. My uncle is not 119 years old. He has days to pay that money to the kidnappers. A subsistence farmer in Northern Nigeria might earn N400,000 in a good harvest year. To raise N100 million through farming alone would require 250 uninterrupted years of harvest. The land does not give that. No family gives that. Yet this is what the kidnappers — operating in forests that three successive governments have promised to clear — have decided a poor man’s life is worth extracting from a family that cannot feed two hundred and fifty years of farming into a single demand.
The Nigerian National Bureau of Statistics has told us that between May 2023 and April 2024, Nigerians paid approximately $1.42 billion in ransoms. Not naira. Dollars. This is not a crime of desperation. This is an economy. It has pricing strategies, market intelligence, and a management structure operating from forests that Operation Hadarin Daji and Operation Fatsan Yanma have been promising to dismantle for years. The government counts its victories in bandits killed, not in hostages returned. That is a choice. It is a deliberate measurement choice, and the metric you choose reveals the outcome you are actually optimizing for.
Back to my uncle’s story. Our family held a meeting when he was taken. We debated going public. We decided against it because the moment kidnappers believe a hostage has a relative in Europe or the United States, the calculation inflates. My being in America is not wealth. But perception is the currency of the kidnapping economy, and we could not spend it carelessly. So we kept quiet. We waited. We hoped the state that declared an emergency in November would reach us before the ransom deadline.
We are still waiting. Nothing from the state. The kidnappers now know that their hostage has a nephew in America. They whispered that to him. How they know, I have no idea.
I am going public now because silence no longer counts. Silence has allowed the Nigerian state to process this emergency as a communication problem rather than a governance failure. Five days after Tinubu signed his declaration, a national daily ran the headline: Fresh Abductions, Killings Test Tinubu’s Security Emergency, Heighten Anxiety.
The emergency had not stopped the kidnappings. It had generated press releases faster than it generated rescues. My uncle is still in the forest that the press release promised to clear.
I am naming the institutions responsible: the Department of State Services, the Nigeria Police Force, the Nigerian Army, and the Office of the National Security Adviser. I name them not to perform outrage but because accountability without specificity is decoration. Somewhere in those institutions, someone has intelligence about the forest where my uncle is being held. I am asking, publicly, on the record, because I know they know the kidnappers. They know them. They have what it takes to fetch them.
Do not mistake this appeal for helplessness. I know what the Nigerian state is capable of when it decides that a life is worth retrieving. I have watched it deploy resources for politicians, protect businessmen, and negotiate for citizens whose names appear in newspapers. My uncle’s name does not appear in newspapers. He is a poor man. He is, by every measure that the Nigerian state uses to allocate its protection, invisible.
I am making him visible now.
The Talakawas of Nigeria are dying, being abducted, being ransomed, being processed as inventory by an armed economy that the state has spent a decade failing to shut down. And the people entrusted to respond declare emergencies and wait for the press cycle to move on. This must stop. Not because my uncle is ransomed.Because the Constitution says so. Because 100 million naira extracted from a subsistence family is not a ransom. It is a verdict. It is the Nigerian state’s verdict, rendered through inaction, on the value of a poor man’s life.
My uncle deserves better than that verdict.
So do the thousands of Nigerians sitting in rooms like ours tonight, calculating impossible sums, waiting for an emergency that has not yet reached their forest. That is the price we pay for being Nigerians.
Haruna Mohammed Salisu publishes WikkiTimes and writes this piece from the USA.
