ABUJA — President Bola Tinubu has ordered Nigeria’s bandits, kidnappers and the financiers behind them to surrender or face the full force of the state, using a Democracy Day address to project resolve over a security crisis that, by his own account, has begun to ease even as mass abductions push into new parts of the country.
To bandits, kidnappers, and sponsors of terror, surrender or face the full force of the Nigerian State, Tinubu said in the June 12 speech marking the anniversary of the country’s return to democratic rule. These windows of surrender will not remain open forever. No mercy will be shown to those who trade in the blood of Nigerians.
The president backed the warning with numbers. His government, he said, had allocated 5.41 trillion naira to defence and security in the 2026 budget, the largest such commitment in the country’s history, and approved the recruitment of more than 50,000 police officers alongside thousands of new military personnel.
Tinubu also claimed steady progress on the ground. More than 13,000 fighters had been neutralised over the past year, he said, while over 124,000 combatants and their dependants had surrendered since 2023 through Operation Safe Corridor, the government’s amnesty and de-radicalisation programme, and terrorism-related deaths had fallen sharply since 2015.
Those figures, which cannot be independently verified, sit awkwardly against the recent record. In May alone, gunmen abducted 38 schoolchildren and killed a teacher in Oyo State, while another 42 children were seized in Borno, the kind of mass kidnapping that has scarred northern Nigeria for more than a decade.
What alarmed officials about the Oyo attack was its location. The abduction struck the South-west, a region long considered relatively insulated from the banditry that has consumed the north, evidence that the threat is widening rather than receding.
The scale remains staggering. By one count from the NGO Global Rights, Nigeria recorded more than 600 kidnapping cases in 2025, and at least 2,400 students have been taken in major school raids since the Chibok abductions of 2014 first drew the world’s attention.
Tinubu’s own forces have logged hard-won successes. Last week Nigerian troops freed 360 captives from a fortified Boko Haram enclave in the Mandara Mountains, though community groups said the original number taken was higher and that several infants born in captivity had died before the rescue.
The president framed the fight as inseparable from his broader Renewed Hope Agenda, the governance and economic programme on which he staked his presidency, casting security as the precondition for the investment and growth he has promised Africa’s most populous nation.
Critics counter that the rhetoric has outrun results before. Successive Nigerian governments have declared bandits defeated or on the run, only for fresh waves of abductions to follow, and the spread of attacks into the South-west has hardened public scepticism about official optimism.
For families in the affected states, the ultimatum will be measured against a single test, whether the next school term passes without another convoy of children vanishing into the bush. Until then, Tinubu’s warning to the gunmen reads, to many Nigerians, as a promise the state has made and broken before.
