Blood on the Budget: Banditry, Political Betrayal, and Nigeria’s War on Its Own People
Albert Oloruntoba
Nigeria has committed over ₦32.88 trillion to defence in fifteen years. Over 614,000 Nigerians were killed by insecurity in a single year. Something is catastrophically, deliberately broken.
There is a particular kind of cruelty in dying a preventable death. It is different from dying of drought, or disease, or age. This is the cruelty of knowing that the resources to stop your death exist/ed, were budgeted for, announced, appropriated, but simply never arrived. That is the cruelty being visited daily upon millions of Nigerians. Banditry has graduated from what was considered rural nuisance into a full-spectrum existential crisis, while the political class that governs them has responded with a combination of theatrical budgets, cynical amnesty deals, and stunning impunity. The gruesome beheading of a school teacher in a video that has been circulating the round is one of the latest among many others of the sort that we have seen this year. The killing of a serving Brigadier General, the Benue, Plateau, Kwara killings of scores of people, including women and children, and many more situations which had not received public attention, all direct us to one fact: Tinubu and his band are a complete failure. They have carefully made banditry and kidnapping a multi-billion-naira industry.
The Architecture of Abandonment
When farmers cannot farm, food does not reach markets. When roads are too dangerous to travel, and many are, controlled at intervals by bandit checkpoints collecting levies from terrified travelers, supply chains collapse. The Food and Agriculture Organization projected that 33.1 million Nigerians would face high levels of food insecurity in the 2025 lean season, a figure representing a seven million person increase from the year prior, driven in significant part by insecurity-induced disruption to agricultural production in the North. Against this catastrophe, the Nigerian government has responded primarily with money, a vast, growing, largely unaccounted quantities of it. The trajectory is dizzying: defence and security allocations climbed from ₦2.41 trillion in 2022, to ₦2.9 trillion in 2023, to ₦3.85 trillion in 2024, to ₦6.57 trillion in 2025. In total, Nigeria has committed an estimated ₦32.88 trillion to defence over the past fifteen years – roughly 12.5 percent of total government expenditure across that period, according to reporting by Modern Ghana. When President Bola Tinubu presented his 2026 Appropriation Bill in December 2025, defence and security received ₦5.41 trillion – the single largest sectoral allocation in the entire ₦58.18 trillion budget. Yet, Tinubu’s presidency has presided over the worst insecurity problem in the history of democratic Nigeria.
The accompanying speeches that follow these figures have been emphatic. “Security is the foundation of all progress,” Tinubu declared in December 2024. “Our people should never live in fear – whether on their farmlands, highways, or cities.” These are fine words but Nigerians knew these funds will not go to where they have been declared they would be going. But the question that no presidential speech has satisfactorily answered is this: where does the money go? The answer, where it can be pieced together, is deeply alarming. Of the ₦4.52 trillion total expenditure proposed by the Nigerian Army for 2025, only ₦1.17 trillion – approximately 25.94 percent – had been disbursed by year’s end. Huge amount of money is always mentioned, but very little of it goes to where it is supposed to. This is what political ineptitude looks like in practice: declarations instead of prosecutions; budgets instead of deployments; press releases instead of justice. Those fat-bellied corrupt leaders swallow up everything at the expense of the suffering masses.
There is a concept in international law – the crime of omission – which holds that a failure to act, when one has the capacity and duty to act, can constitute a culpable wrong. By any reasonable standard, Nigeria’s political leadership stands implicated in this crisis not merely for its failures but for the structural conditions it has deliberately maintained. Our presidents, since Buhari have been most culpable. A political economy in which security budgets are chronically under-disbursed while presidential travel expenditures for 2025 were budgeted at ₦8.74 billion is not a system experiencing resource scarcity. It is a system expressing political priorities. A governance architecture in which military officers can be named in a government report as suppliers of weapons to bandits, and face no prosecution, is not a system that lacks accountability mechanisms. It is a system in which accountability has been actively neutralised. It is a system that thrives on the atenuje of honourless and dignity-less characters like Omokri, Bwala, Wike, and some so-called “celebrities” like Seyi Law, and many more, who are, as Wole Soyinka describes Elesin Oba, “laggards who drag their feet in dung and vomit, whose lips are reeking of the left-overs of lesser men”. And worst of it, all the cries of the masses, the gruesome beheading and shooting of the abducted live on videos, are not issues of national concern to this self-centered political class.
Something has to change
Nigeria is not a poor country. It is a country with poor governance. The distinction is decisive. With the political will, and the political accountability that this crisis demands but has never received, some very clear minimum reforms that even a ten-year old Nigerian child understands, are non-negotiable: full public disclosure and parliamentary audit of all security budget disbursements, with prosecutorial consequences for diversion; an immediate, independent investigation into allegations of military and political complicity in banditry, with power to name and indict serving and former officials; the abandonment of amnesty approaches that reward armed violence without accountability or verified disarmament; serious, sustained investment in the structural drivers of the crisis – rural employment, community-level dispute resolution mechanisms, cross-border law enforcement cooperation, and the recovery of state presence in territories that have effectively become bandit fiefdoms; and a fundamental reorientation of the state’s relationship with extractive neglect to genuine representation and resource distribution, and lastly which never happens, the failing leaders, e.g. Ahmed Tinubu should respectfully step down instead of playing political games with the lives of the people.
The Nigerian state has the obligation to protect its citizens. It has the resources, if not the will, to begin doing so. What it lacks, year after year, budget after budget, amnesty after amnesty, is the political honesty and duty of choosing its citizens over its interests. That choice, and its long overdue consequences, is what Nigeria’s dead and the living are owed.
Key Sources
ACAPS Conflict Dynamics Report, Nov 2025
Agu & Ugada, Banditry in Zamfara (2024)
Aina, Unsolicited Amnesty Schemes in Northwest Nigeria (2023)
FAO/Cadre Harmonisé Food Security Analysis (Nov 2024) |
Human Rights Watch World Report 2025
Musa, State Strategies and Banditry (2022)
Nairametrics / BusinessDay / Daily Post — Nigerian Budget Analysis (2024–2026)
Nigeria Human Rights Commission (Jul 2025)
Nigeria National Bureau of Statistics Insecurity Data (Dec 2024)
ScienceDirect — Banditry and Modern Slavery in Nigeria (2025)
The New Humanitarian — Why Bandit Amnesties Are Failing (2025)
The Soufan Center Intelligence Brief (Aug 2025)
UNIDIR Banditry Violence Report (Jul 2024)
