August 28, 2026
A single terrorist organisation accounted for 90 per cent of all ransom reportedly paid to kidnappers in Nigeria between July 2025 and June 2026, despite criminal gangs and bandit groups making the bulk of ransom demands, a report by SBM Intelligence has revealed.
The finding is contained in the 2026 edition of SBM’s Economics of Nigeria’s Kidnap Industry report, which examined the actors benefiting financially from kidnapping across the country.
For the analysis, SBM said it attributed every ransom demand and payment to the actor identified in reports of each incident.
It explained that although its database records bandits and kidnappers as separate entities, it grouped bandits under the broader “kidnappers” category for the actor-level analysis.
