A brutal night raid in Southern Kaduna has left seven people dead, overwhelmingly children, and eight critically injured, shattering fragile hopes that Kaduna’s much-touted “Kaduna Model” peace pact with bandit leaders was delivering security.
The attack, which struck Angwan Rimi in Kamaru Ward, Kauru Local Government Area late on Sunday, August 24, 2025, exposes the perilous gap between government pledges and the lived reality of rural communities.
Community sources and the Irigwe Development Association told SaharaReporters that heavily armed assailants descended on the settlement, killing minors including Jacob Zaka (12), Margaret Mathias (5), Delight Paul (1) and several other children and youths named by local leaders.
Eight residents, some as young as one year old, were hospitalised with gunshot wounds and machete injuries. The pictures and eyewitness testimony supplied to reporters describe a scene of indiscriminate slaughter and mass panic.
Kaduna’s government has hailed the “Kaduna Model”, which is an ambitious, sub-national peace initiative involving dialogue, disarmament, rehabilitation and rural development, as a pragmatic attempt to end a decade of banditry that once choked highways and depopulated villages.
Officials have repeatedly pointed to dozens of combatants who reportedly laid down arms and to reopened roads such as the Kaduna–Birnin Gwari highway as early signs of success. But critics warned from the outset that negotiating with notorious warlords like the so-called Yellow Jambros and Dogo Giɗe without transparent safeguards and victim-centred accountability risked leaving communities exposed.
This strike in Angwan Rimi is the clearest, cruellest proof yet of that risk. The pact was supposed to remove weapons from the veld and reintegrate ex-fighters; instead, at least in this instance, it appears to have created openings for spoilers to resume violence, or for dissident elements who never bought into the deal to exploit loosened enforcement.
Local leaders are furious and are demanding immediate, visible security guarantees.
The attack comes amid a national deterioration in violence. Independent tallies show a sharp rise in killings in 2025: the first half of the year alone saw at least 2,266 deaths from insurgents and bandits (more than in all of 2024). This represents a widening security crisis across north-central and north-west Nigeria.
Analysts from ACLED and other monitors have repeatedly warned that armed banditry in the North West has grown into a resilient, illicit economy that cannot be wished away by ad hoc amnesties.
For victims’ families in Southern Kaduna there is no consolation in high-level policy debates. Calls from community organisations for the immediate deployment of adequate forces, for medical evacuation of the wounded and for accountability measures, including criminal investigations into those who break truces, are ringing unanswered.
The Irigwe Development Association’s plea for federal, state and local intervention is both urgent and reasonable. Peace cannot be imposed on paper while children continue to be butchered at home.
A candid assessment must follow. If sub-national peace pacts are to be a credible tool, they require at minimum:
(1) rigorous vetting of combatants who benefit from surrender programmes;
(2) independent monitoring and community participation in negotiations;
(3) a fast, transparent mechanism to disqualify and criminally pursue spoilers; and
(4) sustained security presence in vulnerable villages until local confidence is restored.
Anything less risks normalising impunity. ACLED and human-rights monitors have repeatedly emphasised that disarmament without accountability can entrench cycles of violence rather than resolve them.
Governor Uba Sani’s “carrot-and-stick” defence of the policy will now be tested. The Northwest Governors Forum’s earlier scepticism about negotiating with criminals looked prescient; Kaduna’s unilateral gamble has produced fragile gains and now, once again, catastrophic loss.
For policymakers the choice is stark: double down on opaque deals that may buy short-term calm at the cost of long-term safety, or recalibrate toward enforceable, victim-centred peacebuilding backed by credible security guarantees.
The families of Jacob, Margaret, Delight and the other victims deserve more than platitudes. They deserve swift justice, urgent medical care for the wounded, and a public accounting of how a pact designed to deliver safety failed so spectacularly in Angwan Rimi.
The rest of the nation should watch closely: if Kaduna’s model cannot protect its most vulnerable, neither can anyone claim a silver bullet for Nigeria’s wider Fulani militancy or banditry crisis.
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