Nigeria’s kidnap-for-ransom market has matured into a brutal, profit-seeking industry that now treats places of worship and their staff as high value targets.
A new SBM Intelligence study, Locust Business: The Economics of Nigeria’s Kidnap Industry — A 2025 Update, shows 4,722 people were abducted in 997 incidents between July 2024 and June 2025, with kidnappers demanding roughly ₦48 billion and extracting about ₦2.57 billion.
The pattern is clear. The business is expanding, becoming more organised, and increasingly violent.
Where earlier reporting focused on priests as a distinct target group, the latest analysis finds the net has widened to include nuns, catechists, altar boys and seminarians.
The trend is now visible across regions, but it is particularly stark in the South-East and South-South where religious abductions are concentrated.
These are not isolated incidents. They are tactical assaults on institutions that are both symbolically important and, crucially for criminals, often linked to communities able to mobilise payments.
The human cost is stark. In March 2025 the Archdiocese of Kafanchan confirmed the kidnap and murder of Rev Fr Sylvester Okechukwu, taken from his rectory in Tachira and found dead the following day.
The case underlined how clerical abductions can end in murder and how the reach of violent gangs now runs into the homes of priests.
Days earlier elsewhere a 21-year-old seminarian, Andrew Peter, was abducted alongside a priest and subsequently killed.
The Diocese of Auchi and international church agencies have since chronicled multiple assaults on seminaries and minor seminaries. In July 2025 three minor seminarians were abducted and a security officer killed in an attack on the Immaculate Conception Minor Seminary in Edo State — a fresh sign that training institutions for clergy are now on the frontline.
SBM’s figures also show the economics at work. The report records that kidnappers requested, on average, very large naira sums in incidents it could verify. Between high single demands and mass abductions the cumulative ask was enormous.
The gulf between naira demands and dollar value is widening because currency devaluation has eroded purchasing power, forcing criminals to inflate naira demands to preserve real returns. That conversion squeeze helps explain why ransom numbers in naira look larger yet produce only modest dollar proceeds.
Families and dioceses are paying, sometimes quietly, sometimes under duress. SBM notes that only a small percentage of demands are verified as paid but where payments occur they appear to shape behaviour — prompt payments may free captives but they also signal profitability and encourage repeat attacks.
The Catholic Secretariat and church bodies say between 2015 and 2025 hundreds of priests and seminarians have been abducted and scores killed, a toll that demonstrates this is not a new trend but one that has accelerated and mutated.
Why the shift to nuns, altar boys and seminarians? There are four grim logic points. First, clerical and religious personnel are perceived as soft targets — often isolated and under-protected.
Second, kidnappers calculate that religious institutions can mobilise resources or find sympathetic intermediaries to negotiate.
Third, attacks on clergy sow communal fear and coercion, displacing community authority.
Fourth, the criminal networks are professionalising, able to plan mass operations and to extract larger collective payments.
International reporting and past SBM analyses point to poverty, weak policing and market incentives as root drivers.
What must change is urgent. The state must combine intelligence-led policing, properly resourced rapid response units, and a coherent anti-ransom policy that does not simply push payments underground.
Church bodies need crisis protocols, safer accommodation for clergy and seminarians, and coordinated reporting to civilian authorities.
Above all, the security architecture must recognise that kidnapping has become an economic sector. Treating it as episodic crime will not stop its expansion into sacred spaces.
This is a national emergency disguised as a catalogue of tragedies. When altars and seminaries are no longer safe, the state and church must act together to protect the most vulnerable and to choke the industry that treats human beings as tradable assets.
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