Kidnapping Is The New Cattle Rustle

The kidnapping of more than 50 schoolchildren in Nigeria is not an anomaly — it is the predictable output of a political economy in which kidnapping has become a financially sustainable insurgent business model, with ransom payments (often quietly facilitated) providing reliable returns and negligible interdiction risk. Since the Chibok abductions in 2014, Nigeria has seen dozens of mass school kidnappings; the recurrence is not a security failure but a structural equilibrium in which the state's incentive to pay exceeds its capacity to prevent.