By Nnaoke Ufere, PhD*
This title is uncomfortable for President Tinubu and many politicians, and it should be. Nigeria’s struggle with terrorism, banditry, and kidnapping did not happen by chance.
What we are seeing today is the predictable result of years of social neglect, economic exclusion, and the silent acceptance of child hunger and widespread deprivation as normal conditions of national life.
We live with a damaging contradiction. As a society, we reward wealth without work and celebrate success without accountability, even while corruption happens openly and goes unchallenged.
Each day, Nigerians hear reports of billions of naira stolen from public funds, projects abandoned after payments are made, and political elites enriching themselves without consequences. These actions are not hidden. They are visible, repeated, and effectively rewarded.
According to sociologists Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell, who developed the concept of mimetic isomorphism, individuals and institutions tend to copy behaviors they observe being rewarded, especially in conditions of uncertainty. When political and economic leaders openly profit from corruption and face no penalties, those behaviors become normalized and imitated across society.
This aligns with Albert Bandura’s theory of social learning, which holds that people learn acceptable behavior by observing role models, particularly those in positions of power. In Nigeria, the most visible role models often demonstrate that success comes not through merit, work, or legality, but through access, theft, and impunity.
At the same time, most citizens are denied legitimate paths to advancement. Quality education, stable employment, affordable housing, and basic necessities remain inaccessible or unevenly distributed. The gap between what society promotes as success and the lawful means available to achieve it continues to widen.
Sociologist Émile Durkheim described this condition as anomie: a breakdown of social norms caused by the collapse of shared moral rules. Robert Merton later expanded this idea, arguing that when societies emphasize goals but block legitimate means of achieving them, individuals adapt through deviance.
Under these conditions, crime and violence are not moral failures or cultural defects. They are predictable responses to a system that rewards corruption at the top while denying opportunity at the bottom.
I am not suggesting that other factors, such as tribal, religious, and ideological beliefs, are not antecedents to lives of terrorism and banditry. Rather, behind all of these lies a common underlying force: poverty, hunger, and anomie.
Until we confront this reality, we will continue to explain terrorism, banditry, and kidnapping as isolated evils rather than as symptoms of failures we have allowed to harden over decades.
The human consequences of these failures are already visible across our country. From Owerri to Maidugri, from Jos to Zamfara, from Benin to Kaduna, and from Akure to Damaturi, particularly in impoverished urban settlements and rural communities, children are born into households where hunger is routine and education is inaccessible.
Many enter the world malnourished, medically vulnerable, and socially invisible. Their parents, often shaped by deprivation themselves, lack access to stable income, quality education, or meaningful state support. Poverty reproduces itself long before a child is old enough to understand it.
This crisis is neither abstract nor distant. This Christmas season, while the privileged among us celebrate abundance and goodwill, roughly 600,000 babies will be born in Nigeria alone, according to United Nations population estimates.
Many of these children will arrive in conditions that all but guarantee desperation and social strain. What we refuse to confront today will return to confront us tomorrow in far more dangerous forms.
Available crime statistics and demographic data suggest that when 100 young people are selected at random in our country, approximately 12 will eventually engage in violent criminal activities, including terrorism, banditry, kidnapping, armed robbery, or drug trafficking.
Applied at scale, this means that of the roughly 600,000 children born this month, an estimated 72,000 face a high risk of entering criminal activity, particularly given the severe poverty, limited education, and social deprivation that will shape their early lives. This number is the low end of the estimate.
This is not a prediction driven by fear, but a projection grounded in existing patterns. When large numbers of children are raised in conditions of hunger, exclusion, and institutional neglect, the outcome is not uncertainty—it is statistical likelihood.
Despite these realities, our policy response has been disturbingly indifferent. The Tinubu administration, along with several state governments, appears to treat widespread poverty and hunger as acceptable collateral damage in the pursuit of policy goals.
According to the World Food Programme, approximately 35 million Nigerians are currently facing acute food insecurity. Millions of the country’s most vulnerable citizens go to bed hungry each night, unsure where their next meal will come from.
Hunger is no longer addressed as a national emergency requiring urgent action. It has become a normalized condition in the poorest communities, even as the Tinubu administration promotes a narrative of economic growth and progress.
In our impoverished households, childhood is brief. By adulthood, many young people from this environment are absorbed into criminality not by choice, but by necessity. Deprived of education, dignity, and lawful means of survival, they become easy targets for recruitment into terrorism, banditry, kidnapping, and armed robbery.
What I am convinced of is that violence in our society does not emerge spontaneously. It is cultivated through sustained neglect, deprivation, and policy failure. It is man-made.
Through its policies and, in some cases, the absence of effective ones, the Tinubu administration is inadvertently shaping the conditions that will produce the next generation of terrorists, bandits, and kidnappers. These outcomes are not accidental. They are the direct consequences of choices made today.
Recruiting Pipeline for Terrorists and Bandits
Armed groups do not recruit from stable communities. They recruit from abandonment. Persistent deprivation creates a reliable breeding ground and a steady pipeline of young people into violent crime.
Groups such as Boko Harem, ISWAP, as well as bandit gangs and commercial kidnapping networks across the country, consistently draw recruits from the same pool: neglected and impoverished communities. In areas affected by terrorism and banditry, recruiters deliberately target young men who grew up unseen, unheard, and unsupported by the state.
Testimonies from rehabilitated bandits and former terrorists confirm this pattern. Many describe childhoods marked by hunger, exclusion, and proximity to visible wealth they could not access. They went to sleep hungry while political and social elites lived comfortably nearby.
When these young men are offered money, protection, status, or a sense of belonging, framed loosely as ideology or justice, the choice they make is rarely ideological. It is a rational economic decision shaped by years of abandonment. Violence becomes not just an option, but the most accessible path left open to them.
As a society, we respond too late and then with condemnation. We label these young men criminals or extremists without acknowledging the conditions we allowed to shape them.
The same society that ignored them as children suddenly demands accountability when they reappear as threats. This selective morality allows us to treat violence as a security issue rather than as a social consequence of our collective failure.
A Never-Ending Cycle?
President Tinubu did not create the cycle of poverty that fuels criminality, but it is now his responsibility to break it. During the 2023 campaign, he promised to tackle insecurity and economic hardship.
Yet the cycle remains unbroken. Killings, kidnappings, and banditry continue at an unrelenting pace and, in many areas, have moved beyond effective control.
One reason this failure persists is that the administration has not addressed the root causes of insecurity or the self-reinforcing relationship between deprivation and criminal behavior. Policies have focused on symptoms rather than the conditions that continually reproduce violence.
Children raised in environments shaped by hunger, fear, and instability are far more likely to carry those conditions into adulthood. As insecurity spreads, communities lose the ability to protect, educate, and support their young. Schools shut down, livelihoods disappear, and hunger deepens, strengthening the same pipeline that feeds criminal networks.
Each generation becomes more alienated and more vulnerable than the last. Public holidays and religious seasons come and go, filled with calls for peace and charity, while the structural social and economic drivers of violence remain largely unaddressed.
If If we continue to tolerate child hunger as an unfortunate but acceptable reality, we will keep paying for that tolerance in blood and instability. Every hungry child ignored today becomes an adult forced to negotiate survival in a hostile and unequal world. Some will find lawful paths despite the odds, but many will not. Those odds are shaped long before the first weapon is picked up.
This is why leadership choices matter. It is important to acknowledge leaders who are taking meaningful steps in the right direction. Governors Alex Otti of Abia, Mohammed Umar Bago of Niger, Babagana Zulum of Borno, Charles Soludo of Anambra, Uba Sani of Kaduna, Abba Yusuf of Kano, and Babajide Sanwo-Olu of Lagos have, in different but commendable ways, designed and implemented policies aimed at reducing poverty and expanding access to education in their states.
Their efforts demonstrate that this trajectory is not inevitable. Sustained investment in social welfare, education, and human capital is both achievable and effective when there is political will.
Christmas commemorates the birth of hope under conditions of poverty and hardship. But hope without responsibility is hollow. Until child welfare is treated not as charity but as national security, this cycle will continue. Hungry children will keep growing into angry adults, and society will continue to express surprise at outcomes it helped create.
It does not have to be this way.
Merry Christmas.
*About the Author
Nnaoke Ufere is a leading voice in African public thought and policy. He writes a weekly opinion column for the African Mind Journal, where his work shapes national conversations on leadership, governance, and reform. He is the author of Covenant With Nigerians: Reversing Our Country’s Decline. Nnaoke graduated from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka with a first class honors degree in Electrical/Electronic Engineering in 1981. A Harvard MBA alumnus and PhD holder in Strategic Management from Case Western Reserve University, Ufere is an influential author, public intellectual, and global development analyst whose insights on U.S.-Africa relations and institutional accountability continue to challenge the status quo and inspire change.
