Daniel Akande

Across Kwara State, especially in the northern and northwestern axis including Patigi, Edu, Kaiama, Baruten and their surrounding communities, a wave of brutal violence has swept through villages, leaving behind a trail of deaths, abductions, ransoms, and displacement. In several of these areas, local village heads have been kidnapped or killed, households destroyed, and entire communities forced to flee. While the attention of the national media often drifts toward the more publicized crises in the North West, the slow-burning insecurity in Kwara remains dangerously under-reported. Yet, for the farmers, traders, students, and working families who live in these areas, the crisis is not a statistic but a daily reality that has shattered livelihoods and eroded the fragile social order that once held rural life together.

From Rani and Rani Ramat villages in Patigi, to Edu LGA communities such as Kpanpkanragi and Gamalegi, Kaiama and Baruten in the northern corridor, and parts of Oke-Ode in Kwara South, the stories are strikingly similar. Armed men storm into villages at night, firing sporadically, looting food and money, abducting residents, and often demanding heavy ransoms. Several traditional rulers have been taken, sometimes killed even after ransom payments were made. In some cases, the attackers are reported to operate from forested hideouts in the Kainji and Babala axis, using motorcycles to raid settlements and retreat into the dense forest after attacks. The government’s responses have been sporadic, reactive, and largely ineffective. While police and military units occasionally deploy to the region, their presence is rarely sustained. Villagers describe feeling completely abandoned, left to organize their own vigilante networks with little to no support or equipment.

The socioeconomic effects of this crisis are devastating. Farmers are abandoning farmlands due to fear of ambush, worsening food insecurity in a state once described as part of Nigeria’s agricultural belt. Local markets are shrinking as traders avoid rural roads now controlled by kidnappers. Schools are closing in communities where parents can no longer guarantee the safety of their children. Families forced to pay ransom often sell their livestock, withdraw children from school, or relocate entirely, leading to a quiet but growing wave of internal displacement. Kwara’s insecurity crisis is not just a security failure; it is a humanitarian disaster in slow motion.

The Failure of Capitalist Governance

The roots of this insecurity lie deeper than the guns and forests. It is the direct product of systemic neglect, poverty, unemployment, and the capitalist decay of rural life. For decades, both federal and state governments have starved rural communities of infrastructure, healthcare, education, and employment. What remains of governance in these areas is largely ceremonial, with traditional institutions that once acted as mediators and protectors now targeted and silenced. The police and security agencies are underfunded, often corrupt, and disconnected from the local people. The few youths who try to survive are trapped between unemployment, exploitative labour, and the lure of easy money through violent crime.

This is the political economy of insecurity, a situation where state failure feeds private desperation. The capitalist ruling class, enriched through looting and patronage, has no interest in solving the root causes. Their children live abroad; their security is privatized. The ordinary people are left to face bullets, hunger, and grief. Every abduction in Kwara exposes the bankruptcy of the ruling system that treats security as a privilege rather than a right. The government’s narrow approach, deploying troops without addressing the structural roots of rural poverty, only postpones the next wave of crisis.

A Socialist Alternative and the Path Forward

The Movement for a Socialist Alternative (MSA) insists that insecurity cannot be defeated through bullets alone. The fight for safety must be tied to the fight for social justice, equality, and democratic control of resources. The first step is to place community security under public and democratic control, forming local people’s defence committees that work transparently with trained public security forces under community oversight. The second is to create mass public works and employment programs targeted at the youth in affected LGAs, funded through the reallocation of state resources and the taxation of wealth. This would provide jobs in rebuilding rural roads, reforesting degraded areas, rehabilitating markets, and restoring farmlands.

Land and resources must be managed democratically. Community cooperatives in farming, fishing, and local industries should be supported and publicly funded, ensuring that the wealth produced stays within communities rather than being siphoned by private contractors and political appointees. The state must guarantee universal access to education and healthcare as immediate social investments in rebuilding trust and stability. And where communities have been attacked, a transparent restitution program should be established to rebuild homes, compensate victims’ families, and rehabilitate livelihoods, not as charity but as a social right.

Ultimately, the violence in Kwara is a reflection of the larger crisis of capitalism in Nigeria, a system that has failed to provide jobs, food, and security for the majority while enriching a corrupt elite. A socialist alternative means redirecting national wealth to meet human needs such as food, housing, security, and employment instead of luxury for a few. The insecurity in Kwara must therefore be confronted as both a local emergency and a national warning: that without social justice, there can be no lasting peace.

The working people and youth of Kwara must unite with other oppressed groups across the country to demand a new order, one where security, jobs, and dignity are not privileges but rights guaranteed to all. The MSA calls for solidarity with the affected communities, mass mobilization to expose government negligence, and the building of a workers’ political alternative that can end the capitalist chaos breeding insecurity.

Only through a socialist transformation, one that places human life above profit, can Kwara and Nigeria break free from this endless cycle of poverty and bloodshed.