When Crime Is Given an Ethnic Name
By Abdul Kezo IkonAllah
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Perhaps the most dangerous accelerant in Nigeria’s worsening insecurity is not the sophistication of weapons or the audacity of criminal gangs, but the ethnicisation of banditry. Although criminal networks often include actors from identifiable ethnic backgrounds, the violence itself is not driven by ethnic grievance. Yet across Northern Nigeria, selective media framing and political rhetoric increasingly cast banditry through identity lenses, particularly within farmer–herder narratives. This distortion is not only inaccurate; it is deeply dangerous.
Banditry in the North is, at its core, a criminal enterprise. It thrives on kidnapping for ransom, cattle rustling, extortion, and arms trafficking. Its roots lie in poverty, porous borders, weak law enforcement, illicit weapons flows, and the collapse of rural governance. These crimes are organised for profit, not for ethnic or communal domination. To frame them otherwise is to misunderstand both their motive and their structure.
Yet public discourse continues to drift toward collective blame. Crimes committed by specific gangs are routinely attributed to entire communities. Identity becomes shorthand for guilt, and suspicion replaces evidence. In farmer–herder contexts, this conflation has been particularly corrosive, transforming criminal violence into perceived communal aggression and turning neighbours into enemies.
The consequences are severe. Innocent civilians—farmers, herders, traders, women, and children—become targets of fear, profiling, and reprisal. Longstanding economic relationships fracture. Trust erodes. Communities retreat into defensive postures that deepen division and insecurity.
This narrative shift is often encouraged, or at least tolerated, by political actors who find convenience in identity framing. By presenting banditry as an ethnic problem, attention is diverted from governance failures and institutional weakness. Responsibility becomes diluted, while anger is redirected toward entire populations rather than the criminals themselves. Such rhetoric may mobilise short-term political support, but it leaves behind long-term social damage.
The media also bears responsibility. Language matters. Repetition matters. When reports emphasise the ethnic identity of criminals while neglecting their networks, financiers, and enablers, crime is transformed into a communal story rather than a security one. Over time, stereotypes harden, prejudice normalises, and the public begins to expect violence from certain groups while excusing violence against them.
Ironically, this ethnicisation strengthens the very criminals it seeks to condemn. As communities become suspicious of one another, cooperation with security agencies collapses. Intelligence dries up. Vigilantism rises. Criminal gangs exploit these fractures, embedding themselves within fearful populations who fear collective punishment more than criminal reprisals. In this environment, bandits become harder to isolate and easier to hide.
Northern Nigeria’s insecurity crisis is not an identity war; it is a failure of security, governance, and development. It requires intelligence-led policing, effective border control, arms regulation, economic inclusion, and the restoration of local authority in ungoverned spaces. None of these objectives are served by profiling entire communities or inflaming ethnic anxieties.
Leadership matters in moments like this. Political, traditional, religious, and media leaders must resist the temptation to mobilise identity for convenience or applause. They must insist on precision in language and clarity in responsibility. Criminals must be named as criminals, pursued as criminals, and punished as criminals—without ethnic generalisation.
History offers sobering lessons. Societies that allow crime to be defined by identity eventually lose the ability to distinguish guilt from belonging. When that line collapses, violence becomes cyclical, justice becomes selective, and peace becomes elusive.
Banditry is a crime. Ethnicity is an identity. Confusing the two is not merely an analytical error; it is a threat to social cohesion and national unity. Nigeria cannot defeat banditry by turning citizens against one another. It can only succeed by confronting criminals as criminals—and nothing else.
