大象传媒

Since December, more than 600 students have been abducted from schools in north-west Nigeria, highlighting a worrying development in the country's kidnap-for-ransom crisis. We'll hear from the father of a returned schoolgirl, about the agony of not knowing what's happened to them. But it's not just schoolgirls. Nigeria is subject to a full-blown kidnapping industry, as Ikemesit Effiong of SBM Intelligence explains. And as the government denies it is paying ransoms, and calls grow for the crisis to be brought under control, Bulama Bukarti of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change explains just why it's so hard to combat the kidnappers.

Producer: Frey Lindsay

(Picture credit: A woman whose 2 daughters were kidnapped by gunmen cries at her home in Zamfara State, northwest of Nigeria, February, 2021. Image Credit: KOLA SULAIMON/AFP via Getty Images)