In the shadows of Niger State’s increasingly lawless countryside, a family’s worst fears have come true. Lami Dada, kidnapped alongside her husband on a fateful October day, will never return home. Her life was extinguished by her captors on Sunday—a brutal end to months of torment for a family already pushed to the brink of destitution.
The kidnapping occurred on October 31st as Yakubu Dada, a retired civil servant working with the World Health Organisation, traveled with his youngest wife Lami toward Kontagora. The region, once known for its agricultural bounty, has in recent years become notorious for armed banditry and kidnapping-for-ransom operations that security forces seem powerless to curtail.
“We sold everything,” whispers Maimuna, Dada’s eldest wife, her voice hollow with grief and exhaustion. The family’s desperate struggle to save their loved ones led them to sell their home, vehicles, and even basic household items like beds and televisions. Ten million naira about $6,250 everything they could possibly gather—was delivered to the kidnappers in November, carried into the dense forests of neighbouring Kebbi State by Dada’s brother.
But the bandits’ appetite for extortion proved insatiable. Despite receiving this enormous sum, they demanded an additional 60 million naira($37,500), later “reduced” to 20 million($12.500) and four Bajaj motorcycles—vehicles prized by criminal gangs for their manoeuvrability on the region’s rough terrain and forest paths.
For a retired civil servant’s family, these demands represented an impossible burden. Months passed in agonising limbo until Sunday, when the kidnappers executed Lami, allowing her devastated husband to deliver the news himself during a brief, monitored phone call. “He broke the news that Lami had been shot dead,” Maimuna recounts, “and warned that they would kill him too if we fail to raise another 20 million Naira and provide four motorcycles.”
This tragedy unfolds against a backdrop of deteriorating security across Nigeria’s North Central and Northwestern regions, where armed groups operate with disturbing impunity. The bandits’ ability to hold captives for months, communicate ransom demands repeatedly, and move between states suggests a security vacuum that emboldens criminal enterprises.
Local communities, left largely to fend for themselves, have turned to whatever support networks remain. At Friday prayers, neighbors gathered to hear pleas for help for the Dada family—a somber testament to the collapse of formal security structures.
As Maimuna begs the Niger State government and security agencies to rescue her husband before he meets the same fate as Lami, her plea echoes those of countless other families caught in similar nightmares across the region.
Police spokesperson SP Wasiu Abiodun’s promise to “revert” offers little comfort to a family that has already lost so much—and now waits in dread, wondering if they will lose more.
