Banditry as a profit seeking criminal activity has a long history in Northwest Nigeria. Cattle-rustling, kidnapping for ransom, armed robbery, extortion, looting… these are the economic activities that drive armed groups in Zamfara, Kaduna, and Katsina states. However, since 2011, the Nigerian state’s failure to mediate between Hausa farmers and Fulani pastoralists has exacerbated the crisis, allowing dissatisfaction to harden into ethnic defense groups that evolved into, or collaborated with, bandit formations. These groups have built an alternative economic system that extracts revenue through territorial control and systematic taxation. Current operations to tackle banditry and provide security for the inhabitants of the northwest have relied on kinetic military interventions, which have been a far cry to solving these security concerns.

Cattle theft as foundation

Around 2011, cattle-rustling was the most lucrative criminal activity available for some Fulani men. Northwest Nigeria is not wealthy. Cattle is finite. Villages are small, and environmental degradation and desertification due to climate change have damaged the region severely. Climate degradation as well as a lack of provisions for young men have exacerbated ethnic disputes between Hausa farmers, sedentary in nature, and Fulani nomadic pastoralists, who require moving their cattle through areas that are either degraded or have been converted into farms. This has left a large proportion of these men without stable means to make a living and eroded their traditional way of life.

The affected Fulani men, many with herding experience, and who knew the main forest routes used for herding, resorted to cattle rustling and early forms of banditry. They could handle stolen herds through rough terrain and avoid villages entirely. But bandit strategies evolved beyond simple theft. The targets may be nomadic, but the consistency of choosing them created stable revenue. This drove the transition from opportunistic raiding toward systematic extraction.

Bandits diversified into hybrid operations combining mobile predation with stationary territorial control. This shift reflects rational economic calculation, not cultural tradition or ethnic grievance. Early criminal governance structures appeared almost immediately. One of the rustling gang leaders, Buharin Daji from Zamfara mediated local disputes, filling a governance vacuum. Another one, Terwase Akwaza also known as Gana from Benue, built a school and granted scholarships, positioning himself as a community benefactor. But as insecurity became more profitable, different bandit groups specialised. The early legitimation efforts gave way to systematic resource extraction.

Mining, taxation and control

Dogo Gide exemplified this evolution. He controls illicit gold mining, cattle rustling, and kidnapping operations. Local miners pay protection fees in cash. Chinese miners reportedly pay in currency and weaponry since at least 2020. Late 2023, saw Dogo Gide’s group seize full control of mining sites in Kaduna, expelling all mining companies and working the mines themselves; signalling an evolution that goes beyond protection rackets to direct control of production.

Economic control is linked to social control. Bandit groups prohibit residents from sharing intelligence with security forces, while informants are embedded in communities to track potential threats. Traditional community leaders, through coercion or transaction, provide logistical support enabling concealment of movements. Some bandit leaders combine economic monopolies (levies on farming and mining) with control of transport services and movement restrictions. Villages under bandit control often face extortion and forced labour. Entire hamlets exist in which every aspect of daily life operates under direct bandit control. These are ‘captive populations’: communities held hostage to serve wealth extraction operations. Since rural areas sit far from state centres, and Fulani traditional life is nomadic, expectations of what the state should provide run lower than in cities. Financing water supply requires far more effort than collecting monthly taxes. This explains why bandit governance provisions remain minimal, reaching a ‘Nash equilibrium of governance’ – a stable arrangement where neither party seeks to change the status quo. By merging resource extraction with intelligence denial and local coercion, bandits have created zones where they extract revenue systematically while preventing outside interference.

Forests as infrastructure

Northwest Nigeria’s geography facilitates this model but does not cause it. Armed bandits live in ungoverned spaces where government presence is minimal or absent, using forest enclaves as hideouts. Forests like Kunduma, Falgore, and Kamuk shield armed bandits from state security interventions. Response times measure in hours. By then, attackers have vanished.

Speed and stealth through forests enables operational hybridity. Bandits maintain territorial strongholds where rudimentary governance supports itinerant looting operations. They conduct mobile attacks while extracting stationary revenues through territorial control. The contiguous nature of these forests offers ideal corridors for communications, logistics, and operations. Forest areas extend to Niger Republic, where border porosity enables transnational crime networks.

Collaboration networks

Banditry is not unified. It operates through fluid dynamics combined with shared ethnic background (primarily Fulani men) and shared grievances. Competition exists, but collaboration dominates. The structure adds to their resilience with fluid memberships; individuals work under different leaders at different times.

This allows groups to collaborate in self-defence, protecting each other from Hausa vigilante groups and state security forces. They affiliate or trade with other non-state armed groups such as Boko Haram, ISWAP, Ansaru, and, while no ideological connection is established, the collaboration operates as ‘functional synergy’, a pragmatic cooperation serving mutual economic and defensive interests. Intricate webs of collaboration, combined with fluid membership and close ethnic ties, allow bandits to coalesce when threatened while maintaining operational autonomy otherwise. Interconnected ungoverned forest areas offer discrete corridors and transnational crime links. These networks have cemented bandit groups into the ecosystem of violence and illicit profit across northwest Nigeria and beyond.

Why military responses fail

Vadim Volkov’s observation about post-Soviet Russia applies here: violence has transferred from the public sphere of the state into ‘the sphere of private entrepreneurship’. In northwest Nigeria, the security gap results from capacity gaps when the state is unable, or unwilling, to provide even minimal core public services. Five of the ten poorest states in Nigeria  are in the north and northwest regions, falling behind on key governance indicators such as capacity for Internally Generated Revenue, infrastructural development, literacy levels, and security.

Governance emerges from commercial necessities. Stable operating environments, reliable revenue streams, and local acquiescence all serve to sustain illicit activities. Military solutions alone cannot dismantle systems that have achieved equilibrium with local populations. Effective responses must address underlying capacity gaps that create profit opportunities for violent entrepreneurship while acknowledging the governance functions these groups now provide.

Years of counterinsurgency operations have failed because they treat bandits as simple criminals to be defeated militarily. But bandits are entrenched governance providers operating within a rational political economy. Understanding them as profit-seeking actors who leverage spatial advantages to entrench extractive economic systems reveals the fundamental flaw in current responses. Military operations ignore the economic logics that sustain these groups and the governance arrangements that protect illicit revenues. You cannot defeat an economic system with air strikes alone.