Last September, the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) paraded on television eight children who had been seized from Kano and other northern states by abductors and trafficked to the South–South and South–East through an interstate child trafficking syndicate.
In that incident, a member of the syndicate admitted to selling 21 children to one Nkechi Odlyne, who allegedly sold seven of them to Christopher Ogugua Nwoye, proprietor of Happy Home Orphanage in Asaba, at ₦450,000 each. NAPTIP disclosed that three of the children were from Gombe, while one had been claimed by a Kano mother as her missing daughter, Aisha Buhari.
The agency revealed that the minors, aged between two and ten years, were discovered in an orphanage allegedly run by a senior executive of the Association of Orphanage Operators in Nigeria, where more than 70 children—including 15 newly born babies—were being kept.
In January 2025, NAPTIP in Birnin Kebbi, the capital of Kebbi State in northwest Nigeria, said it had rescued 19 children trafficked from the Zuru area of the state to Calabar, Cross River State. While presenting nine of the children—whose parents had been identified—to Governor Nasir Idris, the State Commander of NAPTIP, Musbau Iya Kaura, said the agency rescued the minors from syndicates that specialized in child trafficking in Calabar.
Identifying six persons, including a female lecturer in Calabar, among the suspects arrested and charged to court in connection with the crime, the Commander added that the Calabar syndicates paid between ₦280,000 and ₦450,000 per abducted child.
The abduction of children from the North to the South is not a recent development. In October 2022, NAPTIP in Akwa Ibom State smashed a syndicate specializing in seizing minors and selling them to willing buyers. The Zonal Head of the agency, Tina Ugwu, revealed that about a dozen minors aged between three and nine were rescued from abductors in a camp along the Calabar–Itu Road.
For several years now, both conventional and online media have carried reports of the abduction of children from northern cities and towns to locations in the South. Many of these incidents have been verified by government anti-trafficking and security agencies.
Virtually all the victims are Muslim children seized by abductors from the southern part of the country and taken to holding centers in southern communities, where they are raised under new identities and religious beliefs. Those recovered are often rechristened and taught a new religion to replace that of their parents—and in most cases, employed as domestic servants or used for even more sinister purposes.
While governmental and non-governmental agencies battle the perpetrators of these nefarious acts, there has not been any deliberate effort to fathom the exact motives behind this bizarre development, much less determine whether these occurrences are random crimes or manifestations of a deliberate agenda. Meanwhile, Northern Nigeria remains engulfed in pervasive security crises, with its Muslim population often stigmatized as perpetrators rather than acknowledged as victims.
The incidents of abduction may seem disconnected, but the one-way trafficking of victims from the Muslim North to the Christian South depicts a pattern that demands closer scrutiny. The number of kidnapped minors discovered in the few cases solved by NAPTIP—undoubtedly only the tip of the iceberg—suggests that a vast number of children are being rustled like cattle in a burgeoning industry that even the agency has admitted is run by syndicates.
This population “theft,” coupled with the massacre of entire communities through insurgency and banditry, is inexorably decimating the population of the Muslim North. Considering that the youngest segment of society is being targeted, it poses a long-term danger to the future of this region and its people.
Southern Nigeria would have since reached such conclusions if the situation were reversed. The matter would have assumed national significance and attracted global attention. Northerners, both Muslims and Christians, would have been collectively branded as child abductors, and venturing into southern towns and cities would have become even more perilous, as each case would receive extensive media hype.
A case in point is that of Ese Oruru, the 14-year-old girl who eloped to Kano from Bayelsa State with a teenager, Yunusa Dahiru, in 2015. As southern media and activists such as Dr. Obiageli Ezekwesili joined forces—and with the cooperation of the Kano Emirate Council—the matter was transformed into a case of abduction, forced marriage, and forced conversion to Islam, eventually leading to Dahiru’s imprisonment.
Unlike the South, the Muslim North has neither the capacity nor the commitment to stand up to more grievous violations of their safety and dignity by outsiders who carry out far more dastardly acts within their communities. In Northern Nigeria, there are no equivalents of Ezekwesili or Sunday Igboho to advocate for indigenes or protect them against perceived injustices or physical threats from intruders.
Meanwhile, the North remains embroiled in internal acrimony. Externally sponsored insecurity is causing the disintegration of the Hausa–Fulani ethnic group—a people forged through centuries of intermarriage, social integration, and adherence to a shared faith. The resultant identity disputes are being fueled by revisionist narratives promoted by agents of subterranean interests.
Like pieces of a puzzle falling into place, the convergence of these events offers clues to understanding the crises ravaging Northern Nigeria—crises that increasingly appear to be part of a strategy to dismantle and weaken the region. Child abductors, bandits, insurgents, and promoters of the “Christian genocide” narrative are actors in an orchestrated gambit, synchronizing efforts toward a shared outcome.
Coming to terms with this destructive agenda—and confronting it with openness and sincerity—is the only way the North can survive as the cohesive entity it once was. If, however, matters have so degenerated as to make that impossible, the North must consider structural separation between its two major religious groups as the sole remaining option—whether or not the rest of the country follows suit.
