Guns on campuses, knives in the streets: Nigeria, we have a gang problem
On a casual scroll on Facebook earlier this week, I came across a disturbing video of a violent clash between two local gangs somewhere in northern Nigeria. This clash involved dozens of gang members bearing axes, machetes, and daggers, and they were throwing rock projectiles at each other. It was a short clip that reminded […]
some of the guns allegedly recovered from the suspect
On a casual scroll on Facebook earlier this week, I came across a disturbing video of a violent clash between two local gangs somewhere in northern Nigeria. This clash involved dozens of gang members bearing axes, machetes, and daggers, and they were throwing rock projectiles at each other. It was a short clip that reminded me of the savagery and brutality of the Battle of Five Points in Martin Scorsese’s award-winning movie, The Gangs of New York. Except there was nothing cinematic about this video, and the blood spilled was real.
Gang violence has always been endemic in Nigeria. Growing up in Jos, we were constantly inundated with news of gang violence between the Kwararrafa boys, the Yan Shanu, or the Gangare gangs, among others. Hordes of ‘Yan daba’, as they are called, would go off to battle over slight infractions, such as one gang member speaking to a rival gang member’s girlfriend. On such accounts, lives have been lost, leading to reprisals and more reprisals and an endless chain of killings.
Some years ago, my mother’s best friend lost her son in one of these clashes. His fatal stabbing led to a reprisal in which several people were killed and maimed. But since her son’s death, my mother’s friend was never the same. She went about with a haunted look in her eyes for the rest of her life until her death. No mother would be the same after seeing the butchered corpse of her son like that.
Her story is not unique. Hundreds or perhaps thousands of families across Nigeria are grieving the loss of loved ones in gang violence that has become the bane of urban areas in the country, from Gombe, where the ‘yan kalare reigned, or still do—I am not updated on the current situation there—to Kano, where ‘dabanci’ has always been in fashion, with gang members now knifing law-abiding citizens to steal their phones.
This is a problem so pervasive that universities in the south of the country, which are supposed to be training our future intellectuals, have become breeding grounds for half-educated gang members who operate as cults. The situation is so bad that SBM Intelligence, in its recent report, said that between January 2020 and March 2025, 1,686 deaths from 909 gang-related incidents have been recorded. The highest number of deaths occurred in 2021, with 377 deaths from 173 incidents. Over the years, the number of incidents has increased, peaking in 2024 with a reported 273 gang-related incidents. Surprisingly, the rise in incidents comes with a drop in lethality, which may suggest a shift in violence patterns.
Places like Rivers State have become hotspots for gang violence, where dangerous gangs like the Icelanders, Greenlanders, Deebam, and Deywell have turned the state into a killing field, with violence often reported in Khana, Gokana, Emohua, and Port Harcourt resulting in fatalities, reprisal attacks, and displacements of residents.
However, the assumption that gang violence is most prevalent in the south of the country, as claimed by the report, may be a case of information asymmetry, with cult violence receiving more coverage in the media than clashes among ‘yan daba thugs and the damage they inflict on society.
The major difference between the gang violence in the north and south is that while the gangs in the north originate from the streets, where most gangs in the world originate from, gangs in the south mostly sprout from educational institutions, from secondary schools to tertiary and sometimes even in primary schools. While street gangs in the north often operate with blades—daggers and machetes, the ones in the south use more sophisticated weapons to wreak greater havoc. In the end, blade or bullets, both gangs are degrading the fabric of society and holding back the development of communities across the country.
Often, these gangs have operated in the full view of the law. Sometimes, it is hard to believe that there are no specific arrangements or “understandings” between the thugs and the police. When I wrote in my novel, Season of Crimson Blossoms, of San Siro, the local drug den that was neighbouring a police station, I was asked by many people if such a place existed. In this case, fiction mirrored reality almost to perfection because the inspiration for San Siro was indeed a thug’s safehouse that was next to a police station in the outskirts of Abuja. In the conversations that followed the publication of that book, many other readers from across the country have reported the existence of similar tangoes of gang dens and police posts in various locations in the country. It would appear that the existence of both in very close proximity, each fully aware of the existence of the other, is an anomaly that is bizarrely all too common in the country.
While this arrangement may be bizarre, it is not completely removed from the fact that a good number of these gangs or thugs are directly in the employ of some politicians who utilise their services to secure electoral wins. Allegations of politicians funding and arming such gangs and protecting them from the law have been prevalent. The uncommon audacity with which the groups operate in the full view of the law is not without some power behind the scenes. The problem is that after a while, the gangs become a thorn in the flesh of the same politicians who encouraged them. In other cases, they are informally incorporated into state apparatus for the terrorisation of people, as was reportedly the case in Gombe and some other states some years back.
Occasionally, the authorities are intentional about clearing street gangs. Sometimes a newly appointed police commissioner would come in with a zeal to make an impression and wipe out the gangs before they firm up arrangements with the new man. Sometimes, a new governor is determined to clear out the “political structure” of his defeated rivals.
It may be completely impossible to eradicate street gangs, as they still exist in most major cities in the world. It is, however, strange that cult groups, which according to their advertised objectives, as stated by some of their founders like Wole Soyinka, are to protect students’ interests, have deviated completely and become bloodthirsty hounds that terrorise law-abiding citizens. They have turned our crumbling citadels of knowledge into blood-drenched houses of horror. One that we, as a society aspiring for growth, cannot continue to suffer.
There must be a deliberateness to curbing gangs, thugs, and cults by clamping down on their recruitment, curtailing their activities, and eradicating them completely. If necessary, the police might need to create a special division or unit that would focus on a proactive approach to tackling gang violence, not by reacting to violence, or only patrolling the streets in run-down police trucks, but by utilising smart intelligence gathering and preemptive operations. These operations must be designed to gather evidence for the diligent prosecution of gang members and ensure that justice is done by putting them away in correctional facilities.
The rights of Nigerians to walk about freely on the streets and to learn in serenity on our various campuses must be protected at all costs. Parents should never fear to send their children out to play or to learn with the fear that instead of returning as surgeons, they may return as cold-blooded butchers of other parents’ dreams.
We simply cannot normalise a country where sending a child to school or to buy bread comes with the risk of losing them to gang violence. The blood of children should not be the ink on which our nation rewrites its future.