Will Owning Guns Make Nigerians Safer?

In March, the kidnapping of 39 students from the Federal College of Forestry in Kaduna made national and international headlines. This attack was only the latest in a series of increasingly brazen attacks on schools across the country. In each case, police and armed forces are powerless to prevent the attacks or track down the perpetrators. The policy of the Nigerian and state governments seems to be to pay ransoms, which only encourages more kidnappings. In 2013, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) created a Nigeria Security Tracker to measure violence caused by the ongoing Boko Haram conflict. Eight years later, the pervasiveness of violence in the country is disheartening. Already in 2021, the CFR’s security tracker counts at least 2,770 deaths—a figure that includes those killed by police, the armed forces, cultists, bandits and intercommunal violence. As troubling as that number is on its own, it fails to contextualize the true impact of insecurity. Firstly, violence that goes unreported in the news obviously cannot be accounted for in any database. Moreover, this figure does not track those who have physically injured or the mental burden borne by survivors and those who have lost friends and family. It does not measure economic and social costs of constant fear, as citizens worry that they too could be next: public spaces avoided, children pulled from school and journeys untaken. All Nigerians bear the burden of insecurity in one form or another.