The Order of The Knights of Saint Mulumba Nigeria (KSM) has issued a scathing indictment of the nation’s escalating security crisis, expressing “grave alarm” over an industrial-scale kidnap-for-ransom economy thriving under what it terms the “silence of the State.”
In a well worded statement entitled A Nation For The Taking and signed by the Supreme Knight, Sir Steve Adehi, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, the influential Catholic fraternal organization, declared that Nigeria’s current security approach has fundamentally failed. Highlighting a breakdown where “no status confers immunity” and “no road is exempt,” KSM warned that criminal enterprises have assessed the government’s capabilities and “found it absent.”
The Knights of St. Mulumba pointed out a stark failure in the Federal Government’s approach to securing educational institutions. Since 2024, more than 600 pupils and teachers have been taken in mass abductions. Concurrently, the Federal Government has invested an estimated 145 billion naira into the Safe Schools Initiative.
“The arithmetic is its own indictment,” the statement reads. “The kidnap economy expands while the sums committed to stopping it grow. A policy that produces this outcome is not a policy. It is a ritual. When a state can not guarantee that a child will return from school, every other promise it makes loses its meaning.”
The Order emphasized that recent school raids in Oyo and Borno States, the murder of a teacher in Oyo, and the brazen daylight abduction of 13 travellers, including a seven-month-old infant along the Biu-Damaturu highway are not isolated tragedies. Instead, they represent a highly synchronized, public pattern where perpetrators openly negotiate and circulate footage, using each unanswered atrocity as a “recruiting poster.”
While saluting the bravery of frontline military and security personnel who have given their lives, KSM directed its criticism entirely at State Doctrine. The organization criticized the cyclical pattern of “reactive surges, post-incident press briefings, and ceremonial visits to fresh graves,” noting that criminals now actively anticipate and exploit these predictable responses.
The Order further stated it will not pretend that inter-agency coordination is effective, that security votes are reaching their intended purposes, or that the silence from top leadership matches the severity of the crisis.
The Knights of St. Mulumba explicitly called upon President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the National Security Adviser, the Service Chiefs, and State Governors to abandon optics and execute six urgent interventions:
1. Transition immediately from reactive troop deployments to data-driven prevention anchored in modern surveillance, community-based detection, and accountability for outcomes.
2. Identify, apprehend, and prosecute not just the foot soldiers but the sponsors, financiers, informants, and political collaborators backing the kidnap networks.
3. Establish a hardened, measurable security presence around vulnerable schools, places of worship, highways, and rural communities.
4. Conduct a transparent, public audit of the Safe Schools Initiative and all related security votes, reporting exactly on disbursement, deployment, and measurable effect.
5. Launch immediate, structured rescue efforts for all persons currently in captivity, including the travellers recently seized in Borno, alongside long-term pastoral and material support for victims.
6. Mobilize honest engagement to reclaim “ungoverned spaces” and dismantle the ideological and economic conditions that manufacture criminal recruits.
The statement concluded with a passionate appeal to all Nigerian citizens, traditional rulers, and religious leaders to reject the ethnic and religious framing of the security crisis. “The criminal does not check the tribe of his victim,” Sir Adehi noted, “neither should the citizen check the tribe of the bereaved before mourning.”
Reaffirming that the Knights of St. Mulumba will continue to provide material and pastoral support to broken families, the Order maintained that “prayer and charity are not substitutes for governance and protection.”
”Nigeria is not yet ungovernable. The window, however, is narrowing,” the statement warns. “What is required is a leadership willing to match the moment with the courage and the competence it demands. We owe this to those already buried. We owe it more to those still living.”
