By Ikenna Igwe
Nigeria’s economic crisis is no longer only about inflation, the Naira, and well-being. It is about fear—and fear, in today’s Nigeria, has become one of the most expensive items in the national budget, even when it never appears on a budget line.
A farmer abandons his land because the road is no longer safe. A trader pays more to move goods because every journey now carries an unspoken security premium. A parent hesitates before sending a child to school, not because education has lost value, but because the road to learning has become a corridor of risk. In May 2026, at least 42 pupils were reported missing after suspected militants attacked a school in Askira-Uba, Borno State, a chilling reminder that the old nightmare of school abductions is not history, but a recurring reality.
This is the contradiction at the heart of Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Nigeria. On paper, the macroeconomic story has improved. The IMF says the government has taken “important steps” to stabilize the economy by removing fuel subsidies, ending central bank deficit financing, and improving the foreign exchange market. Official data show Nigeria’s GDP grew 3.89% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2026. But the IMF also warns that poverty and food insecurity remain high, and Reuters reported at Tinubu’s mid-term mark that inflation and insecurity continue to overshadow the government’s reform narrative. Is that not an irony in itself?
The deeper problem is that insecurity does not only kill people. It distorts prices, breaks supply chains, weakens labor mobility, scares off capital, and lowers the horizon of ambition. It is not just a security problem. It is an economic tax.
Look across the country and the pattern is hard to ignore. In Plateau State, gunmen killed at least 30 people in a university community in March 2026. In Katsina State, Reuters reported that gunmen killed at least 10 people in May, burned homes, and looted livestock in another rural attack. In Zamfara, Amnesty said at least 100 civilians were killed in a market airstrike in May, a claim the military disputed while insisting reports of mass civilian deaths were unverified. In Kwara, Reuters reported that 170 people were killed in a February village attack that raised fears that jihadist violence was spreading into new territory. Different states, different actors, same message: insecurity is no longer peripheral to the Nigerian economy. It is embedded in it.
Agriculture is where this damage becomes most visible. Daily Trust and The Guardian reported that farmers in northern Nigeria have been abandoning farms after attacks, with some paying levies to armed groups and others fleeing entirely. That has direct economic consequences in a country already battling food inflation. The Central Bank of Nigeria’s inflation data show headline inflation at 15.69% in April 2026 and food inflation at 16.06%. When farms are deserted, roads become unsafe, and haulage grows more expensive, insecurity does not sit beside inflation as a separate problem; it actively feeds it.
Then there is the kidnapping economy, which is one of the clearest signs that criminal violence has evolved into an industry. SBM Intelligence reported that between July 2024 and June 2025, at least 4,722 people were abducted in 997 incidents across Nigeria, with at least ₦2.56 billion paid in ransom. That is not just a crime wave. It is a parallel market, one that pulls money out of households and businesses and redirects it into a violent underground economy. In a country trying to attract investment and widen its tax base, that is a devastating misallocation of resources.
The social cost is even harder to measure because it arrives disguised as lost future potential. UNICEF says 8.4 million people in northeast, northwest, and north-central Nigeria will require humanitarian assistance in 2026, including 5 million children, while more than 3.7 million people are displaced. These are not only humanitarian statistics. They are economic warnings. A child out of school because of violence is not just a victim of the present; that child may become part of the country’s future productivity loss. A displaced family is not only a welfare concern; it is also a broken unit of production, consumption, and local demand.
The Tinubu administration has not shied away from pointing to some gains, especially in the oil sector and in macroeconomic management. The IMF and World Bank have both acknowledged improved stability, and Reuters has reported stronger fiscal indicators and steadier growth. A government can improve balance sheets, but if farmers cannot farm, children cannot learn safely, traders cannot move goods confidently, and businesses keep adding a violence premium to every calculation, then growth becomes statistical before it becomes lived, and recognition from international partners doesn’t change that fact.
The real danger now is normalization. Once school attacks reappear in Borno, village killings spread from Plateau to Katsina, and displacement becomes routine across large swathes of the country, the economy begins to adapt to insecurity instead of overcoming it. Businesses become cautious. Families lower expectations. Investors become selective. The country starts pricing fear into daily life. And economies that adapt to fear do not become dynamic; they become permanently defensive.
Tinubu and the Nigerian populace are living two stories at once: the official story of stabilization pushed through public relations and security enforcement, and the lived story of fear and agony. The first may reassure foreign markets for a while and secure additional loans from China and the IMF. The second will decide the country’s future.
And that is the price of fear: it does not only bury the dead. It quietly discounts the living and shrinks the future before it arrives.