Kano

Audu Danbaba is in his fifties but trudges like someone in his eighties. He walks carefully, sometimes raising his hands as if they were scales calibrating his body’s equilibrium. 

As he emerged from his house on Feb. 25, he moved with visible effort –  his feet swollen –  counting each step as if needles were being pressed into the soles of his feet. With a laboured exhale, he eased himself down onto a mat that faced his home. The house, made of mud bricks, is located in Nassarawa village, Gwarzo Local Government Area (LGA), in Kano State, northwestern Nigeria.

Audu cannot remember the exact date when the armed kidnappers pulled him from his house, but he does know that it happened roughly two months ago, maybe a little longer. “I spent about 40 days with them, and now I’m in my fourth week since I was released,” he told HumAngle.

Audu’s ordeal is a window into a calculated and expanding kidnapping economy that has quietly taken root in the Gwarzo LGA. Kidnapping in Kano is fuelled by informant networks, strengthened by a porous border with Katsina State, and maintained by a ransom cycle that is systematically draining the little resources left in the poorest communities of the northwestern region.

Late at night, he was lying down when he heard screaming. The attackers had already entered his home and were beating both of his wives and children. He rushed outside and asked what was happening. They told him directly that they had come for him. To protect his family, he surrendered.

“Here is where they tied my hands and started beating me with the butt of a gun on my legs,” Audu recalled, gesturing toward the spots he said still ache. “Then they pushed me forward, beating me and shoving me until we had walked a long distance through farmland and crossed a road.”

Audu could not recall how long they had trekked with him because he was barely conscious as they dragged him. His sense of measurement also appears faulty, as he confuses miles and kilometres several times while narrating his story.

And so they kept pushing him. 

“It was on the road that I noticed security operatives on patrol, as though they had received a tip and were following us. I tried to lift my head, and they struck me with the rifle butt and pinned me down. I couldn’t speak. We stayed like that until the patrol passed, then they pulled me up and kept beating me as we walked,” he added. 

What Audu described, the systematic beating of victims after abduction, has emerged as one of the most disturbing features of the kidnapping crisis in northern Nigeria. After reaching the forest, he said he was tied alongside another man who had also been abducted. The torture continued with such ferocity that the other man died a week after he was abducted. 

“After his death, his corpse lay there with me for two days before they took him away,” he said. 

Different clips showing how abducted victims are tortured by their abductors have recently been circulated online. One footage featured a member of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) being tortured repeatedly by his abductors while pleading for help. In another widely shared video, three women were shown being struck as the abductors pressured them to urge their families to pay a ransom.

Another harrowing case is the testimony of a man published by a local media outlet in Zamfara, Maibiredi TV. The man narrated that his abductors burned one of his hands using molten rubber during ransom negotiations to force his family to speed up payment. Only two of his fingers remain. 

What is happening in Gwarzo?

At least five Local Government Areas (LGAs) in Kano share borders with neighbouring Katsina State, namely Rogo, Tsanyawa, Shanono, Gwarzo, and Ghari (formerly Kunchi). While Tsanyawa and Shanono have suffered the most attacks, Gwarzo is particularly vulnerable. The town’s western and northern borders are adjacent to Katsina’s Malumfashi and Musawa LGAs, which have been heavily impacted by terrorist activities for a long time. 

The dense and ungoverned forests in these regions provide terrorists with continuous cover for their operations. From there, locals say, they flow into Gwarzo.

Locals say that the first recorded case of kidnapping occurred on Dec. 14, 2025, when terrorists on motorcycles attacked the Kururawa community in the Lakwaya district of Gwarzo. They invaded the home of an elderly man known locally as Yakubu Na Tsohuwa and abducted him. His eldest son, Badamasi, was injured while attempting to stop the assailants from taking his father. Within the same week, a second kidnapping incident was reported.

Gwarzo’s security crisis did not start in December 2025. In January 2024, police operatives arrested Isah Lawal, a 33-year-old man from Giwa LGA in Kaduna, during a clearance operation in Karaye LGA along the Kaduna-Kano border. He confessed to fleeing a terrorist camp in Birnin Gwari due to internal gang violence and expressed his intention to establish a new camp in the Gwarzo-Karaye forest. This arrest, which was largely unreported at the time, served as a warning that the authorities did not adequately heed.

The Gwarzo-Karaye forest corridor, straddling Kano’s border LGAs and stretching toward Katsina’s ungoverned zones, had already been identified by displaced armed factions as a viable new territory. 

The December 2025 attacks followed a pattern that exposed how openly these groups now operate. Around 20 armed men were spotted in Danjanku village in Malumfashi LGA, heading toward the Kano axis, according to sources. The attack on Zurum Mahauta in the Gidan Malam Sallau community came at midnight on the same day.

To address the growing threat, the Kano State Government deployed forest guards to monitor the woodland areas around Gwarzo. These guards serve a dual purpose: overseeing the reforestation efforts critical to the state’s climate change response, and functioning as an early-warning layer for security threats emerging from the forest.

Dahir Hashim, the Commissioner for Environment and Climate Change, told HumAngle that the guards were recruited to tackle both challenges simultaneously: “Managing the forests because of their critical role in halting desertification, and providing rapid alerts whenever security threats are detected.”

HumAngle spoke to Abdullahi Hamza, who leads the team managing one of the forests in Mainika, Gwarzo. He is cautiously optimistic about the project, saying: “This initiative by the government has delivered results; at least for now, we have gone many days without a security incident inside Gwarzo, though there may be areas we are not yet aware of.”

There are two forests in Gwarzo. One is known as Dajin Katata, where the forest guard Musa Muhammad previously worked. 

“There were constant criminal incidents in that forest; the fear eventually led the previous government to fell the trees to deny criminals cover,” he told HumAngle. 

Musa was later reassigned closer to home in Mainika. He does not hide his discomfort with that decision. The felling of Dajin Katata, he said, was ecologically damaging — those trees were a bulwark against the advance of the desert. But he has made his peace with the logic behind it. 

“Security comes first,” he said. “You must be alive to breathe the shade of a tree.”

Kidnapping the poor for ransom

Why was Audu a target for abduction in the first place? By every visible measure, even within his own village, Audu is not a wealthy man. His mud-brick house sits among the more neglected on the street, unrepaired and unremarkable. 

He told HumAngle himself that shortly before his abduction, he had tried to sell his farmland out of financial desperation, but the offer he received felt so insulting that he walked away from the deal.

“The land was worth between three and a half and four million naira, but they offered me two and a half million naira. I felt disrespected, so I refused,” he said.

Then came a coincidence that, in hindsight, feels like anything but.

Around the same period, the Kano State government began disbursing outstanding allowances owed to former ward councillors across the state. Audu’s son, Anas, had served as a councillor between 2020 and 2023, which placed him among the beneficiaries. The payment, amounting to roughly ₦6 million, was not made quietly; the state government publicised it widely. Photographs were taken at the government house. Screenshots of bank alerts began circulating on social media, shared by recipients whose names and faces were now attached to a specific, traceable sum.

The publicity became something else entirely.

“Many people had their eyes on that money,” said Mallam Saidu, Audu’s neighbour. “There is a strong suspicion that it was this payment that drew the kidnappers to Danbaba’s house that night.”

Audu suspects the same. He says his captors told him, as they held him, that someone had directed them to him. They did not tell him who.

“They showed me about five people from a distance,” he said. “I could barely lift my head to look, and when I did, I didn’t recognise any of them.”

Later, during ransom negotiations, Audu says he kept hearing one side of a phone conversation — someone telling the kidnappers that they should push his family harder to bring more, insisting they had the money and should produce it.

Across northern Nigeria, kidnapping has evolved from opportunistic crime into a sophisticated industry, and at its operational core lies a network of human intelligence that security agencies have struggled, and often failed, to penetrate or counter.

Kano has witnessed a surge in kidnapping and criminal operations aided by local informants and snitches within the state’s localities. This development seems to have inflated security threats in local communities. Musbahu Shanono, for instance, is originally from Faruruwa in Kano but works in Lagos, in Nigeria’s South West. 

When HumAngle spoke with Musbahu in 2025, he described the creeping anxiety that now accompanies what should be an ordinary homecoming – the fear of informants making him a stranger in his own community.

“Now I only come at night,” he said. “No one should know I’m around. Not even my friends. Not until I’m sure it’s safe.”

According to security authorities across northern Nigeria, kidnappers conduct detailed advance planning before armed teams execute raids at vulnerable hours, overwhelming lightly protected targets and transporting captives deep into remote forest hideouts.

In 2021, the Zamfara State government announced the arrest of more than 2,000 suspected informants. The following year, the state went further to enact legislation prescribing life imprisonment for anyone found to have aided kidnapping operations or other criminal activity in the state.

Yet the problem has not abated. Security authorities across Nigeria acknowledge that informant networks remain one of the most intractable elements of the crisis, embedded in communities, operating in plain sight, and extraordinarily difficult to root out. 

Even Nigeria’s Minister of Defence, then-Chief of Defence Staff, Christopher Musa, admitted publicly in 2024 that informants were being used not only to identify and track targets, but to actively misdirect security forces pursuing terrorists.

“They make the troops go elsewhere, and when they get there, they meet nothing,” Musa said.

The price of coming home

Now Audu is back. But his return has cost his family everything.

“They only released me after we paid ₦8 million and three motorcycles,” he recalled.

The family sold whatever they could find. The farm that he had refused to part with for two and a half million naira, the offer he had walked away from as an insult to his dignity, went for only ₦1.8 million in the end due to desperation. 

“Then we went around asking for help – some people gave us gifts, others gave us loans,” said Anas, his eldest son. Today, after his father’s release, the family is saddled with a debt of approximately ₦4.5 million and has no clear idea where to begin repaying it.

Audu carries the weight in his body as much as in his finances. “Even after I returned, everyone who saw me broke into tears at the state I was in,” he said. “Doctors have examined me and given me medication, but the pain in my body has not stopped.”

His deeper anguish is the problem he cannot solve: how does a man who had nothing rebuild from less than nothing? “We sought help from every direction and found very little,” Anas added. “We are still appealing to the government, even if it is just to help settle the debt, because everything we had was consumed by this ordeal.”

For the remaining residents of Nassarawa and the villages clustered along Gwarzo’s edges, the haunting question is not about debt. It is about prevention and how to protect themselves from the fate that swallowed Audu before the kidnappers come again.

How do you comfort a man who has just watched years of his life turn to smoke?

Sulaiman Mustapha remained seated inside the mosque after the dawn prayer, long after others had left. He put both hands on his head as if trying to hold his brain in place. He could not speak. No wailing. No outburst. Just the stillness of a man whose world had collapsed overnight. Those around him tried to console him, but the words sounded distant, almost irrelevant. 

Less than a month ago, Sulaiman bought a new motorcycle to make his trips to Singa Market in Kano, North West Nigeria, easier. For him, it was not just a bike. It was a milestone. For years, he had gone to the market with his brother as a worker, running errands for established traders. With time, he began handling purchases. Then he began trading in small quantities for himself. The profits were modest but steady.

The motorcycle symbolised a shift. It meant he would no longer spend heavily on transport. It meant more capital for his small shop. It meant growth. Then, in a matter of hours, fire erased that growth. Now it was metal frames and ash. 

On Saturday, Feb. 15, around 4 p.m., a fire broke out at Gidan Glass, a plaza at Singa Market. Witnesses say the fire spread quickly, leaping from shop to shop before traders could salvage much. It burned for two days. By the time it was contained, dozens of shops had been reduced to charred frames.

Sulaiman and his brother’s shop was among them.

When he sat in the mosque that morning, he was mourning years of hard work — the savings, the small profits he reinvested, and his mother’s inheritance. “After his grandfather died, the inheritance was shared,” his close friend, Abba Abubakar, told HumAngle. “His mother gave him her portion to grow the business.”

Now, everything is gone. 

The fire that tore through Singa Market is the latest in a long line of infernos that have become almost routine in Kano markets. Within 48 hours, early estimates placed losses in billions of naira. But beyond the figures lies a deeper story: how recurring fires, weak emergency infrastructure, and structural neglect continue to threaten the livelihoods of thousands of small-scale traders who form the backbone of the city’s informal economy.

Sulaiman’s story is that of hundreds of traders whose stalls were destroyed. In markets like Singa, capital is built slowly from daily turnover and rarely backed by insurance. Many traders rely on family contributions, cooperative loans, or personal savings. A single disruption can undo a decade of effort.

For small-scale traders, the market is their safety net. It funds school fees, hospital bills, rent, and other family obligations. When the market burns, the consequences ripple far beyond the charred stalls.

By Monday afternoon, some traders had returned to sift through ashes, hoping to salvage metal frames or partially burned goods. Others simply stood in clusters, calculating debts they still owed suppliers.

There are still unanswered questions about what triggered the fire and whether preventive measures were in place. For now, what remains visible is the human toll.

The full extent of the damage and how traders will rebuild is still unfolding.

But how did it start? 

Between sparks and sorrow

Around 3 p.m. that Saturday, Abba Abubakar noticed thick black smoke rising into the sky. The sight unsettled him immediately. Some weeks earlier, he had seen a similar column of smoke before a fire gutted Gidan Mazaf at the same Singa Market.

“But this one was very close,” he told HumAngle.

Abba is not a trader at Singa. He sells wrappers and garments at Abubakar Rimi Market, popularly known as Sabon Gari, just across the road. His fear was instinctive. Fires are not unfamiliar in that commercial district. When smoke appears, traders do not wait for confirmation. They imagine the worst.

“We rushed out of our shops and later realised it was solar panels burning on top of Gidan Glass,” he said. “By the time we got there, it had already consumed part of the upper floor, and the fire was raging.”

From another part of the neighbourhood, Muttaka Musa, who works in one of the affected stores, also saw the smoke. He had been at a nearby plaza known as Gidan Gwaggo Laraba when he looked up and saw the sky darken.

“Immediately I got there, the fire had already finished one of our stores and had started catching the other,” he said. Muttaka said people had been warned when the fire first broke out. But warnings in markets often compete with denial. No one expected the flames would escalate to that scale.

Auwal Ibrahim Gaya lost two shops in the blaze. He was performing the afternoon Asr prayer when he received the call. “When they told me the fire had started, I was at the mosque,” he said. “I rushed there, and when I saw it, I began reciting prayers. I said Allah is testing us, and we accept His decree.”

Faith, in moments like this, becomes both refuge and resignation.

As the fire intensified and traders failed to contain it, emergency services were called. But by then, the scene had drawn large crowds. Onlookers filled the narrow access roads, making it difficult for fire trucks to reach the core of the market.

One firefighter, who asked not to be named because he was not authorised to speak to the press, told HumAngle that “almost all the fire service trucks we have in Kano were mobilised. But the fire kept spreading from the top. It was moving across the upper structures, so it was difficult to control. If there had been a helicopter, it could have quenched it from above.”

An investigation by HumAngle found that the Nigerian Federal Fire Service does not currently operate firefighting helicopters. Announcements about acquiring one circulated between 2021 and 2024, but the purchase never materialised. The National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), which previously had access to such support, is also reported to have non-functional aerial equipment.

As a result, even with the presence of the Federal Fire Service, NEMA officials, the Kano State Emergency Agency, and the state governor, Abba Kabir Yusuf, at the scene, the fire burned for two days before it was finally largely subdued.

What causes market fires in Kano? 

Market fires are not new in Kano. Almost every year, a section of the city’s commercial heart goes up in flames. Sometimes it is a cluster of stalls. Sometimes an entire block. The pattern has become disturbingly familiar. Traders rebuild. Business resumes. Then another fire breaks out.

In the two months of 2026 alone, at least five fire incidents have been recorded within the Kano metropolis. Four occurred in markets: Kofar Ruwa yan Katako, Gidan Mazaf Singa, Gidan Glass Singa, and near Abbatuwa cemetery. One affected a filling station along Madobi Road. For a city whose economy leans heavily on trade, these events are structural tremors.

A 2021 study by Sulaiman Yunus, an urban risk and disaster management researcher at Bayero University, Kano, documented 366 fire incidents between 1974 and 2017. On average, that translates to at least eight outbreaks annually in markets alone. The data suggests a chronic vulnerability embedded within Kano’s commercial architecture.

But what explains this cycle? Why do the fires persist, despite decades of losses?

Sulaiman found that outbreaks are most frequent in highly concentrated, densely built, older commercial hubs. Large central markets such as Kantin Kwari Market, Kasuwar Kurmi, and Sabon Gari Market were identified as particularly vulnerable.

These markets evolved long before modern urban planning standards. Stalls are packed tightly together. Extensions are added informally. Electrical wiring snakes across wooden beams and zinc roofs. Access routes are narrow, often clogged with traders, buyers, and transporters. When fire breaks out, it meets fuel.

The study notes that most affected markets lack functional fire hydrants and emergency suppression facilities. In many cases, traders rely on buckets of water or improvised extinguishers in the crucial first minutes. By the time fire trucks arrive, flames have often climbed to rooftops and leapt across adjoining structures.

Temporal analysis in Sulaiman’s study shows a clear seasonal pattern. Fire outbreaks peak during the dry season, particularly between November and March. The Harmattan months record the highest incidence rate because the air is drier and the winds harsher. Materials that might otherwise resist ignition become combustible.

Yet climate alone does not ignite markets.

The research found that electrical faults and power surges account for the majority of recorded incidents. Illegal connections and overloaded circuits were identified as primary ignition sources. In markets where dozens of traders tap into a single supply line to power freezers, grinding machines, bulbs, and charging points, the system is often stretched beyond capacity. Electricity, meant to enable commerce, becomes the spark that destroys it.

The Singa Market fire fits within this broader history. Its scale may be exceptional, but its underlying conditions are not. The questions raised in its aftermath echo those of previous disasters: Were safety standards enforced? Were electrical systems inspected? Were access routes kept clear?

For now, attention has shifted to relief. The Federal Government has approved a ₦5 billion intervention fund for traders, while the Progressive Governors’ Forum also donated ₦3 billion, signalling recognition of the magnitude of the loss. But compensation, even when fully disbursed, rarely mirrors destruction. For small-scale traders, relief funds often dissipate before reaching the lowest tiers. Many operate without formal registration, insurance, or documented inventories. Their losses exist in memory, not in audited balance sheets. A bag of rice here. Ten kegs of oil there. A motorcycle bought less than a month ago.

Billions of naira in pledges may soften the blow at a macro level. Yet, for the petty trader who relied on daily turnover to survive, recovery is measured not in billions but in whether he can reopen with even a fraction of his former stock.

In Kano’s markets, fire is no longer an anomaly but a recurring chapter in the city’s commercial story. Each outbreak exposes the same structural weaknesses. Each investigation repeats familiar findings.

And each time, traders return to rebuild in the same crowded corridors, under the same fragile wiring, hoping that this season’s wind will be kinder than the last