Kwara Residents Allege Security Forces Direct Ransom Payments To Terrorists

A disturbing pattern is emerging from villages tucked along the Ilorin East corridor of Kwara State, where families desperate to rescue kidnapped relatives say the uniformed officers stationed nearby aren't just failing to help. They're actively pointing captives' families toward the criminals themselves.

Multiple residents from Woru and its neighboring settlements have come forward describing a breakdown in trust so severe that many no longer bother calling for help when armed men strike. Requests for police or military backup, they say, routinely go unanswered, leaving grieving families to strike deals with kidnappers on their own terms.

It's what comes next that has shocked residents most. When a family doesn't know where to hand over cash or goods demanded for a relative's release, the terrorists themselves tell them to flag down whichever police or army officer they find patrolling the highway. From there, residents allege, those same officers escort or point the families straight to the terrorists' camps, some in zones already flagged as active criminal territory.

The claims land amid a broader collapse of security across the region. Terrorists have reportedly tightened their grip on the roads linking these farming communities to Ilorin, the state capital, making even a routine trip to market or farmland a calculated risk.

One family's ordeal illustrates just how far the extortion has gone. Relatives of the Magaji, Woru's traditional ruler, say they scraped together 5 million naira in cash along with a motorcycle, two phones and crates of alcohol to secure his son's freedom, only to have the kidnappers resurface days later demanding a second 5 million naira payment. The young man remains missing. Community members say he's one of at least seven residents currently being held captive, after a fresh wave of abductions swept through Woru and surrounding areas between August and September.

Beyond the ransom payments themselves, residents describe a slow economic strangulation taking hold. Farmers, once the backbone of the local economy, are increasingly staying off their land altogether rather than risk an ambush, a shift that could ripple into food shortages down the line.

Frustrated locals are now demanding that Kwara's state government step in directly, and that an independent investigation be opened into the specific claims against security personnel. SaharaReporters says it reached out to both the state police command and the Nigerian Army for a response to the allegations, but neither had replied by the time of publication.

This isn't the first time security forces in the state have faced this kind of accusation. Back in February, villagers in a similarly named Woro community, this one in Kaiama council area, made a related claim after a mass killing left over 160 people dead. Soldiers deployed in the aftermath, residents said then, chose to camp out in town checking vehicles rather than pushing into the forests where the attackers were believed to be hiding.