Hunger Driving Nigerians Into Bandit, Terror Groups – UN
Desperation born of empty granaries is quietly filling the ranks of armed groups across northern Nigeria, with the United Nations warning that hungry residents are joining bandits and insurgents simply to eat. The disclosure, made by the World Food Programme on Thursday, paints the clearest picture yet of how deprivation and violence now feed each other in a region battling its worst hunger crisis in nearly a decade.
According to the WFP, communities have reported cases of individuals enlisting with armed groups “in search of food or income, underlining the risks created when hunger deepens and people run out of options.” The agency’s latest Cadre Harmonisé analysis found that more than 17 million people across nine conflict-affected states are experiencing “crisis, emergency, or catastrophic levels” of hunger, an increase of almost two million since the previous projection.
Nigeria has battled a jihadist insurgency centred in the northeast since 2009, but the conflict has widened sharply since 2025. Jihadist factions have pushed into the northwest, a zone already destabilised by armed “bandit” gangs, producing the overlapping crises now driving mass displacement. WFP regional director for west and central Africa, Kinday Samba, said the spread of violence “across a much wider area” was “forcing people from farmland, driving displacement and restricting humanitarian access.”
The scale of that retreat is measurable. The agency said the number of areas too dangerous for its frontline staff has doubled, with 15 additional locations now partly inaccessible. Government authority remains thin outside urban centres, leaving rural farming communities, which grow much of the nation’s food, exposed to repeated attack.
Borno State, the epicentre of the insurgency, illustrates the stakes. More than three million residents there are acutely food insecure, including over 750,000 in severe conditions and more than 10,000 facing catastrophic hunger, one step short of famine. Across the three northeastern states of Borno, Adamawa and Yobe, the food insecure population has climbed to 6.2 million, yet WFP can currently reach only 740,000 of them, leaving 5.5 million, mostly children, without assistance.
That shortfall marks a steep fall from the 1.3 million people the agency supported at the height of the 2025 lean season. Aid cuts by the United States under President Donald Trump, alongside reduced contributions from other Western donors, have hit some of Nigeria’s poorest households, thinning the humanitarian lifeline just as needs surge.
The hunger emergency sits within a broader economic strain. The International Monetary Fund, in its 2026 Article IV report, said poverty rose to 63 percent by the end of 2025 while more than 27 million Nigerians faced food insecurity, even as it credited President Bola Tinubu’s fuel subsidy removal and exchange rate reforms with improving macroeconomic stability. The Fund itself flagged insecurity in the food-producing north as a major risk to the economy.
WFP said it was “deeply concerned” that the suspension of food aid was pushing families toward “desperate coping” measures. With the June to August lean season now underway and funding exhausted, the agency has warned that without fresh contributions its reach could shrink further, deepening a cycle in which hunger sustains the very violence that creates it.