Igboho Says Iru Ekun Tops 80,000 Volunteers
Yoruba nation activist Chief Sunday Adeyemo, better known as Sunday Igboho, says more than 80,000 volunteers have now registered for his Iru Ekun Security Network, a figure that overshoots the 50,000 target the outfit set for itself and places the region’s newest community security experiment squarely within the national conversation on insecurity.
In a statement issued by his media office in Ibadan on Monday, Igboho, who founded the network, described the turnout as evidence of the region’s readiness to confront kidnapping, terrorism and other violent crime through local action. “It is delightful to announce the impressive level of interest and enthusiasm demonstrated by our people in Iru Ekun Security Network. We were projecting 50,000 personnel, but we have already registered over 80,000 in Yorubaland,” he said.
According to him, the outfit has been formally launched in Oyo and Osun, with Kwara to follow on Thursday. He said Governor AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq of Kwara was among the stakeholders partnering the initiative in that state. Igboho maintained that recruitment was being screened through background checks to keep criminals and persons of doubtful character out of the ranks, and he claimed that communities once besieged by abductors had recorded fewer incidents since the network became active. Those claims of declining kidnapping were not accompanied by supporting figures and have not been independently verified.
Notably, Igboho credited the federal security establishment for the outcomes he reported. “Minister of Defence, Christopher Musa, Inspector General of Police, Tunji Disu, the DG DSS, Adeola Oluwatosin Ajayi and the NSA, Nuhu Ribadu, Commissioners of Police in South West, Kwara and Niger states, have greatly supported our operations. Without their backing, the successes we have recorded would not be possible,” he said. He urged Nigerians to rally behind President Bola Tinubu’s drive to partner local communities against insecurity, and framed the effort as one that must cut across ethnic and religious lines.
That roll call reflects how much has shifted at the top of Nigeria’s security hierarchy in recent months. Christopher Musa, who served as Chief of Defence Staff from June 2023, was moved to the defence ministry in December 2025 after Mohammed Badaru Abubakar resigned on health grounds, and was confirmed by the Senate following a five hour screening dominated by questions over the Maga school abduction in Kebbi. Tunji Disu became Inspector General of Police in February 2026, succeeding Kayode Egbetokun, who resigned. Nuhu Ribadu has served as National Security Adviser since 2023, while Adeola Oluwatosin Ajayi heads the Department of State Services.
That Igboho would today publicly thank the DSS carries its own weight. On July 1, 2021, operatives of that same agency, backed by soldiers, raided his residence in the Soka area of Ibadan over allegations that he was stockpiling arms, a charge he denied. At least two of his associates were killed and more than a dozen people arrested. Declared wanted, he fled the country and was detained on July 19, 2021, at the Cardinal Bernardin airport in Cotonou while attempting to travel to Germany with his wife. He spent roughly two years tied up in legal proceedings in Benin Republic before regaining his freedom in October 2023, and only returned to Nigeria in late January 2026 after his name was removed from the wanted list under the current administration. His movement from fugitive to self styled security partner is among the more striking turns in the region’s recent security politics.
The network itself was unveiled in May 2026 in the wake of a run of school abductions that jolted Oyo State’s rural belt. Gunmen stormed the Baptist Nursery and Primary School, Yawota, along with Community Grammar School and L.A. Primary School, Esiele, in Oriire Local Government Area, seizing scores of pupils and teachers in coordinated dawn raids. At the launch, Igboho cast the outfit as a forest facing volunteer force and insisted it carried no religious agenda. “This is not a religious war. We must set religion aside and focus on the real issue, terrorism, kidnapping, and the destruction of the future of our children,” he said at the time.
The anxiety driving such initiatives rests on hard figures. The National Bureau of Statistics, in its Crime Experience and Security Perception Survey released in December 2024, estimated that about 2.2 million Nigerians were kidnapped between May 2023 and April 2024, with victims and their families paying roughly N2.23 trillion in ransom over the same window. SBM Intelligence recorded 4,722 abductions across 997 incidents between July 2024 and June 2025, with at least 762 people killed. The National Human Rights Commission separately documented 3,012 kidnappings and 3,584 killings between January 2024 and April 2025.
The geography of that violence still tilts heavily northward. In the SBM breakdown, the North West accounted for 425 incidents and 2,938 abductions, dwarfing the South East’s 257 victims and the South West’s 144. Data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project likewise place the North West at the centre of the crisis, with 662 kidnapping related events recorded between 2019 and 2023, far ahead of other zones. Yet the South West’s comparatively lower numbers mask a genuine slide. The Oyo school raids punctured a region long regarded as relatively safe, and bodies such as the South West Youths Forum have warned that that reputation is now under strain.
Iru Ekun also enters a field that is already occupied. Since January 2020, the six South West states have run the Western Nigeria Security Network, popularly called Amotekun, a governor backed corps created to complement conventional policing and anchored in laws passed by the state assemblies. How a large volunteer body like Iru Ekun sits alongside Amotekun and the regular security agencies, and under what legal and command structure it will function, remains one of the open questions around the project. Analyses published earlier in 2026 noted that, despite the steady stream of announcements, the network had yet to be backed by formal documentation from relevant authorities, leaving parts of its standing a subject of public debate.
For now, Igboho’s figures and his claims of falling abductions rest largely on his own account, still awaiting the independent verification that would settle their weight. What is not in dispute is the demand that produced them. With the Kwara launch fixed for Thursday and the founder positioning the outfit as an ally of the federal government rather than a rival to it, the next test for Iru Ekun will be whether the enthusiasm behind its enrolment numbers converts into measurable safety on the ground, and whether it can operate strictly within the law it says it upholds.