Emmanuel Nyamson was caught in an ambush meant for foreigners. What followed was nine months of beatings, starvation, executions, and a final desperate run through the forest on collapsing legs.
EMMANUEL NYAMSON did not intend to be there. The ambush on that October 2024 morning outside the Army barracks in Kontagora, Niger State, had been laid for white construction workers travelling the Tegina–Kontagora road. The foreigners took a different route that day. Nyamson, a Kaduna-born businessman and contractor born in 1968, did not. He rode his borrowed motorcycle toward his maize farm just before nine in the morning, and rode directly into a net that had been cast for someone else.
By the time he emerged nine months later, on collapsing legs, crawling beside a forest footpath in what had become Kebbi State eighteen of the fifty-eight people kidnapped alongside him were dead.
His account, given in an interview published by Nigerian newspaper The Punch, is one of the most detailed testimonies yet to emerge from the interior of Nigeria’s kidnapping economy a crisis that has consumed thousands of lives, generated hundreds of millions in ransom payments, and turned the forests of the country’s northwest into a network of open-air prisons from which escape is measured not in hours but in months.
Nyamson had gone to the farm to pay labourers. His account of the abduction is disarmingly ordinary the daily rhythm of a working man, interrupted by violence. “They had already blocked the road and kidnapped 36 people,” he recalled. “When they also kidnapped the two of us, they took us into the forest, and we trekked for like five days and four nights. I kept collapsing on the way, and they would give me Tramadol to take.”
That detail Tramadol distributed to keep abductees mobile enough to travel is a recurring feature in accounts from Nigeria’s bandit forests. The opioid painkiller, widely misused across the Sahel, serves a functional purpose in the kidnap economy: it keeps bodies moving when bodies have no reason to move.
When the group finally reached the camp, the message delivered on arrival was unambiguous. “The first day we entered their camp, they brought someone out, laid him on the ground, and shot him dead,” Nyamson said. The victim was a young man, estimated between 21 and 22 years old. His body was carried into the forest by fellow captives. “They then threatened us that if any of us tried to escape, they would kill the person too.”
Within days of arrival, the interviews began. The captors assessed each hostage’s apparent wealth and connections, and set their price accordingly. For Nyamson, the calculation was made from photographs images of him handing over construction projects to army officers, standing alongside uniformed personnel. The kidnappers settled on N100 million.
“When I said I couldn’t pay them the N100m, they almost killed me that day,” he said.
His family eventually paid approximately N30 million a sum that represents a small fortune by the standards of most Nigerian households but fell far short of the demand. The N70 million balance kept him chained.
Others paid less and walked free. Some paid N5 million and were released. The camp operated on a sliding scale of extraction, with those who could not satisfy the demand warehoused in the forest, chained to trees, beaten daily, fed on ground guinea corn that was sometimes unsieved, roasted maize stripped from passing farms, and raw groundnuts donated by villagers who encountered the procession.
The camp was not a fixed facility. It was a node in a larger network. “Sometimes, the kidnappers would come to that camp from Sokoto, Katsina, Zaria, or Zamfara, and there were like 2,000 or 3,000 of them,” Nyamson recalled. “They always came there because that was their camp where they kept most of their victims.” Each faction arrived with its own leader referred to as a Kachalla and its own motorcycles. The forest, in Nyamson’s telling, was not a wilderness but a governed territory, with specialist units for cattle rustling, armed robbery, and kidnapping, converging at shared logistical hubs.
“We would see the skeletons of the people who had been killed, several other decomposed human body parts, and dead bodies littering the forest,” he said.
The death toll across nine months was systematic. Two captives died of illness at the first camp. Six were killed at the second camp. One man’s wife fell sick and died in captivity; the kidnappers, as punishment, forced the bereaved husband and Nyamson to carry her corpse approximately five hundred metres into the forest and dispose of it. Three captives who rebelled were executed.
In total, eighteen of the fifty-eight people abducted died before Nyamson escaped.
The window opened by accident. The guards had run out of marijuana. One was sent on a roughly forty-kilometre journey to resupply. The remaining two, left to watch three chained captives Nyamson and two others wandered toward their hut. Crucially, the guards had given Nyamson the key to his own chains so that captives could relieve themselves during the day and re-chain themselves on return. He used it.
“I unchained myself. I also unchained the two other guys because it was a very thick forest. When they left to enter their hut, we ran out of the den and escaped.”
What followed was two and a half days of forest trekking. By the third day, Nyamson’s legs gave out entirely. He collapsed and lay beside a footpath. Two men on a motorcycle found him themselves, he believes, kidnappers but took pity on his condition. They forced a passing cyclist to carry him, gave him N1,000 for food, and pointed him toward the nearest village. He was received there, bathed, clothed, and fed. Eventually moved to the town of Berere in Kebbi State, then to Kontagora in Niger State, and home.
“I knew within me that I had already given up that I might not come back alive,” he said. “I knew that God was going to do His handiwork.”
Nyamson’s testimony arrives within a broader landscape of escalating catastrophe. Nigeria’s National Human Rights Commission documented 3,012 kidnappings and 3,584 killings between January 2024 and April 2025, with the Northwest recording 425 incidents and 2,938 abductions alone. A separate report by SBM Intelligence recorded 4,722 kidnappings across 997 incidents between July 2024 and June 2025, with at least 762 people killed and estimated that the kidnap-for-ransom industry raised some $1.66 million in that same twelve-month period.
According to Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics, Nigerians had paid these groups approximately $1.42 billion in ransoms from May 2023 to April 2024 alone demonstrating the scale at which the kidnapping economy has become entrenched.
The worst humanitarian crisis in decades is being caused by banditry, which poses the biggest security risk to rural populations in border regions in northwest Nigeria, sustained in part by porous borders, arms trafficking, multifaceted poverty, and the movement of criminal elements from neighbouring states.
In November 2025, the crisis extended once more to schools. On November 21, 303 students and 12 teachers were kidnapped at St. Mary’s Catholic Primary and Secondary School in Papiri, Niger State the same state where Nyamson had been abducted the previous year prompting mass school closures across the state and beyond.
Nyamson’s account adds a human dimension to these figures that statistics alone cannot supply. He is not a number in a commission report. He is a man who forgot who he was for nine months, who carried a dead woman’s body through a forest, who crawled on his hands and knees toward a footpath and found, by some combination of divine fortune and human mercy, a way home.
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“Anytime I remember what I experienced, I am not happy,” he said. “After I came back, I’ve been forgetting things easily, unlike before.”
He did not say what he was trying to forget. He did not need to.
