When the 44 pupils and teachers taken from Oriire in Oyo State were freed on 10 July 2026 after 56 days in captivity, the army explained that troops had spent over a month dismantling hideouts and informant networks inside the Old Oyo National Park. A few weeks later, in one of the largest single day rescue operations in the country’s history, 308 people taken from Woro in Kwara State and from villages in Niger State were recovered from the Kainji Lake National Park, a federally protected wildlife sanctuary that reporting says links into a wider corridor used by armed groups. This was not a one off. Together, these rescues show a pattern that started with Sambisa Game Reserve in Borno State, which Boko Haram turned into “Camp Zero”, its de facto capital, more than ten years ago.
Nigeria’s national parks and game reserves were set up by colonial and post-independence governments to protect wildlife and forests. Today, several of them have become safe havens for terrorists, bandits, and kidnap gangs in the country. To understand why, we have to look past the immediate security failures and into a conservation system that has long been starved of money, staff, and proper management before any armed group ever set foot in these forests.
Sambisa was gazetted as a forest reserve by the colonial government in 1958 and re-designated in 1977 as a National Game Reserve, at one point drawing tourists to its 518 square kilometres of greenery in Borno State. By the time Boko Haram’s violence intensified after 2009, Sambisa had almost no functioning ranger presence and no infrastructure linking it to nearby towns. It became what conservationists have called an ungoverned space, one that insurgents filled precisely because the government had already left it empty and undeveloped. Boko Haram used the forest’s size to build training camps, hold abducted girls, and run what amounted to an insurgent capital, and it took the military years and a multi-country offensive to break their hold on it.
The lesson from Sambisa is that a large, underfunded protected area at the edge of state authority is not neutral ground. If the government does not occupy it, an armed group will. More than a decade on, that lesson has repeated itself across several more of the country’s parks and reserves.
In 2021, the National Park Service suspended operations and research in Kamuku, Kainji, and Chad Basin altogether because they were too dangerous to work in. In December 2024, Nigeria’s Office of the National Security Adviser announced the arrest of 621 criminals who had been using forests and national parks as hideouts, specifically naming Kamuku, Chad Basin and Kainji Lake as parks that had been taken over.
The Alawa forest in Niger State also serves as a shelter for terrorists now. There was a case of a father whose teenage daughter was abducted by a Boko Haram linked gang and, according to what he was told, forced into marriage with a commander somewhere inside the forest. He was informed there was no possibility of paying a ransom to get her back because she had already been taken into the forest itself, a detail that shows just how completely these spaces have become sealed off from any outside authority, even from the usual, grim economy of ransom payments. More young girls have reportedly suffered the same fate. Locals described terrorists in Alawa using heavy weapons, land mines, and improvised explosives, a level of sophistication that speaks to how comfortably these groups now operate on what is technically protected government land.
Several features make Nigeria’s parks and forest reserves especially attractive to these groups, and all of them trace back to years of conservation and forestry policy failure rather than bad luck. Nigeria’s national parks alone cover around 20,000 square kilometres, roughly 3% of the country’s land area, with individual parks like Kainji, Old Oyo and Gashaka Gumti each spanning thousands of square kilometres of dense terrain. In May 2025, President Tinubu approved the re-establishment of forest guards, but they are simply names on a payroll, with little real patrolling happening on the ground.
Another problem is the absence of basic infrastructure. Many protected areas remain disconnected from the national power grid, leaving rangers on site without reliable lighting, communications equipment, or the ability to raise the alarm quickly when something is spotted. A forest without power and radios is, in practice, a forest with no way of telling the outside world what is happening inside it.
Despite the Federal Government shutting down operations at Kainji and Kamuku for security reasons in 2021, park management continued awarding contracts worth well over half a billion naira between 2021 and 2024, according to figures pulled from Nigeria’s Open Treasury Portal.
Conservation tends to survive where it pays for itself, through tourism or by shared benefits with local communities who then have a reason to report intruders rather than tolerate them. Sambisa’s safari tourism ended long before Boko Haram arrived, and most of Nigeria’s other parks never built this kind of income at any meaningful scale. Worse still, in places like Kainji, terrorists are reported to be running organised, large-scale illegal logging operations, sometimes working alongside local loggers under threat, taking a cut of the proceeds and leaving vast deforested areas visible even from satellite images. So the forests are not just sheltering armed groups, they are being actively stripped and sold by them, removing the very resource that conservation was meant to protect in the first place.
Nigeria also has weak coordination across state lines. Parks like Kainji span Niger and Kwara states, and Old Oyo spans Oyo and Kwara states, creating exactly the kind of jurisdictional gap that armed groups use to move hostages and dodge pursuit. Reporting on the Kainji rescue noted that victims taken from two different states were found held together in the same forest area, showing how freely the kidnappers moved across the same borders that complicate coordination between different state police commands and military units.
The growing geographic reach of the terrorist groups also makes it much easier for them to trade members, arms, and even combine victim groups, like the Kwara and Niger kidnappings. What started as a Boko Haram problem confined to the Lake Chad Basin has spread. ISWAP and Lakurawa fighters, along with armed militias and bandit networks, are deliberately using forest reserves nationwide, no longer just in the North East but increasingly in Kwara, Niger, and Oyo states too. The Lakurawa group itself began as a small band that some communities in Sokoto initially welcomed as protection against local bandits, only to watch it grow into a more organised and dangerous force with links across the border into Niger Republic, exploiting the same porous, forested and poorly monitored terrain that has failed Nigeria’s parks for years.
Nigeria’s parks were meant to protect some of West Africa’s last significant wildlife, including forest elephants and chimpanzees, and to build a tourism industry that could have created real rural jobs. Every park that becomes a criminal enclave is also a park where poaching goes unchecked, research becomes impossible, and the illegal logging described in Kainji and Alawa strips away tree cover that took decades to grow. The conservation failure and the security failure are the same failure, seen from two different angles. A ranger service properly funded to patrol these forests would serve both purposes at once, protecting wildlife and denying armed groups a safe place to hide, which is why letting that funding rot away for years has cost the country so much.
The rescues in Kwara, Niger, and Oyo states show that Nigeria’s security forces can get real results once political will and coordination are properly mobilised. But a month-long military operation to free hostages after a mass abduction is not a substitute for the quiet, unglamorous work of protecting a forest before anyone is taken there in the first place. That means treating ranger funding and staffing as a genuine security priority rather than a box-ticking exercise, making sure money spent on patrol vans and CCTV actually gets used. It also means connecting reserves to power and proper communications so rangers can raise an alarm when they see something wrong. Nigeria needs whole forest ecosystems rather than state boundaries, since kidnappers already ignore those boundaries.
As a country, we need to encourage conservation, so that these forests become something communities have a reason to help protect, rather than ungoverned land that everyone, armed groups included, treats as nobody’s responsibility.
