Kidnapping: Senate Extends Death Penalty to Perpetrators, Financiers, Informants

* As lawmaker wants banks probed over ransom payment

Sunday Aborisade in Abuja

In a sweeping offensive aimed at dismantling Nigeria’s deepening kidnapping crisis, the Senate on Wednesday advanced amendments to the 2022 Terrorism (Prevention and Prohibition) Act, approving provisions that extend the death penalty to all actors involved in kidnapping.

They included perpetrators, financiers, informants, logistics suppliers, harbourers, transporters, and anyone who knowingly aids criminal abductions.

The bill, sponsored by Senate Leader, Senator Opeyemi Bamidele, seeks to categorise kidnapping, hostage-taking and their ancillary crimes as terrorism nationwide, granting security agencies broader investigative powers to trace illicit financial flows, disrupt logistics networks and execute intelligence-driven counter-terrorism operations.

Debated extensively during plenary presided over by Senate President Godswill Akpabio, the amendment received firm, bipartisan support. Akpabio referred the bill to the Committees on Judiciary, Human Rights and Legal Matters, National Security and Intelligence, and Interior, with a mandate to conduct a public hearing and return their report within two weeks.

Bamidele, leading the debate, said kidnapping in Nigeria had transformed into “coordinated, commercialised and militarised violence” that now mirrors terrorism in organisation and brutality.

According to him, families are being impoverished by ransom payments, communities paralysed by fear, and entire regions destabilised by rampant abductions.

He said: “This is no longer an ordinary crime. The patterns of operation and the sheer ruthlessness now carry all the characteristics of terrorism.”

He stressed that the amendment targets only violent offenders and their networks, not innocent communities, adding that prosecutions would fully comply with constitutional safeguards.

Senator Adams Oshiomhole, Chairman of the Committee on Interior, backed the bill but dismissed the country’s deradicalisation programme as ineffective.

He said: “Some of these guys go back to their crimes. Enough is enough. If you are convicted for terrorism, the penalty should be death. Even the Bible and Quran affirm that he who kills has no right to live.”

Senator Orji Uzor Kalu, Chair of the South-East Development Commission Committee, said Nigerians had suffered long enough from the atrocities of kidnappers.

“Young girls are raped. Women are widowed. Families lose breadwinners. Anyone involved, sponsors, informants, logistics suppliers, must face the consequences,” he said.

A sharper concern emerged from Senator Victor Umeh, Chairman of the Committee on National Population and NIMC, who called for urgent scrutiny of financial institutions through which ransom payments are made.

“It beats the imagination that ransoms running into hundreds of millions are paid through financial institutions and nothing happens,” he said.

According to him, banks and individuals who facilitate ransom transactions must be identified and held liable, while the law must provide explicit sanctions for such complicity.

He said: “When kidnappers are caught, they should know that the price is death. Those who survive the ordeal describe their captors as people who are not human.”

Minority Leader, Senator Abba Moro, also aligned with the majority, calling the amendment a necessary consensus to restore internal security.

“We can no longer allow the country to be terrorised. Kidnappers must face capital punishment,” he said.

Bamidele explained that the amendment would give security agencies stronger authority to trace and confiscate assets linked to kidnapping, cut off ransom-funding channels, strengthen inter-agency coordination and ensure speedier pre-trial processes.

He said: “This is a war on the Nigerian people. Our response must be firm, decisive and unambiguous.”

With mass abductions now occurring on highways, in schools, farms, homes and marketplaces, the Senate’s latest move marks one of its strongest legislative attempts yet to confront kidnapping as a direct and escalating threat to national security.