Night of Fire in Kasuwan Daji: A Market Turned Graveyard
They tell you markets are the heartbeat of a village. In Kasuwan Daji — literally “the bush market” in Hausa — that heartbeat still echoes tonight, but broken. Stalls that at dawn would have brimmed with tomatoes and millet now lie smouldering under a sky smeared with smoke and the bitter scent of burned palm oil. The road into the Kabe district of Niger State is quiet in a way that feels unnatural, as if the land itself is holding its breath.
“We saw them coming from the bush,” said Wasiu Abiodun, the Niger State police spokesman. “They set the market on fire, looted shops and — over 30 victims lost their lives during the attack. Some persons were also kidnapped.” His voice, relayed through terse official channels, is the first of many attempts to contain the human scale of the night.
Locals put the toll higher. The Catholic Church in Kontagora, whose parishioners still whisper of the atrocity on social media and at candlelit vigils, said more than 40 people were killed. Images circulated online — some graphic, some grainy — showed victims whose hands were tied behind their backs. The pictures have settled on the minds of anyone who scrolls past them: women, men, the unmistakable bent shoulders of old age.
The Raid
Witnesses describe a calculated sweep. The gunmen arrived on motorcycles, a common mode for Nigeria’s so-called “bandits,” a catchall term for heavily armed criminal gangs that operate across the north and central belt. They moved through the market in the late afternoon, firing into the air and into the crowd. They took food, livestock and, according to several sources, young men and women who could be marched back into the bush and held for ransom.
“They were not in a hurry,” said Aminu, a corn farmer who lives ten minutes’ walk from the burned stalls. “They took what they wanted. I ran into the cornfield and stayed there until sunrise. When I came out, the market was gone.”
A Long-Running Crisis
Niger State has experienced waves of violence for years. In November, armed gangs abducted more than 250 students and staff from a Catholic boarding school in the same region — a nightmare that captured global headlines and briefly focused international attention on the scale of kidnappings across Nigeria.
The attacks in Kasuwan Daji occurred less than 20 kilometres from Papiri village, the site of that school abduction. For residents here, proximity is not just geographic; it is a cruel reminder that safety in this part of the country is fragile and easily torn.
Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country, home to over 200 million people. But population size offers no shield from the myriad conflicts that now chew at its edges: a long-running jihadist insurgency in the northeast, inter-communal and farmer-herder clashes that flare with alarming frequency, organized criminal networks in the northwest that specialize in large-scale kidnappings for ransom, and separatist violence in the southeast.
“We are dealing with multiple, overlapping security threats,” said Fatima Ibrahim, a security analyst based in Abuja. “These are not siloed problems. When the state’s capacity is stretched thin, criminals exploit the gaps. They can operate for hours — as reports suggest they did in Kasuwan Daji — because there simply aren’t enough patrols, personnel or trust between communities and security forces.”
Why now? A regional ripple effect
Officials in Abuja say a recent uptick in violence across parts of northwestern Nigeria may be connected to militants displaced by international military pressure. President Bola Tinubu’s office suggested the attackers in Kasuwan Daji could include fighters fleeing areas hit by US airstrikes on Christmas Day that targeted militants linked to the Islamic State group. “They will be caught and brought to justice,” the president vowed through his media adviser, Bayo Onanuga.
Whether these particular attackers were “terrorists,” bandits, or a mixture of the two matters — not for semantics, but for how security operations are planned and how civilians are protected. The labels shift how resources are mobilized, what intelligence is shared internationally, and how victims are spoken about in public.
Voices from the Ground
On a concrete veranda near the ruined market, I met Hana, who sells second-hand clothes piled in plastic bundles. She had wrapped her head with a scarf that smelled faintly of smoke. “My customers are gone,” she said. “When the market is closed, there is no school money, no food. We sleep with one ear open now.” Her eyes brimmed with a weary clarity that needs no statistics to prove its truth.
Religious leaders have also weighed in. The local Catholic community described the ease with which the gunmen operated — “reports indicate the bandits operated for hours with no security presence,” their statement read — and called for prayer and urgent government action.
“This is not just about security,” said Pastor Joseph Eze, who runs a small outreach program in Kontagora. “It is about the erosion of daily life. Markets are social spaces, not just economic ones. When they burn, community trust burns with them.”
What Comes Next
In the short term, survival is priority one: counting the dead, tending the wounded, comforting those left behind. Then comes the fraught question of whether ransoms will be paid, as they often are when schools and villages are seized — a grim, unofficial market that funds more violence.
Longer term, the story points to systemic failures. President Tinubu has promised a national security revamp and increased defense spending in the 2026 budget; he has also shuffled senior defence personnel. But money and personnel alone will not rebuild trust between communities and the state. That takes sustained political will, accountable governance, and local policing structures that include the people they serve.
- Key facts: authorities reported “over 30” dead; local church leaders reported more than 40.
- Context: November abduction of more than 250 students in Niger State amplified fears and highlighted vulnerabilities.
- Broader picture: Nigeria grapples with insurgency, organized banditry, localized communal violence, and rising displacement.
Global resonances
This is not only a Nigerian story. It reflects global patterns: the way fragmented violence fills power vacuums, how displacement generates humanitarian crises, and how external military actions — including cross-border strikes — can ripple unpredictably into local dynamics. Aid agencies and international partners are watching closely, and the images from Kasuwan Daji will likely feed into debates about how to balance counterterrorism operations with the protection of civilians.
Questions to Carry Home
As you read this, ask yourself: what does safety look like in a place where a market can be struck down without warning? How do communities rebuild trust with institutions that feel impotent or absent? And how do global actors — from foreign militaries to international aid agencies — help without making the deeper problems worse?
The people of Kasuwan Daji will spend months — perhaps years — sifting through the rubble, reconstructing stalls and lives, and retelling the story of a night when their market became a graveyard. But these are not only their questions to answer. They are ours, too: about governance, global engagement, and the moral urgency of protecting civilian life in an era when conflict is ever more diffuse and devastating.
“We want to live,” said Hana, handing me a small plastic bag of wilted greens she had saved from the ruins. “Is that too much to ask?”
It is a question that hangs in the smoke-soaked air of Kasuwan Daji and should hang in the halls of power, in the inboxes of donors, and in the conscience of anyone who believes in a world where markets bustle and children can go to school without fear.
