Nearly nine months after gunmen abducted 25 schoolgirls in Maga, attacks and security operations across Kebbi point to overlapping threats involving different armed actors and vulnerable corridors.
Ten police officers and two civilians were killed on Monday, 10 August, in a battle with a large armed group around Makuku in Sakaba Local Government Area of Kebbi State. The police headquarters later said a vigilante was also killed.
Police spokesperson Bashir Usman said at least 17 suspected bandits were killed and four motorcycles belonging to the attackers were destroyed. Two police officers were injured. He cautioned that the casualty assessment was continuing as security personnel pursued members of the group who fled.
A subsequent police account said more than 200 armed men on motorcycles attacked a security camp at Makuku at about 6 a.m., prompting reinforcements supported by the army and air force. It said the gun battle lasted more than two hours.
The police headquarters’ account also listed one vigilante among those killed, in addition to the 10 police officers and two civilians, and said at least 17 suspected attackers were believed to have been killed.
Mr Usman later told PREMIUM TIMES that the two accounts referred to the same attack.
He said the attackers in three groups approached Makuku from different directions in an apparent attempt to surround the community, including the security camp located at its entrance.
He said an attack on the camp formed part of the wider assault on Makuku because “the camp is located just as you enter the village.”
His explanation helps reconcile the broader descriptions of an attack on the security camp and engagements around Rafin Makuku. However, Mr Usman did not clarify precisely what stages of the operation corresponded to the 6 a.m. and 9:25 a.m. timestamps contained in the two official accounts.
A separate question is how the reported air force operation fitted into the sequence.
But Makuku was not an isolated eruption.
Nearly nine months earlier, elsewhere in Kebbi South, another attack had forced the state into national headlines.
On 17 November 2025, armed men invaded Government Girls’ Comprehensive Secondary School in Maga, Danko/Wasagu LGA. They abducted 25 schoolgirls, killed the school’s vice-principal, Hassan Makuku, and injured another employee.
The girls were eventually freed, but the attack exposed weaknesses in school protection and triggered wider closures. Kebbi subsequently ordered secondary and tertiary institutions to close temporarily due to insecurity, while the federal government temporarily closed 47 Federal Unity Colleges following the school attacks in Kebbi and Niger.
The controversy deepened when Governor Nasir Idris said soldiers deployed around the Maga school withdrew shortly before the attack despite prior intelligence about a possible raid. The Minister of State for Defence, Bello Matawalle, later said the army was investigating the circumstances surrounding the withdrawal.
What has happened since then raises a different question.
Rather than one vulnerable school or one insecure forest corridor, attacks and security operations over the following months have touched communities across several parts of Kebbi, including Danko/Wasagu, Sakaba, Shanga, Bagudo, Dandi and Bunza.
The incidents have involved different actors. Authorities have described some as bandit groups or Lakurawa terrorists, while the affiliations of some kidnappers remain unestablished. Security forces have also responded to armed movements across state and international boundaries.
The evidence does not show one organisation advancing uniformly across Kebbi. Instead, it points to overlapping security pressures involving different actors, targets and geographic corridors.
The geographical spread of insecurity predates the latest attacks.
A November 2025 report by the European Union Agency for Asylum, drawing on ACLED data, recorded 70 security incidents and 156 fatalities in Kebbi between 1 January 2024 and 31 August 2025.
Forty of the incidents were classified as violence against civilians and 28 as battles.
The incidents were recorded in 18 of Kebbi’s 21 LGAs. Danko/Wasagu recorded the highest number of incidents (19), followed by Arewa with 12 and Shanga with nine. Suru and Augie recorded five each.
The data do not establish that the same armed actors were responsible across those areas. But they provide a broader baseline showing that insecurity was already geographically dispersed before the recent incidents examined by PREMIUM TIMES.
A recurring pressure point has been Kebbi South.
Danko/Wasagu, Sakaba, and the surrounding areas lie close to states that have faced entrenched banditry. Local officials have described some of the insecurity there as a cross-border problem rather than violence generated entirely within Kebbi.
That argument resurfaced at the end of July after armed men attacked Tudun Bicci in Danko/Wasagu.
Four people, two local forest guards and two civilians, were killed, while a soldier was declared missing. The council chairperson, Hussaini Bena, said the attackers struck people on farmland before security personnel and local guards intervened.
Mr Bena attributed recurring violence in the LGA partly to armed-group camps in neighbouring Zamfara and Niger states, from where he said attackers crossed into Kebbi communities.
The Makuku incident occurred less than two weeks later.
