A disturbing video that surfaced online this week showing secondary-school students being initiated into a secret cult has reignited fears that Nigeria’s long-running cult wars, once mostly confined to universities and the streets of some southern cities, are now moving deeper.
Security analysts, educators and rights groups warn the footage is not an isolated incident but part of a widening pattern of recruitment, violence and political manipulation that is remaking youth crime on and off campus.
The footage, which emerged on social media, shows students kneeling down while older youths recite oaths and mark initiates with ritual scars, a method of induction human-rights monitors say mirrors tactics used by notorious university cults and transnational criminal networks. The clip triggered immediate outrage from parents and other Nigerians amid renewed calls for a coordinated national response.
Rising toll and creeping reach
Data and reportage compiled over recent years suggest cult-related violence remains both widespread and intensifying. A recent analysis of state reporting and media accounts tallied roughly 1,686 deaths from cult clashes across a five-year span, with states in the south, Rivers, Lagos and Edo among them, recording the highest tolls. That pattern of lethal clashes, researchers say, increasingly spills into tertiary and, alarmingly, secondary schools.
Campus insecurity monitoring by Nigerian outlets found that in a 20-month window, at least 28 students were killed and 78 kidnapped in incidents affecting universities and polytechnics, figures that experts say undercount the true scale because many cases go unreported or are recorded under different crime labels. Secondary schools are less systematically tracked, but multiple recent viral videos and local reports point to a steady trickle of initiations and clashes at the high-school level.
A national security problem, not just campus mischief
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) assessments and national threat reports characterize modern cults as part of Nigeria’s broader organized-crime landscape: groups that recruit young people, traffic in violence, extort businesses and are increasingly professionalised — sometimes with transnational links. The UNODC and Nigerian security briefings warn that cult groups have become “more sophisticated and violent,” complicating policing and prevention in educational settings.
Politics in the shadows
Multiple human-rights reports and academic studies point to an uncomfortable link between cult groups and political actors. Investigations going back decades show that political “godfathers” and some party operatives have recruited and financed gangs and cults as enforcers during campaigns, to intimidate rivals or to protect local power bases. Human Rights Watch and other monitors say that patronage relationships — money, protection and weapons — transform cults into tools of political violence and make suppression politically fraught.
Local reporting and witnesses interviewed in states with heavy cult activity describe a seasonal spike in recruitment and violence around election cycles, when competing camps harvest and weaponise young recruits.
Some states have adopted tougher anti-cult laws — Rivers State’s 2018 law, for example, prescribes heavy penalties for cult killings and related crimes — and security services report periodic mass arrests. But rights groups warn that punitive laws alone do not address root causes: youth unemployment, school insecurity, absenteeism among teachers, and the glamorisation of cult rites on social platforms. UN and NGO reports recommend a combined approach of prevention, community policing, school safety audits and programmes that restore pathways to legitimate livelihoods.
Schools themselves are reacting with a mix of measures: emergency assemblies, strengthened gate-security, collaborations with parent-teacher associations, and teacher training to spot early signs of recruitment. But many principals say they lack resources to enforce round-the-clock supervision or to protect students from external gangs that exploit off-campus networks.
For many Nigerians, the choking spread of cultism into schools is a warning signal that criminal networks and political patronage are harvesting the vulnerability of young Nigerians. Without a combined legal, political and community response, the country risks losing another generation to organised violence that starts in classrooms and ends in coffins.
