About the Project

80–25 is an attempt to look at forty-five years of organized violence in Northern Nigeria as a continuous, evolving phenomenon.

In March 2024, bandits rode into Kuriga, a small town in Kaduna State, Nigeria, and took 287 children from their school. By the time parents arrived, the children had disappeared into the forests and hills of the Birnin Gwari axis. The Nigerian government condemned it, as it always does. The military was deployed, as it always is. Three weeks later, the children came home, and the story, which had briefly broken through into international news, faded. What almost nobody asked, at least not in any forum where the answer could have been acted upon, was a simple question: how did a tactic that Boko Haram developed and refined in Borno State over the course of a decade become, by 2024, standard operating procedure for banditry networks operating a thousand kilometres to the west, with no formal connection to Boko Haram at all? That question does not have a simple answer, but it has an answer.

80–25 begins in 1980. While Northern Nigeria has a history of political violence and cycles of armed uprising that goes back generations, through the colonial period, through the jihad of Usman dan Fodio in the early nineteenth century, and through conflicts that predate written documentation entirely, the Maitatsine uprising in Kano in 1980 is the first clearly documented instance of the specific recurring pattern this archive is designed to track, sourced across government records, newspaper archives, academic work, and survivor testimony. The full history of this region is longer and more complicated than any single archive could contain. This is just one serious slice of it.

Muhammadu Marwa was a Cameroonian preacher who arrived in Kano sometime in the 1940s and spent decades building a following among the city's poorest residents, the urban poor who had migrated from rural areas and found instead limited economic prospects and a growing conviction that the Nigerian state had nothing to offer them. By the late 1970s, his movement had thousands of followers living in a compound in the Yan Awaki neighbourhood, increasingly armed and increasingly in conflict with the state. The uprising began in December 1980. 10 days of street fighting left somewhere between four thousand and ten thousand people dead, a range that is in itself an indictment of how this history has been documented. Marwa was killed. The government declared the movement crushed. Two years later, a Maitatsine cell surfaced in Kaduna. Then Bulumkutu in 1982, Yola in 1984, and Gombe in 1985. The movement had lost its founder, its headquarters, and its original base, but it kept finding new ones.

That dispersal logic is the through line of this entire history. Mohammed Yusuf founded what would become Boko Haram in Maiduguri in the early 2000s, drawing on the same constituencies as Maitatsine two decades earlier, in a city that had already, a generation earlier, hosted a Maitatsine cell. When the military killed Yusuf in custody in 2009 and declared the movement broken, the faction that coalesced around Abubakar Shekau spent three years rebuilding and emerged more violent, more decentralised, and more dangerous than before. By 2014, Boko Haram controlled a territory larger than some European countries. When sustained military pressure eventually fractured the group between 2015 and 2016, it split into ISWAP and smaller formations that spread across the Northeast and into Niger, Chad, and Cameroon, where they continue to operate today.

In the Northwest, banditry networks that had begun as localised disputes over land and cattle had evolved by the late 2010s into armed groups with internal hierarchies, territorial control over large areas of Zamfara, Katsina, and Sokoto, and the capacity to shut down entire local governments. The mass kidnapping tactic, which Boko Haram developed as an ideological statement, was adopted by these networks as a pure revenue model. Kankara in 2020, 344 students. Jangebe in 2021, 279 girls. Kagara in 2021, 39 students. Tegina in 2021, 136 children, some as young as five years old. Kuriga in 2024, 287 children. More than a thousand students were abducted from Northwestern Nigerian schools in four years alone. The tactic had migrated across a thousand kilometres, shed its ideology, and become industrialised. That migration is almost impossible to see without the kind of long view a comprehensive archive provides.

That archive is what 80–25 is. Every incident is geolocated and sourced, drawn from news archives, government records, academic research, NGO documentation, and community testimony. The archive documents official responses alongside the events themselves, tracking displacement as a structural feature of how these cycles work and how they keep finding new fuel. It is built for the researcher who needs a reliable consolidated source, for the journalist who needs the context behind the latest crisis, for the policymaker or funder who needs to understand what has actually been tried across forty-five years and why it keeps falling short, and for the communities at the centre of this history, whose experience deserves a record serious enough to reflect what they have actually endured.

The archive will be updated continuously, maintained in partnership with local researchers and community organisations. It is and will remain completely free to access.