No Cash, No Ransom: The Antidote Nigeria Threw Away, While Chasing Bandits With Jets

*Byline: For a Nation Bleeding Money, Blood, and Time*

Nigeria has spent two decades throwing bullets, billions, and battalions at banditry. 

Yet General Christopher Musa stood on Channels TV June 12, 2026 and admitted what every grieving village already knows: “Why It Seems So Difficult To Deal With Banditry”. 

Bad roads, no networks, IEDs, five-minute strikes.

*Musa's Statement isn't strategy. That is confession*

*The Sledgehammer vs The Fly*

Using military jets to chase cash-for-ransom bandits is the stupidity of using a sledgehammer to kill a fly. 

Yes the fly dies, but your wall collapses, and the next fly arrives. 

Troops can sweep 10km for IEDs, but bandits vanish in 5 minutes because cash makes them mobile.

*Military intervention has failed since 2 Decades. The Trump’s “bomb-them-out” interventions abroad failed too*. 

Kinetic force without cutting oxygen only breeds harder criminals who are “fearless and ready to die”. 

*Gen. Musa himself said the challenge is “political... TDN believes otherwise that Nigerian cash-for-ransom activities is 90% Cashless Policy, not a military decision”*

*Yet we keep buying more drones while ignoring the Cashless switch*

*Cash Is The Oxygen. Cut It, They Suffocate.*

Cash-for-ransom is no longer just forest bandits. Families now stage self-kidnaps to extort rich relatives. 

Cattle rearers abandoned herds to “rear humans for cash.” 

Ritualists, Yahoo boys, and allegations of security agents and royal fathers conniving — all of them feed from the same river: physical cash. 

*Gen. Musa asked, “Who is funding them? Who are those giving them the logistics... It is still the people”. The people pay cash. Cash is untraceable. Cash is ransom*

*No Cash, No Ransom. No Ransom, No Banditry.*

Between January and April 2023, Nigeria accidentally tested the antidote. 

The cashless policy forced transactions into traceable channels. 

Kidnaps for ransom dropped sharply. Bandits lost liquidity. 

Then the Supreme Court cancelled it.

PBAT’s government refused to revisit it. Insecurity roared back.

*90% of Nigerian insecurity is cash-driven: ransom, fuel, food, logistics. Remove cash, you remove 90% of the business model*

*The remaining 10% — religious ideology and tribal grievance — can be easily handled by the proposed State Police and community resilience, not airstrikes*

*Recommendations: What Must Happen NOW*

1. *Embarrassing Urgency for Cashless 2.0*: Reintroduce a hard cashless policy with limits on physical cash. Every transaction above ₦5,000 must be digital. 

Banks, POS, USSD. No excuses. The “minor inconveniences” of 2023 are nothing compared to daily mass graves.

2. *Track the Money, Not Just the Men*: The Senate already directed NCC to track bandits flashing ransom money on TikTok. Extend that to every Naira. If cash can’t move, ransom can’t move.

3. *State Police for the 10%*: Ideology and tribal clashes need local intelligence, not Abuja battalions. 

Let states police their narratives while the center chokes the cash.

4. *Stop Negotiating, Start Starving Them*: Gen. Musa warned states to stop negotiating with bandits because “they don’t fear God” and “it damages our work”. Correct. 

But negotiations happen because cash exists. Kill cash, negotiations become pointless.

5. *Prosecute Cash Enablers*: Anyone trading with bandits must be treated as an insurgent. 

Start with cash mules, POS agents in red zones, and fuel suppliers paid in notes. 

*Conclusion: Choose Inconvenience Over Insecurity*

Gen. Musa is right: the military are not magicians. We asked them to be. We sent them into forests while leaving the cash tap open in Lagos, Kano, and Port Harcourt.

*Nigeria does not need more soldiers. It needs fewer Naira notes. We tried cashless once and it worked. We abandoned it for “inconvenience” and inherited “cash-for-ransom” as a national industry.*

This is alarming. This is urgent. Embrace cashless again — embarrassingly, aggressively, without apology.

*No cash, no ransom activities. No ransom activities, then a safer Nigeria is possible without military sledgehammers or Trump’s failed interventions*

The fly dies when you take away the food. Not when you break the house.

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*Reference: General Musa on Channels TV*

https://www.channelstv.com/2026/06/12/video-why-it-seems-so-difficult-to-deal-with-banditry-gen-musa/