Nigeria advocates put northern missing at 17,000

Local advocates for missing people estimated 17,000 people are missing across northern Nigeria, Al Jazeera reported in an Oct. 25 news article from Maiduguri.

The figure gives scale to a humanitarian gap in Borno State, where Kashim Mohammed’s Association for the Well-being of Displaced and Missing Persons’ Families said its records indicate about 10,000 missing people, compared with the advocates’ northern Nigeria estimate.

Mohammed, 39, chairs the community group in Bolori II, Ngarnam ward, Maiduguri. His younger sister, Falmata Mohammed, disappeared in 2011 while travelling with her mother from Maiduguri to Port Harcourt, and Mohammed said unidentified gunmen abducted the two women.

A later tip suggested Falmata had been found in Benin, but Mohammed said the man who brought the information vanished without leaving contact details. “From then until now, nobody knows anything about the man who brought the information,” he said.

Another Maiduguri resident, Muhammad Alhaji Bashir, 29, told Al Jazeera his elder brother, Adam Muhammad Bashir, known as Bakura, went missing around 2012 or 2013. Bashir said relatives took Bakura’s photographs to a rehabilitation centre in Bulumkutu when they heard rescued people had arrived, but no one identified him.

Boko Haram’s armed rebellion began in northeastern Nigeria in 2009. The conflict has hit communities through attacks, abductions and displacement, leaving families to search across hospitals, displacement camps and facilities receiving people rescued from conflict areas.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, working with the Nigerian Red Cross Society, has supported efforts to trace missing people and reconnect separated relatives, the article said. Mohammed said his association sometimes receives Red Cross notices with names and details that can offer leads, though they do not necessarily confirm a relative has been found.

The estimates carry uncertainty. Al Jazeera said the sources, geographic scope, reporting periods and methods behind the 17,000 northern Nigeria estimate and the association’s Borno records had not been independently established for the article.

Mohammed said the association was formed in 2023 after searches by affected families and registered with Nigeria’s Corporate Affairs Commission in 2025. Members meet monthly, share information and discuss the economic strain left when a missing person was a parent or breadwinner.

The group is also assisting about 600 orphaned children from affected families, Mohammed said. Some are in school, while others have dropped out because relatives cannot afford fees or other basic needs.

Flooding in parts of Maiduguri in 2024 added another obstacle, according to Mohammed. He said water damaged photographs in Ngarnam that families had preserved to help identify missing relatives.

For Mohammed and Bashir, the searches continue without confirmation that their relatives are alive or dead. Mohammed’s father died at 60 from an illness the family linked to high blood pressure, still believing his daughter might return.