How Gov Mbah Reclaimed Enugu’s Notorious Kidnap Corridor
By Chidi Omeje
There was a time when travelling along the Enugu-Nsukka Expressway, particularly the Opi-Ugwuogo axis, was an exercise in anxiety.
For years, the stretch had acquired an unenviable reputation as a kidnapping corridor. Travellers approached it with apprehension; families waited anxiously for loved ones to arrive; and reports of abductions for ransom routinely dominated the news. The road, which connects Enugu, the state’s capital, with the university town of Nsukka and serves as an important gateway between the South and the North through Benue State, had become synonymous with fear and trepidation.
What made the situation particularly troubling was that the criminals appeared almost impervious to conventional security arrangements. Soldiers and mobile policemen were deployed along the route, yet kidnappers continued to strike with frightening audacity. The problem was therefore not simply a shortage of men in uniform. It was a failure to adequately anticipate, detect, track and disrupt the criminal networks exploiting the terrain.
For the Enugu State Government, this was more than a security challenge. It was a direct assault on the economic and social life of the state, and an uncomfortable contradiction to an administration that was making visible interventions in other sectors.
Governor Peter Mbah’s response was consequently not to treat kidnapping as an isolated criminal problem requiring occasional military or police raids. The administration set about building a broader security architecture designed to prevent crime, detect threats early, respond rapidly and deny criminals the spaces in which they operate. That shift in philosophy has been crucial.
At the heart of the new architecture is an ultra-modern, technology-driven Command and Control Centre designed to provide real-time surveillance, intelligence gathering and monitoring of the state’s critical spaces and borders. This is significant because modern security is increasingly about information: knowing what is happening, where it is happening and responding before a threat becomes a catastrophe.
The deployment of 150 AI-enabled patrol vehicles and operational assets for the Distress Response Squad has added another important layer. Security presence becomes considerably more effective when personnel are not merely stationed at fixed points but possess the mobility and technological capacity to respond quickly to distress calls and emerging threats.
But perhaps one of the most important elements of the strategy is the decision to take the fight to the criminals’ natural habitat. The establishment and equipping of the Enugu Forest Security Force recognised a fundamental reality of contemporary insecurity: criminals do not necessarily operate where the state is most visible. Forests, bushes and remote settlements can provide hideouts, escape routes and staging grounds. Securing those spaces therefore becomes as important as securing the highways and urban centres. This is where Enugu’s approach appears to have gone beyond the traditional idea of security as simply putting more armed men on the road. The game changer was actually about denying criminals sanctuary.
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The establishment of the Enugu State Security Trust Fund has also provided an institutional mechanism for sustaining the security architecture. Security requires money; not merely for weapons and vehicles, but for communications, intelligence, logistics, personnel welfare and maintenance. By creating a framework for mobilising public-private resources, the state has sought to make security a collective responsibility rather than an exclusive burden of government.
Then there is the intelligence dimension. No security architecture can succeed sustainably without information from the communities where crimes occur. The integration of neighbourhood watch structures and traditional leadership into the state’s security framework recognises that residents often see and hear things long before formal security agencies do. A farmer who notices unfamiliar faces in a community, a traditional ruler who becomes aware of suspicious movements, or a neighbourhood watch member who detects an unusual pattern of activity can provide the first critical piece of intelligence.
In other words, the state has begun to move from a security model that waits for crime to happen to one that seeks to anticipate and prevent it. The restoration of normal economic and social activity is perhaps the most visible dividend of this approach. That is why the story of the Enugu-Nsukka Expressway is bigger than one notorious stretch of road.
It is the story of what happens when government treats insecurity as an ecosystem rather than a series of isolated incidents. Kidnapping thrives where there is intelligence failure, weak surveillance, difficult terrain, slow response, inadequate logistics, community silence and the absence of sustained political will. Disrupt those conditions simultaneously and the criminal enterprise becomes considerably more difficult to sustain. This may well be the most important lesson from Enugu.
The state did not tame the kidnapping challenge simply by putting more security personnel on the road. It began to combine technology with intelligence, mobility with surveillance, forest security with highway protection, community information with institutional coordination, and public resources with private-sector support. The result is a security philosophy increasingly defined by prevention rather than reaction.
There is, of course, no justification for declaring victory prematurely. Criminal networks adapt, and today’s security success can become tomorrow’s vulnerability if vigilance, investment and intelligence gathering decline. Sustaining the gains therefore requires continuous technological upgrades, professional policing, inter-agency cooperation, community engagement and accountability. But there is an important point that should not be lost. For years, the Opi-Ugwuogo corridor was treated almost as though kidnapping there was an inevitable reality of our life. It was not. It should never be!
The experience under the Mbah administration demonstrates that even deeply entrenched security problems can be confronted when government combines political will with the right architecture, resources, technology and intelligence. The real achievement is therefore not merely that a notorious kidnapping corridor has become safer. It is that Enugu has demonstrated a larger proposition: criminality can be pushed back when the state stops merely reacting to insecurity and begins systematically dismantling the environment in which insecurity thrives.
That is how a kidnapping monster is tamed. That is how security challenges are confronted. I hope other states blighted by the scourge of kidnapping and other violent crimes are taking dressing from the Enugu template.
*Chidi Omeje is the publisher of Security Digest magazine
