Governor Dauda Lawal of Zamfara State has disclosed that he rejected a N600 million ransom demand by bandits who abducted two of his brothers.
He said he would rather risk losing them than finance criminals who could use the money to acquire more weapons.
Lawal said the decision was taken despite pressure from members of his family, including his mother, who pleaded with him to secure the victims' release by paying the ransom.
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The governor spoke during an interaction with media executives in Gusau while defending his longstanding opposition to negotiating with bandits and other criminal groups.
He said his position was based on the belief that ransom payments had transformed kidnapping into a source of financing for armed criminal networks.
"My stand has always been no negotiation with the bandits, from day one. And I still maintain that stand," Lawal said.
According to him, the kidnappers demanded N300 million for each of the two brothers, who he said were taken from their homes.
"I said I was not going to pay a dime," he said.
According to him, handing over such money would only strengthen the criminals.
Lawal argued that ransom money could ultimately be converted into weapons used in subsequent attacks.
He said the situation will create a cycle in which each successful kidnapping finances another operation.
"For every naira that you pay, that is what they use to acquire sophisticated weapons," he said.
The governor said the incident placed him in the difficult position of choosing between the immediate safety of his relatives and the wider consequences of rewarding the kidnappers.
He recalled that his mother urged him to reconsider his position, but he told her that paying for one relative could expose other members of the family to similar abductions.
"I said, 'No, I am not going to pay this money.' The reason is that I have other brothers and sisters," he said.
Lawal said he also used a religious argument in trying to explain his position to his mother, asking whether paying N300 million to secure one person would ultimately prevent death if God had decreed otherwise.
He said the kidnappers eventually became frustrated after failing to obtain the ransom and later sought a much smaller payment in the form of N150,000 worth of recharge cards.
Even that demand, he said, was rejected because he had already committed himself not to give money to the criminals.
"I said somebody from the family should pay that because I had made a commitment that I would never pay," he recalled.
Lawal's position comes against the background of persistent banditry and kidnapping in Zamfara, one of the states most affected by armed criminal groups in the North-West.
Security personnel and civilians have continued to come under attack in parts of the state this year, including Tsafe, Anka and Bungudu.
In January, an ambush in Zamfara killed five soldiers and a police officer, while military operations in the state also resulted in the rescue of dozens of hostages from bandit-held locations.
The governor said such attacks had reinforced his conviction that negotiating from a position of weakness would not provide a lasting solution to the security crisis.
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He also argued that previous negotiations had failed because bandit groups were fragmented, with no single leadership capable of binding all factions to an agreement.
Lawal said his administration was instead strengthening local intelligence and security response through Community Protection Guards, technology and improved access roads to difficult areas.
He recently linked the construction of a 95-kilometre road in the Tsafe axis to the need to reduce the time required for security agencies to reach communities under attack.
The governor has also continued to advocate state police, arguing that local personnel would understand their communities and terrain better and that a more decentralised command structure could produce quicker responses to attacks.
