Nigeria’s wave of kidnappings: why the spike in attacks across the north?

Why is Nigeria in the throes of a kidnapping epidemic? Sometimes depicted as terrorists, other times as bandits, attackers targeting three schools inside of a week, leading some to compare with the 2014 Chibok attacks by the jihadists of Boko Haram. We’ll do our comparison and revisit the same question as a decade ago, why would any human being abduct children, in some cases nursery school children?