The security tax built into every price quote from Jos

Five years running an agribusiness through Plateau’s slow-motion exodus, and the risk premium investors haven’t priced in.

My phone starts ringing whenever something happens in Jos. Lagos, London, family overseas, friends I haven’t spoken to in months – all are asking the same question: Are you safe? Five years in, that question doesn’t bother me. The other question matters more, the one about what staying costs. Running an agribusiness here incurs a structural, compounding cost that is unrelated to the danger, and few people account for it in their pricing.

Jos is one of the more liveable cities in Nigeria’s north: good food, better weather than anywhere else I’ve worked, a university that still runs, and soil that grows produce most of the country envies. I run an agribusiness sourcing from partner farmers across Plateau and Bauchi, and I’ve watched colleagues run the same numbers and leave before anyone wrote the story.

This is the story of that exit: when it began, why it never stopped, and what the state could do to reverse it.

The 2001 break

Anyone who grew up here or arrived in the early 2000s remembers what the 2001 and 2008 crises did to the books. Expatriates left. Major industry players closed their Jos operations. Investors marked Plateau down on internal risk maps. Insurers pulled back from mid-sized operators. Fixed assets that had taken decades to build lost their value in the crash, and most owners never recovered it.

Institutional knowledge left with that first wave, too: freight relationships, supplier networks, the procurement officers who knew which compounds to walk into and which to avoid. Investors looking at northern Nigeria ran the same numbers and chose Kaduna or Kano instead. Jos never recovered its place in that calculation, and the absence of one dramatic flashpoint since 2008 has let investors and the state assume recovery is underway. It isn’t.

The rural turn

The violence after 2010 moved to the villages: Bassa, Barkin Ladi, Riyom, Kanam, and Wase. These are coordinated attacks, not isolated incidents. In March, attackers killed four traders from Gangare on the road to Pankshin, and that single incident triggered emergency security deployments into the capital to head off retaliation.

Rural insecurity and urban commerce move together: when the road between a farm and a market turns unsafe, the market goes quiet, the warehouse sits empty, and the buyer in Lagos calls Kaduna instead.

The cost at farm level

Agriculture employs more than 80 percent of Plateau’s rural population. In Barkin Ladi and Riyom, farmers I work with can’t reach their more distant fields. Farmers either cultivate the plot closest to their house or do not farm at all. The same insecurity that drives away investors keeps farmers off their land, and it barely shows up in anyone’s numbers.

I see this at close range. We’ve rerouted sourcing more times than I can count. A consignment that should take four days takes seven because our field officer can’t travel a particular road that week. We postponed the buying day because three farmers in the cooperative haven’t slept at home in a fortnight. A community I’d planned to onboard last harvest stopped being viable in an afternoon.

Every sourcing decision now carries a security layer that shouldn’t have to exist: which roads our team can travel, which compounds are safe to visit before harvest, which farms will yield and which won’t because the farmer couldn’t reach the field in time. I build that cost into every price I quote and every lead time I give. Buyers never see it. It isn’t free.

The confidence gap in Plateau’s spending

The state isn’t idle. In 2025, Plateau’s Internal Revenue Service collected N40 billion for the first time; the 2026 target is N65 billion. Governor Mutfwang has signed a N4 billion lending facility with the Bank of Industry: single-digit interest and a tenor of up to five years, aimed at small businesses. The state has budgeted for roads. Military operations are active.

None of it fixes the real constraint. Traders won’t use a road until they trust it. The BOI facility is sound, but businesses stay or leave based on whether their staff sleep through the night, not the interest rate. Chasing N65 billion from a shrinking pool of formal businesses does not grow the economy. It squeezes the businesses that haven’t already left.

Alongside the spending, the state needs four things: secured corridors between farms and markets, route accountability for goods in transit, insurance frameworks that price risk for operators below enterprise scale, and a standalone commitment to protecting commercial activity, not a line item inside a security briefing.

Underpriced: The case for Jos

Jos isn’t finished. It has infrastructure most of the north doesn’t. The university still produces graduates. The farming hinterland has real commodity potential: altitude and soil that grow crops with genuine market value. Founders are still building here, and most of us are tired of hearing about this city only when something goes wrong.

Building here takes more than conviction. Investors, logistics operators, banks and the government need to treat economic protection as a policy objective on its own, not an afterthought to peace talks or a chapter buried inside a security white paper.

If you’ve written Plateau off, look at the specifics before you finalise that call: the soil, the altitude, the commodity profile, the infrastructure that survived, and the people still here. The risk is real. So is the return for whoever prices it in first.

The 2001 exodus opened a gap. It took a generation to begin closing. The slow bleed of the last decade is opening another one. Whoever moves first will make the next decade of margin inside it.

About the author:

Cobi-Jane Akinrele is the founder of Aké Collective, working with over 1,000 smallholder farmers in Nigeria’s highland states (Plateau, Bauchi, and Taraba) to build traceable, EUDR-compliant supply chains for soy, coffee, and fonio. Born in the UK with Nigerian roots, she studied at Cambridge and holds a master’s in African Studies. She writes about supply chains, compliance, and the realities of building food systems from the inside in her newsletter, Highland Lens.