WATCH: Ten women form vigilante group in Jos, patrol their neighbourhood at night to fight growing insecurity

• Ten Christian and Muslim women have formed a vigilante group to patrol their Jos neighbourhood at night.

• The group says worsening insecurity and repeated attacks pushed them to take action.

• Their story has drawn attention as Plateau State continues to grapple with deadly violence.

In Jos, ten women have taken the security of their neighbourhood into their own hands, forming an all-female vigilante group that patrols the streets at night armed with whips, flashlights and identification cards.

What makes the group unusual beyond its composition is its membership; it includes both Christian and Muslim women, a detail that carries particular weight in Jos, a city with a long and painful history of religious conflict.

The women say the decision to organise was driven by the worsening security situation around them, with violence in nearby communities pushing them to act rather than wait.

Their leader, Blessing Ngozi, described the motivation in terms that leave little room for ambiguity.

"We women are the ones who are affected in anything bad that happens. We are affected because our husbands are killed and our children are killed. At the end of the day, we become childless and widows," she said.

The group operates against a backdrop of sustained and documented violence across Plateau State. 

According to BBC Africa, 60 per cent of all violence against civilians recorded across Nigeria in April 2026 took place in Plateau State alone, a figure that places the state at the centre of the country's worsening insecurity crisis.

That crisis has been building for years. Amnesty International's data shows that in the two years since President Tinubu took office, at least 2,630 people have been killed in Plateau State, making it the second most affected state in the country after Benue. Over 167 rural communities have been attacked across the state, displacing an estimated 65,000 people.

Between late March and early April this year, coordinated attacks on five communities in Bokkos Local Government Area alone killed more than 100 people in the space of a week, the kind of violence that has become grimly familiar to residents across the state.

It is within this context that the ten women of Jos decided that waiting for intervention was no longer an option.

Armed with whips rather than weapons, their nightly patrols are built around deterrence and community presence rather than confrontation. The flashlights and ID cards signal legitimacy and the whips signal intent.

The group has drawn attention for what it represents as much as what it does. Women from communities that have historically been on opposite sides of Jos's religious fault lines, choosing to stand together in the dark rather than remain divided by it.

No government agency has publicly acknowledged or formally supported the group at the time of this report.

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