Former Niger Delta warlord Mujahid Asari Dokubo’s explosive admission that his over 3,000 fighters in Imo State have received zero payment for 44 straight months has ripped the veil off the true engine of the South-East’s unending crisis of kidnapping, armed robbery, and “unknown gunmen” violence.

In his March 29, 2026 interview with The Sun, Dokubo laid it bare: “As I am talking to you, for 44 months, I have not been paid. For the services of the men who are fighting at the forefront, getting injured and dying.” Deployed since 2021 by the Buhari administration through the DSS to “crush IPOB/ESN camps,” the group was never withdrawn. Instead, it was left to rot without salary, without logistics, and without accountability.

The implication is as predictable as it is deadly: hungry, armed, battle-hardened men with no income will feed themselves.

Security analysts and South-East stakeholders have long warned that unpaid vigilante-style militias inevitably morph into criminal enterprises. With no salary for nearly four years, Dokubo’s operatives many originally recruited into Imo’s Ebubeagu outfit now face a simple economic reality: survive by crime or starve. Sources close to the theatre say the men have increasingly turned to:

Highway and home kidnappings for ransom, human organ harvesters, using their knowledge of local terrain and official cover to operate with impunity.

Lolo Nneka Chimezie, National President of the Igbo Women Assembly, has been sounding this alarm for years. She has repeatedly accused Dokubo’s group and the Imo State government of deliberately manufacturing insecurity to justify militarisation and undermine the Biafra agitation. According to Chimezie, the non-payment is not negligence, it is a feature, not a bug. Unpaid fighters are easier to deny and harder to control, creating a perfect deniable proxy for chaos while the real sponsors wash their hands.

IPOB has gone further, describing Dokubo’s men as the primary architects of the “unknown gunmen” killings and abductions that have turned the South-East into a war zone. The group insists the militants were hired specifically to discredit IPOB/ESN, but the prolonged lack of pay has now backfired, turning state-sponsored enforcers into full-blown predators.

The human and economic cost to the South-East is catastrophic. Communities live in perpetual fear. Businesses have fled. Families pay “protection” levies or lose loved ones to ransom demands. Youth unemployment, already sky-high, is worsened as desperate young men are recruited into these same criminal networks for quick money. The Entire Orsu Local Government Area now operate under the shadow of armed groups that were originally brought in to “restore peace.”

Dokubo himself admitted his men have suffered deaths and injuries while he personally funds operations from savings to prevent total collapse. Yet the federal and Imo State governments remain silent, no payment, no withdrawal, no explanation.

Forty four months without pay is not a funding delay. It is a deliberate policy that has converted supposed security operatives into the very criminals terrorizing Imo state and south East. Until the government admits this truth and either pays the fighters or sends them back to the creeks, the kidnapping, robbery, and bloodshed in the South-East will not stop, because the real cause is no longer IPOB, ESN, or “unknown gunmen.”

It is 44 months of unpaid militancy. And the South-East is paying the price in blood and billions.