The first Sharia state (January 2000)#Deep dive →
On 27 October 1999 Governor Ahmed Sani Yerima announced that Zamfara would implement Sharia (Islamic) law in full; the Sharia Penal Code came into force in January 2000. Zamfara was the first Nigerian state of the Fourth Republic to adopt full Sharia, and over the next two years eleven additional Northern states followed (Bauchi, Borno, Gombe, Jigawa, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Kebbi, Niger, Sokoto, Yobe). The decision was constitutionally contested — Section 10 of the 1999 Constitution forbids any government from adopting a state religion — but was politically irreversible by the time Obasanjo's government chose not to challenge it at the Supreme Court.
Banditry — Nigeria's worst-affected state (2011 — present)#Deep dive →
Zamfara is, by virtually every measure, the worst-affected state in Nigeria's North-West banditry crisis. The epidemic — traced by the most careful researchers to armed Fulani-herder / sedentary-farmer conflicts that militarised from around 2011 in Zamfara's frontier LGAs (Anka, Bukkuyum, Maru, Shinkafi, Zurmi) — has produced sustained kidnappings-for-ransom, mass village displacements, and the collapse of state security across much of the state's rural geography by the mid-2010s. The federal Air Force-led 'Operation Hadarin Daji' was launched in 2020, with successive military operations through the Buhari and Tinubu administrations failing to restore full civilian authority to the worst-affected LGAs. The crisis is documented in detail at the Armed Forces hub and the Federal Cabinet (Defence) entry.
Illegal gold mining and the bandit economy#Deep dive →
Zamfara hosts one of Nigeria's most significant goldfields, concentrated in the Anka and Bukkuyum LGAs. The combination of unregulated artisanal mining, illegal foreign-buyer networks (most notoriously, allegations of Chinese and Lebanese smuggling rings), and bandit taxation of mining sites has produced one of the largest documented illicit-economy linkages between Nigerian banditry and a single natural resource. Federal mining suspensions were imposed in 2019 (Buhari) and renewed in 2023 (Tinubu), with limited effect.