Kidnapped, but why?

Two Italians, Claudio Chiodi and Ivano De Capitani, have been kidnapped in Niger. (For the geographically challenged: this is not Nigeria. Niger is another country further into Sahara.) There is luckily not enough information to get a good picture of what is going on, and that makes it possible to make interesting guesses.

The kidnappers have issued a statement which says that Niger is not a democracy. However, no one knows who they are and what they are after. There are hundreds of millions of Chinese, who do not live in a democracy, and they do not kidnap foreigners to get their message out. Why would people from Niger do so? What makes anyone start fighting for democracy? It is often a good idea to do so - at least with peaceful means, but millions, probably billions of people across the globe to not bother doing it. Why would those people from Niger do it?

There is a possibility that the kidnappers believe that democracy will solve all their problems. There is not enough food. Bring on democracy! There are no good programs on television. Bring on democracy! There is a drought. Bring on democracy!

(Ironically, each of those problems may actually be somewhat helped by democracy - even the drought. With democracy there is fairly likely to be a discussion about droughts and their causes. If it is possible to solve it through better irrigation systems, a democracy is more likely to apply the solution than a dictatorship, where the ruling group may have little interest in actually solving the problem at all.)

There is also a possibility that the kidnappers want money. But then, why do they not simply say so? Perhaps they just begged the Italians for some money, and got more and more insistent. The kidnappers finally realised that they couldn't get any money from the Italians, unless they kept them there with violence, and then they had to invent an excuse for what they had done - and that excuse turned out to be a political struggle in which they had never before participated.