Kidnap stories

The week before, as most Nigerians know, there was an attack on a train heading from Kaduna to Abuja. Fortunately, there was no fatality in that incident but it said something of what the state of the country has become.

The kidnapping did not start today but over the years it has grown and kept growing to the point now where every person should be worried if they are not already. 

We have watched over time the growing criminal capacity of these kidnappers to wreak havoc. A few months ago, it became clear that these people, being touted as bandits, have acquired the capacity to shoot down a fighter jet. At least, if reports are to be believed, it frightened some people in the security sector enough to the point that they allegedly reached out to these bandits and allegedly struck a deal with them so they could buy off the anti-aircraft gun truck for N20 million if the Wall Street Journal were to be believed. Of course, the Nigeria Air Force has stringently denied this allegation

“The NAF wishes to categorically state that there is absolutely no iota of truth in the spurious allegation that was undoubtedly designed to cast aspersions on the good image of the Service. The said report is totally false. It should therefore be taken as fake news and disregarded,” Air Commodore Edward Gabkwet, Director of NAF Public Relations and Information, said.

What cannot be denied is that these bandits have now developed the guile to plant an explosive on rail tracks. And are increasingly venturing into villages, towns and cities to harvest people, much in the same manner that slave raiders in the past did.

The most recent of course was the invasion of the University of Abuja staff quarters, where a total of seven persons were abducted. The same thing had happened at ABU Zaria only months before where they carted away poor university staff leaving in frankly embarrassing lodgings not befitting the status of people trusted to educate the future leaders of the country.

Of course, schools have become habitual hunting grounds for these kidnappers. How they have developed the capacity to abduct hundreds, sometimes up to 600 students, at a time and walk them for kilometres into the forest, unchallenged, is a big head scratch.

And only last week, they raided a church in Kaduna State and interrupted the studious devotion of some 60 Christians and led them away into the bush. But then again, at the height of Ramadan, Islam’s holiest month, these bandits stormed a Katsina mosque, interrupted the earnest prayers of those Muslim faithful and went away with 40 of them. This was in May this year.

Everyone knows a kidnap victim. And everyone has a kidnapping story. One of the most tragic I heard was on a day I had taken a visiting relative to the train station where she met a Kaduna-based neighbour of theirs. This neighbour was grieving. One of her nephews had been killed by his abductors.

The young man was at home with his brother and mother minding their business when armed men broke the wall of the house and kidnapped the two young men. One of them was receiving treatment for some ailment he was suffering from.

After a month with the kidnappers, a ransom was delivered. The bandits said it was not enough. They asked the messenger to wait and take back their response. They brought out one of the young men and shot him before his brother and the relative who had gone to deliver the ransom. They took the money and kept the other sibling and as at the time I was told of this account, no one knew what the fate of the other brother would be.

The stories I have recounted here are all familiar to us. Every day a worse one emerges. But what these stories tell us is that nowhere is safe. Not the roads. Not the trains. Not the churches or mosques and certainly not our homes.

The poor, who can barely afford three meals a day, has been taken. And the rich who can afford mansions and guards are not safe either. Neither are traditional rulers or government officials.

What is worse is the sense of helplessness the average Nigerian feels in the face of these assaults of criminality.

The story is told of relatives of some kidnap victims who were on their way to deliver the ransom to bandits for the return of their loved ones. As they were about to veer off into the bush for their rendezvous with the kidnappers, they met a group of policemen.

“Where are you going to?” the officers asked.

“Our relatives have been kidnapped,” they said. “We are going to pay the ransom.”

“Oh, how unfortunate,” the officers said. “We wish you good luck. May God bring you and your relatives back safely.”

And with the prayers from the policemen, the relatives continued their march into the forest to accomplish their mission while the policemen jumped into their patrol vehicle and left the vicinity.

It has come to that. 

Between 2017 and 2020 some 34 police officers were kidnapped, sometimes five at a time, according to data diligently compiled by Daily Trust’s Librarian, Malam Haruna Ibrahim. This did not include the 12 officers ambushed along the Katsina-Zamfara expressway while on their way to a training programme. For each of these, there was no gallant SWAT-style rescue. But a humble submission of ransom like the rest of us.

The recent invasion of the Nigerian Defence Academy by these bandits, during which they killed two officers and kidnapped a major, sent shock waves across the country. If a military institution like the NDA is vulnerable like that, what does that say about the rest of us? 

Nowhere is safe.

What is happening in Nigeria today is an unmitigated disaster. And we are here running from pillar to post wondering who is going to save us, who is going to make us safe.

The Hausa people have a saying that when one is inundated by blows, one should block the blows to the head. In this case, even the arms that will block these blows are incapacitated. We are at the mercy of fate.