For two long years, Mrs Toboulayefa Jones did not know where her husband was, or if he was alive or ‘swimming with the fishes’, as the mafia would say.
All she knew was that the men who stormed his Yenagoa office in July 2016 and took her husband, Jones Abiri, away were not kidnappers, thieves, or even ritual murderers; they were men working for the Nigerian government.
Jones Abiri was the publisher and editor of The Weekly Source before men of the Department of State Services (DSS) apprehended him, waved their wands empowered by the government and in a cloud of bureaucratic smoke, ‘disappeared him’ for two whole years.
For two years, they denied that he was in their possession.
For two years, they did not allow his family or lawyers to see him.
Only the intervention of local and international journalism and rights groups forced the DSS to produce Mr Abiri.
They charged him to court with spurious allegations of terrorism for publishing a story that claimed there was a brewing coup plot in the military.
Despite the courts awarding him damages, which the government is yet to pay, Mr Abiri was re-arrested in 2019 and his trial is still playing out like a badly-scripted episode of SpongeBob SquarePants.
I do not know Mrs Toboulayefa Jones and I cannot say how she coped with the trauma of losing her husband for those years.
There is a depressing photo of her and her son published on Aljazeera, in which she was holding a photo of her then missing husband, staring despondently into the camera.
I imagine her pain was deep.
That she felt lost, imprisoned in limbo waiting for news of her husband.
But most of all, I recognised that deep, overwhelming sense of despair in her eyes because I had seen it before.
I saw it in the eyes of Khadija Ahmad, 24, whose husband, Abubakar Idris (Dadiyata), a university lecturer and government critic, has been missing for over a year now.
He had returned home in the early hours of August 2, 2019, when some men morphed out of the dark, jumped on him, forced him back into his car and drove away with him.
Thirteen months later, no one has seen the man or his car, no ransom call made to the family.
There are reasons to suspect that the same voodoo that disappeared Mr Abiri is at play in Dadiyata’s case.
What I discovered, while investigating this story, was that after he was taken, his cell phone signal was tracked to within meters of a government-owned security facility in Kaduna.
And a reliable security source confirmed that Dadiyata, at some point, was held in that facility.
As they did in Mr Abiri’s case, the DSS has denied taking Dadiyata and submitted an affidavit to a court claiming the same.
The Kaduna State government’s yearlong silence on the disappearance is baffling.
It is either a disaster in its image-making organ or a defiant I-don’t-give-a-damn attitude when a citizen of your state is stolen, like a bundle of kola, from his home and your long arm is suspected to be behind it.
At the very least, one would expect the government to deny the allegations and make the appropriate reassuring noises about finding him and assuring other citizens of their safety.
Two days ago, the government of Kaduna State, through its Attorney-General and Commissioner of Justice, Aisha Dikko, denied any culpability in Dadiyata’s disappearance.
About making an effort or commitment to find him, well, the government said absolutely nothing.
Incidentally, the denial was issued a day after the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances celebrated every year on August 30.
To the best of my knowledge, that day went by unmarked in Nigeria with the thousands that Boko Haram, bandits and kidnappers have forced to disappear largely ignored, and unremembered.
This was something I wanted to write about last week before Femi Fani-Kayode suicided what was left of his reputation. (May that rest in peace)
If one does not find the rate at which Nigerians are being disappeared by all the things the government should protect them from, one should be even more concerned when the government, through its agencies, is responsible for this enforced disappearances.
The government too needs to be worried, especially considering that it was between 1983 and 1985, when the same man was running the country, that issues of human rights abuses, disappearances and arbitrary detentions became trending national concern.
The recent disappearance of the controversial Mubarak Bala, for instance, raises many concerns.
He was arrested in his Kaduna home by the police for the offence of blasphemy.
His first son was just six weeks old at the time.
Neither his wife nor his lawyers have seen him since and the police have so far refused to account for his whereabouts.
One does not have to agree with Mubarak’s atheist views to see the injustice being done here—I, for one, find his comments on religion and the religious needlessly provocative and potentially inciting to people who proclaim faith in God.
One does not even need to speak with his distraught wife, Amina, whose daily worry is proof that the man she married and the father of her nursling is alive.
“I know the issue is sensitive,” she told me.
“I am not saying they should not take him to court, I just want to know that he is alive.”
Your country should never make you, or anyone else, beg for news of loved ones like this.
Your country should never cause you this distress.
The penchant of our law enforcers, even when they claim to be protecting us, to cause us grief is phenomenal.
At the onset of the COVID-19 lockdown for instance, before the death toll mounted, in trying to enforce the lockdown, Nigerian security forces killed more Nigerians than the coronavirus did in the first few weeks of the outbreak.
That the government of Nigeria said nothing about those killings or the enforced disappearances of the Jones Abiris, the Dadiyatas and the Mubarak Balas, and the extended detention of Agba Jalingos, the avoidable massacre of hundreds and the disappearance of thousands under the Boko Haram canopy is worrying.
That most Nigerians themselves are saying nothing is a clear indication that we do not realise that we, as a people, as individuals, are an endangered species.
We are being preyed upon by bandits, terrorists and diseases that no longer kill people elsewhere, as much as we are being preyed upon by our government.
This was how the disappeared count in Argentina rose little by little until 30,0000 people were disappeared between 1976 and 1983, leaving questions that have remained unanswered for years and a deep, throbbing scar in the memory of that country.
It would be a tragedy if the same were to happen in Nigeria.
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