Before I am kidnapped
Kidnapping is becoming as perennial as death. It will happen someday, somehow, but you know neither the day nor the hour nor the location. For once, we have a leveller – low or mighty, royal or plebeian, slave or freeborn, citizen or foreigner – we are all potential goods to be exchanged for ransom money. […]
Kidnapping is becoming as perennial as death. It will happen someday, somehow, but you know neither the day nor the hour nor the location. For once, we have a leveller – low or mighty, royal or plebeian, slave or freeborn, citizen or foreigner – we are all potential goods to be exchanged for ransom money.
Insecurity sits on top of our heads like an invisible elephant. The phenomenon of armed robbery started after the civil war and the state responded with equal fury when it enacted the robbery and firearms decree which prescribed death sentence for convicts. We have come a long way from the days of celebrity robbers like ‘Dr’ Ishola Oyenusi who famously warmed a journalist, “People like you don’t talk to me when I am armed; I gun them down!”
Oyenusi’s notoriety was exceeded by Lawrence Anini, the bandit who terrorised Edo State and environs in the mid-80s until the law caught up with him, leading to his public execution on March 29, 1987.
Today’s kidnappers are mostly faceless and more ruthless. Whereas the armed robbers of yore usually spared their victims’ lives after dispossessing them of their valuables, these kidnappers sometimes kill for fun. At times they shoot randomly at moving vehicles and thereafter rob the dead. When negotiations for ransom break down, the abducted victim pays the price. In some cases, while torturing their victim, they put a call through to his family so they can hear his eerie screams and hurry up with the negotiated ransom.
They used to go after the wealthy. Now, they don’t care. They just harvest as many highway commuters as they can and then sort them out when they get to their camp which is usually many miles from civilisation. So, poverty is no longer a shield. A genuinely poor man can be kidnapped and if his abductors don’t believe that he belongs in the lowest rungs of the social ladder, they might just waste him for all it’s worth.
I haven’t visited my favourite restaurant, Kaduna’s Mona Lisa, in a while. Road travel is out of the question for now, and rail travel has been subjected to our usual malaise of incompetence laced with open, in-your-face corruption and ticket racketeering. Stay where you are, my inner voice warns each time the travelling bug bites.
The recent revelation by EFCC Chairman Ibrahim Magu that some state governors promote insecurity to enable them inflate security votes in their states, was jaw-dropping. A former governor of Sokoto State, Attahiru Bafarawa has openly affirmed Magu’s accusation, arguing that while the wave of banditry, cattle rustling, kidnapping, communal clashes and general insurgency seem to be on the rise, the state governors are getting ‘richer’ as a result of the increase in the allocations set aside for their security votes.
Bafarawa, correctly in my view, contended that the spiral effects of poverty, ignorance, unemployment and several other developmental challenges bedevilling the North, were the reasons able-bodied youths resorted to perpetrating kidnapping, cattle rustling, and all sorts of criminality for livelihood.
Bafarawa’s analysis is in tandem with the observation of the Australian Political Scientist, Anthony Ballot, who, in a piece titled: “Africa: The Land for Zero Class Struggle”, noted as follows:
“Though the level of poverty in the continent is unparalleled, the scenario that I witnessed during my recent visit to Nigeria, the largest economy in the continent of Africa and the 6th largest producer of crude oil in the world, is the failure of the rich and state actors to guarantee the security of lives and properties of their third class citizens who live mostly in isolated ghettos devoid of civilisation. It is mind-bugling.”
I have read the harrowing accounts of many former victims of kidnapping and it is clear to me that only the grace of Providence can ensure that a victim makes it out alive. May our physical and emotional endurance not be tested by these bandits!
While the kidnapping industry burgeons, the police and other security agencies appear overwhelmed. The only sector where they record eye-popping victory is when physically manhandling strip dancers clad in their birthday suits as happened recently in Abuja where even those moralists who advocate temperance in social life, are embarrassed that nude women could be arrested without the decency of being allowed to dress up.
It is immoral to use such an immoral method to check immorality. I don’t have to be a women’s liber or gender warrior to know that. By all means, let’s fight immorality but let’s not take a giant leap back into prehistory under whatever guise. This is how we spoil a good idea with our primitive way of interpreting well-intentioned directives.
If we confront the kidnappers, armed robbers, cattle rustlers and other bandits who have made commuting from one place to the other a nightmare with the same enthusiasm and ferocity with which those armed policemen carried one of the nude women aforementioned into their waiting vehicle, the criminals terrorising our highways would have been forced look for another means of livelihood.
I dread finding myself in the position of the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller whose 1946 post-war confession (“First, they came for the communists”) has become a melancholic classic. I want to speak out while my voice may still be heard.
As long as those bandits continue to lie in wait like a lion seeking prey to devour, I am remaining where I am. But if, in spite of this precaution, I still get abducted, just remember that I spoke out before they kidnapped my voice.